The Angels of Mons: A Perfect Hoax from World War One

That was when the miracle occurred. That was when the Agincourt longbow-men rose from the very soil itself and took to the skies. Their phantom arrows raining down upon the encroaching German army.

Long dead, but still deadly, those British men would not let their descendants die like this. A celestial light blazed around them, as the ghosts of Agincourt covered the retreat. The Angels of Mons - as they were later to be called - stood as a bright, impenetrable wall between the fleeing Britons and the German gunners.

Nor were these phantom patriots alone. Soldiers reported, in stunned tones, the roaring exhortations of St George himself, charging along the front line of Mons on his white stallion.

Others saw none of that. They were already out into the countryside, racing alongside the railway tracks, hurrying away as fast as they could. But those British infantrymen too saw something. As they ran, they could have sworn that a ghostly cavalry rushed past them towards the horrors of the Mons battlefield.

The British Army was woefully tiny, relative to their enemies on the other side of Mons. But that was only if you counted the living. By the end of the Battle of Mons, it seemed that every British warrior in history was back and willing to take up arms.

Angelic hosts and brothers in arms from beyond the grave, there to keep the ordinary British Tommy safe.

With such a background and portfolio, it seems bizarre that anyone wouldn't see the author's name and be tipped off that the story was fiction.  The Bowmen, with its mix of Welsh mysticism and supernatural narrative, was precisely the sort of tale for which Arthur Machen was famous.

But he wasn't just writing fiction anymore.  In 1914, he had accepted a job as a journalist and many of his reports were about the fighting on the Western Front.

Even so, there was usually a very clear line between his news items and his fictional work. The latter tended to be on the pages given over to story-telling. They generally appeared under headings like Our Short Story.

On September 29th 1914, The Bowmen was published in the London Evening News. The story was told as a first-person narrative, as if an eye-witness was sharing his experiences. It was not in the fiction section, it was in amongst the factual, mainstream news. In the Our Short Story column was another work by an entirely different author.

This Machen tale, of ghostly Britons rising to defend their latter-day countrymen, was presented to the readership as reality; something which had actually been witnessed by terrified soldiers fleeing from the front.

Within hours, word of mouth had spread the story as fact, from the capital to the rest of Britain. Within weeks, it was being preached from the pulpits of churches up and down the country. Even the clergy seemed convinced of its reality, though they identified the visions as angels, not ghosts.

Hence the legend of the Angels of Mons was born.

For the men going into that carnage, there was a sense of patriotic fervor prevailing over all anyway. Added to that was the notion that the Almighty Himself was on the side of Britain - this demi-paradise, this other Eden -  and what further evidence was needed of that than the fact that the sun never set on the British Empire?

Mons was a slap to morale, that was true. But the Almighty had so marked Britain for greatness, that even its dead returned to make good any deficiencies. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

For the wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and sweethearts left at home, it was a comforting thought to imagine that something supernatural would keep their men safe. If not God, then ghosts.

For the owners and editors of newspapers, it was a story which sold papers. Hence it kept on being told, with embellishments and in differing versions. This is why the legend as exists now isn't quite the same as that printed as The Bowmen.

For the clergy, there was much to recommend in this tale. Though they didn't know it, they were presiding over the last generation of British with an almost universal Christian faith. The First World War would do much to shake those beliefs, hurtling Britain towards widespread secularism.

Even so, vicars and priests across the country were increasingly having to deal with the loss of substantial parts of their congregations. Every person killed in battle required a memorial service. Each casualty left behind those in mourning.

This was the age of the 'Pal's Brigades' - friends, brothers, groups, whole communities of men - who would enlist together, serve alongside each other, and frequently all be killed en masse. Clerics were facing situations when every single member of their flock had lost somebody, and had to make sense of it.

Any wonder then that the Angels of Mons featured so heavily in sermons across Britain. Here was 'proof' of God's hand in the war. Here was the evidence that they weren't forgotten. For those losing their religion, this was also the counter-argument that God existed.

It was in Britain's churches that the longbow-men and cavalry ghosts became angels, and that was why.

For the government, the Angels of Mons was a useful propaganda tool. No smoking gun has yet been shown, proving that the War Department was behind the scores of 'eye witness accounts' that began to creep out, as the war progressed. But it does seem likely.

This theory is explored in depth by David Clarke in The Angel of Mons.

As for Arthur Machen, he constantly, loudly and publicly denied that he'd ever received any 'secret intelligence' from government, nor had he interviewed the exhausted survivors from the Battle of Mons to receive the story. 

It was his own, influenced by nothing more than the history of Agincourt coupled with elements from Welsh mythology - particularly King Arthur hearing the clarion call to come and save them all, or Y Ddraig Goch rising from its cave to fight back the Germanic White Dragon - and placed in the modern day. A ghost story interwoven with Cymric Mysticism, just like 90% of everything else that he wrote.

But no-one cared to hear that. In the terrible aftermath of Mons, it was a story that soothed the national psyche and that was all that mattered.