Angels of Mons

On 29 September 1914, the Welsh author Arthur Machen published a short story entitled "The Bowmen" in 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 some 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.

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.

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.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.

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.

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.

[7] 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.

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.

After the war the story continued to be frequently repeated, but with little factual evidence to support it from eye-witnesses to the events at the Battle of Mons.

[9] However, General Charteris was not serving with II Corps in 1914, and was commenting on it therefore from a second-hand perspective, and an examination of his original war correspondence and notes from which his book's text was drawn makes no contemporary mention of the story at that time.

[10] One example of the proliferation of material, which was particularly notable within religious circles, is the production in 1915 of a 160-line poem entitled "The Angels of Mons", by Dugald MacEchern.

In 2001, an article in The Sunday Times claimed that a diary, film and photographic evidence proving the existence of the Angels of Mons from a World War I soldier named William Doidge had been found.

Other papers like Variety and the Los Angeles Times and television programmes soon followed up the story and a website connected to the mystery became very popular.

The footage was supposedly found in a trunk in an antique shop by Danny Sullivan in Monmouth, close to Machen's birthplace of Caerleon.

In 2002, in a BBC Radio documentary; The Making of an Urban Myth, Sullivan admitted the story was a hoax created to drum up interest in Woodchester Mansion, and the film footage and soldier were fictional.