The Strange Account of the Day “Angels” Saved British Troops During WWI

Whilst it's a beautiful story, it's unfortunately not a true story. I've appended the true story after the article.

From Aleteia

By John Burger
Was it St. George? St. Michael? Multiple accounts testified to a heavenly host on the fields of France in August 1914.

Nations and their armies have often gone to war believing “God is on our side.” In a little-known incident at the outset of World War I, that sentiment seemed to have been visibly affirmed for a number of British soldiers.

In early August 1914, soon after tensions on multiple fronts and levels erupted into war, Great Britain dispatched the British Expeditionary Force to counter the German invasion of Belgium. The Germans had their sights on Paris, and the BEF met the German Army at the Belgian town of Mons, southwest of Brussels.

The BEF was vastly outnumbered but fought valiantly against the forces of the Second Reich. Unfortunately, they could not hold the line. As they retreated, the Germans pursued them.

By August 26, the two sides engaged in fierce battle at Le Cateau, France. Multiple British fighters swore later that they witnessed celestial intervention against the German onslaught.

“Some Tommies swore it had been St. George, the warrior saint of England,” writes historian Robert Barr Smith on the website Warfare History Network, reproduced at The National Interest. “Others said it might have been St. Michael, since he carried a gleaming sword. A few said they couldn’t tell, but it had definitely been an angel, maybe more than one. Some men were sure they had seen three wonderful, tall figures towering above the smoke and dust of the battlefield. For others it had been a brilliant light, a golden aura against a brilliant sky, or a cloud in which indistinct but heroic figures had come and gone, aided by phantom archers from the olden days of the English warrior-kings. Whatever it was, the soldiers agreed, it had saved their lives. No amount of civilian scoffing would ever change that.”

Public Domain

The “scoffing” back home took the form of suggestions that the men were overextended in battle circumstances, leading to hallucinations. But the very fact that they lived to tell about what they witnessed gave credence to the testimonies of those on both sides of the battle.

“In one action during the long retreat, an understrength British battalion, about to be overrun by masses of German infantry, became aware of a shadowy army fighting beside them, an army of bowmen of the days of Agincourt, five centuries gone,” wrote Smith, who served in Vietnam and retired as a law professor from the University of Oklahoma. “These phantom men-at-arms cried aloud to St. George, and their swift arrows darkened the sky. A great voice was heard to thunder over the din of battle, ‘Array, Array!’ German prisoners taken in the action said they were bewildered that their British opponents had reverted to wearing armor and shooting arrows.”

… weary British soldiers saw tall, unearthly figures materialize in the gloom above the German lines. They were winged like angels, and as they hovered in the gathering darkness, the Germans inexplicably halted and the British slipped away to safety. During the retreat, some soldiers swore that they had seen the face of the patron saint of England. A wounded Lancashire Fusilier asked a nurse for a picture or medal of Saint George because, he said, he had seen the saint leading the British troops at Vitry-le-Francois. A wounded gunner confirmed his story. He described the saint the same way the fusilier had — a tall, yellow-haired man on a white horse, wearing golden armor and wielding a sword. Other soldiers agreed that he looked just like his image on the gold sovereigns of the day.

The Germans, though they outnumbered the British in men and arms, saw something that convinced them that their enemies had strong reinforcements. Apparently, the BEF did have strong reinforcements, but not human ones.

History buffs — and anyone who wants to read an amazing account on this Memorial Day weekend — can read the whole article at The National Interest.

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The truth:

Arthur Machen and "The Bowmen"

On 29 September 1914 Welsh author Arthur Machen published a short story entitled "The Bowmen" in the London newspaper the Evening News, inspired by accounts that he had read of the fighting at Mons and an idea he had had soon after the battle.

Machen, who had already written a number of factual articles on the conflict for the paper, set his story at the time of the retreat from the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The story described phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt summoned by a soldier calling on St. George, destroying a German host. Machen's story was not, however, labelled as fiction and the same edition of the Evening News ran a story by a different author under the heading "Our Short Story". Additionally, Machen's story was written from a first-hand perspective and was a kind of false document, a technique Machen knew well. The unintended result was that Machen had a number of requests to provide evidence for his sources for the story soon after its publication, from readers who thought it was true, to which he responded that it was completely imaginary, as he had no desire to create a hoax.

A month or two later Machen received requests from the editors of parish magazines to reprint the story, which were granted. In the introduction to The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915) Machen relates that an unnamed priest, the editor of one of these magazines, subsequently wrote to him asking if he would allow the story to be reprinted in pamphlet form, and if he would write a short preface giving sources for the story. Machen replied that they were welcome to reprint but he could not give any sources for the story since he had none. The priest replied that Machen must be mistaken, that the "facts" of the story must be true, and that Machen had just elaborated on a true account. As Machen later said:

It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size.

— Arthur Machen, Introduction to The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War

Around that time variations of the story began to appear, told as authentic histories, including an account that told how the corpses of German soldiers had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds.

In "The Bowmen" Machen's soldier saw "a long line of shapes, with a shining about them." A Mr. A. P. Sinnett, writing in the Occult Review, stated that "those who could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings' between the two armies." This led Machen to suggest that the bowmen of his story had become the Angels of Mons. This last point was challenged by Harold Begbie in his book: On the Side of the Angels: A Reply to Arthur Machen, London 1915.

Angels

On 24 April 1915, an account was published in the British Spiritualist magazine telling of visions of a supernatural force that miraculously intervened to help the British at the decisive moment of the battle. This rapidly resulted in a flurry of similar accounts and the spread of wild rumours. Descriptions of this force varied from it being medieval longbow archers alongside St. George to a strange luminous cloud, though eventually the most popular version came to be angelic warriors. Similar tales of such battlefield visions occurred in medieval and ancient warfare. Atrocity reports like the Rape of Belgium and that of the Crucified Soldier paved the way for a belief that the Christian God would intervene directly against such an evil enemy. However, there are strong similarities between many of these accounts of visions and Machen's story published six months earlier.

In May 1915 a full-blown controversy was erupting, with the angels being used as proof of the action of divine providence on the side of the Allies in sermons across Britain, and then spreading into newspaper reports published widely across the world. Machen, bemused by all this, attempted to end the rumours by republishing the story in August in book form, with a long preface stating the rumours were false and originated in his story. It became a bestseller, and resulted in a vast series of other publications claiming to provide evidence of the Angels' existence. Machen tried to set the record straight, but any attempt to lessen the impact of such an inspiring story was seen as bordering on treason by some. These new publications included popular songs and artists' renderings of the angels. There were more reports of angels and apparitions from the front including Joan of Arc.

Kevin McClure's study describes two types of accounts circulating, some more clearly based on Machen, others with different details. In a time of intense media interest all these reports allegedly confirming sightings of supernatural activity were second-hand and some of them were hoaxes created by soldiers who were not even at Mons. A careful investigation by the Society for Psychical Research in 1915 said of the first-hand testimony, "We have received none at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon". The SPR went on to say the stories relating to battlefield "visions" which circulated during the spring and summer of 1915, "prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumour, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source.” Given that the Society for Psychical Research believed in the existence of supernatural forces, the conclusions of this report are highly significant.

The sudden spread of the rumours in the spring of 1915, six months after the events and Machen's story was published, is also puzzling. The stories published then often attribute their sources to anonymous British officers. The latest and most detailed examination of the Mons story by David Clarke suggests these men may have been part of a covert attempt by military intelligence to spread morale-boosting propaganda and disinformation. As it was a time of Allied problems with the Lusitania sinking, Zeppelin attacks and failure to achieve a breakthrough on the Western Front, the timing would make military sense. Some of the stories conveniently claimed that sources could not be revealed for security reasons.

The only real evidence of visions from actual named serving soldiers provided during the debate stated that they saw visions of phantom cavalrymen, not angels or bowmen, and this occurred during the retreat rather than at the battle itself. Furthermore, these visions did not intervene to attack or deter German forces, a crucial element in Machen's story and in the later tales of angels. Since during the retreat many troops were exhausted and had not slept properly for days, such visions could be hallucinations.

According to the conclusion of the most detailed study of the event it seems that Machen's story provided the genesis for the vast majority of the tales. The stories themselves certainly boosted morale on the home front, as popular enthusiasm was dying down in 1915 and they demonstrate the usefulness of religion in wartime.