The Angels of Mons

August 1914. Mons, in the Belgian province of Hainaut. On 22 and 23 August the British Expeditionary Force fought the Germans here. The retreat that followed ran into September. The men went days without sleep. Most of the later visions belong to that retreat.

One lance-corporal told his story to his nurse. An officer, in a state of great anxiety, pointed to the sky. "I could see quite plainly in mid-air a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined." The light grew brighter. Three shapes appeared. The one in the centre had "what looked like outspread wings." They hung above the German line. The men watched for about three-quarters of an hour. "All the men with me saw them."

The night of 27 August. A Lieutenant-Colonel was riding along the column with two other officers. On both sides of the road he became conscious of "a very large body of horsemen." Another officer said he, too, had been watching them for twenty minutes. At the next halt a party went out to reconnoitre. They found no one there.

Private Robert Cleaver of the 1st Cheshire Regiment signed an affidavit: "I personally was at Mons and saw the vision of angels with my own eyes." He described a flash between the retreating troops and the German cavalry. A parish magazine in Clifton told of German horses that "turned round terrified and regularly stampeded." Nurse Phyllis Campbell heard soldiers speak of St George on a white horse at Vitry-le-François.

Before any of this reached print, Arthur Machen had published a short story. "The Bowmen" appeared in The Evening News on 29 September 1914. St George is called upon. Then comes "a long line of shapes, with a shining about them." Their arrows fly. Ten thousand German soldiers are left dead.

By spring 1915 the tale was back, told as fact. A. P. Sinnett wrote in The Occult Review of "a row of shining beings" between the armies. "In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels," Machen wrote, "and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become 'the Angels of Mons.'"

Harold Begbie answered Machen with a book, On the Side of the Angels. In 1915 the Society for Psychical Research concluded that the stories were "founded on mere rumour, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source." The Daily Mail checked Cleaver's claims and admitted he "was not in France at the time."

A letter by Brigadier-General John Charteris, dated 5 September 1914 but published in 1931, describes "the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse" facing the advancing Germans. Folklorist David Clarke argues the date was fudged, and suggests military intelligence may have spread morale-boosting disinformation in spring 1915. Others point to exhaustion. As Private Frank Richards put it, "Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead beat."

In 2001 The Sunday Times reported a film and diary of a soldier named William Doidge, found in a Monmouth antiques shop and bought by Danny Sullivan. In the 2002 BBC Radio documentary The Making of an Urban Myth, Sullivan admitted the soldier and the evidence were fiction, invented to publicise Woodchester Mansion.

As Machen wrote in November 1915, "it was as if I had touched the button and set in action a terrific mechanism." More than a century on, the angels still appear in Mons, in street art on the Rue de Houdain.