The Mysterious Battlefield Angels of Mons
The soldiers saw an apparition.
Rescued by Battlefield Phantoms?
On the blood-soaked battlefield near Mons, Belgium in August of 1914, the heavily outnumbered British soldiers were facing a crushing defeat.
At the moment when all hope seemed lost, a group of angels appeared to the British. Some accounts also report the appearance of phantom bowmen and a ghostly vision of St. George.
The spectral presences are said to have stiffened the resolve of the British, who went on to inflict heavy casualties on the attacking Germans. Their resistance halted the German advance long enough for the British Expeditionary Force to organize an orderly retreat toward Paris and save itself from annihilation.
This image appeared in the Illustrated London News of November 1915 showing spectral bowmen in front of British troops.
Witnesses to the Angels of Mons
Accounts of the vision of an angelic host abound.
- David Ludlow offers a report of a conversation with his grandfather, William, who was at the Battle of Mons: “My grandfather said he saw this angel: 20 feet tall, outspread wings, hands behind her, holding back the lines. He could see her face plainly―beautiful,” he said.
- An English nurse, Phyllis Campbell, wrote of tending to a wounded soldier who told her, “It’s true, Sister. We all saw it. First, there was a sort of a yellow mist, like, sort of risin’ before the Germans as they came to the top of the hill ... The next minute comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears off, there’s a tall man with yellow hair in golden armour on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he was saying, ‘Come on boys! I’ll put the kybosh on the devils.’ ... The minute I saw it, I knew we were going to win.”
- Another wounded soldier told a nurse that he saw “quite plainly in mid-air a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon nor were there any clouds. The light became brighter, and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the center having what looked like outspread wings. The other two were not so large but were quite plainly distinct from the centre one. They were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour.”
The anecdotal accounts cannot be verified, and there is no record of them in the regimental histories of the battle—not of the visions recounted nor of any outbreak of mass hysteria.
The Bowmen of Agincourt
In England, at the time, writer Arthur Machen was reading newspaper stories about the near collapse of the British Army and wrote his own fictional story about the unusual events called "The Bowmen." (He later said that he wrote the tale as a way of comforting himself).
In his account, Machen wrote that, as the British soldiers were in their greatest danger, one of them called to St. George, “Heaven’s Knight, aid us!”
“And, as the soldier heard these voices, he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout, their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts," wrote Machen.
The ghostly forms of bowmen and their deadly shower of arrows turned the tide of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415
The London Evening Standard printed the story on September 29, 1914 without clearly noting that it was a work of fiction. Many readers took it to be a true account of the visions seen at the Battle of Mons.
Arthur Machen.
The Angels of Mons Legend Grows
Machen's “The Bowmen” is seen by many as the genesis of the Angels of Mons story. As the tale passed from person to person, it became embellished so that the supernatural seraphim were added to the narrative.
The British public, who were reading the terrible casualty lists, wanted desperately to believe in the story and took it as a clear sign that God was on their side. The account of the Angels of Mons essentially transformed from fiction to non-fiction.
Arthur Machen got a request from a vicar for permission to reprint “The Bowmen” in his parish magazine and wondered, “would he be kind enough to add his sources?”
Machen pointed out the yarn was fiction, but the rector would have none of it. He was sure the divine intervention was factually true.
“It was then that it began to dawn on me that ... I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit,” Machen recalled.
That’s when the British Army took the growing legend to the next level.
British soldiers wait to move up to the Battle of Mons in August 1914.
The Angels of Mons Turned Into Propaganda
Captain John Charteris (later Brigadier-General) was an aide-de-camp to the senior member of the British Expeditionary Force, General Douglas Haig. Charteris was given the title of Chief Intelligence Officer, from which post he developed a campaign known as “Black Propaganda.”
The plan was to spread misinformation and raise morale.
Shortly after the action at Mons (September 5, 1914), a letter under Charteris’s signature appeared:
“Then there is the story of the ‘Angels of Mons’ going strong through the 2nd Corps, of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress. Men’s nerves and imagination play weird pranks in these strenuous times. All the same, the Angel at Mons interests me. I cannot find out how the legend arose.”
In his 2005 book, The Angels of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians, David Clarke suggests the story was concocted by Charteris. Clarke says that a careful examination of the letter quoted above shows the date to have been fudged. This would appear to have been done to sever the connection to “The Bowmen” so as to give the angel angle credibility it did not deserve.
Charteris’ fiction was then fed discreetly to newspapers that had no ability to confirm it because of the cloak of censorship that shrouded the information.
Angels of Mons Eyewitnesses
Only one of the witnesses actually had a name; most were identified only as a soldier or a nurse.
Then, a soldier turned up who swore an affidavit before a justice of the peace: “I, Robert Cleaver, (No.10515), a private in the 1st Cheshire Regiment, of His Majesty’s Army, make oath and say as follows: That I personally was at Mons and saw the vision of angels with my own eyes―Robert Cleaver.”
Upon further investigation, Private Cleaver was not at Mons; he wasn’t even at the Western Front when the described events happened. He lied. Did the others lie? Possibly, but some may have believed they saw something supernatural.
A Private Frank Richards did not see what others claimed to have seen and offered an explanation: “If any angels were seen on the retirement they were seen that night. March, march, for hour after hour, without a halt; we were now breaking into the fifth day of continuous marching with practically no sleep in between ... But there was nothing there. Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead beat.”
The men were also hungry and in a state of heightened anxiety having experienced the combination of terror and exhilaration that is common among people in combat. In such conditions, the mind plays all manner of tricks on people.
Historian John Grehan has written, “Maybe some of the stories were invented. Maybe all those who said they saw a miracle were simply hallucinating, as the scoffers said. Maybe it was, after all, merely mass hysteria ... But, maybe it wasn’t.”
An Angel of Mons statue was erected in southern England in 1929.
Bonus Factoids
- The British took the Angels of Mons story as proof that God was on their side. But the German soldiers wore a belt buckle inscribed with “Gott Mitt Uns” (“God Is With Us”).
- Brigadier-General John Charteris engaged in dirty tricks every bit the match of Russian election tampering. He created the story of German Kadaververwertungsanstalt that was supposedly a factory in which dead soldiers were rendered to make fat that could be used to make lubricants, candles, and even nitroglycerine.
- In the 1980s, there was a revival of interest in angels in the United States. To feed the demand, several magazines trading in the paranormal dragged the Angels of Mons yarn out of retirement and presented it as a non-fictional account.
Sources
- “My Grandfather Said He Saw the Angel of Mons.” Beccles and Bungay Journal, June 27, 2017.
- “Were the Angels of Mons in World War I real, or Mass Hysteria?” Robert Barr Smith, Warfare History Network, undated.
- “The Angels of Mons.” St. Margaret’s London, September 18, 2014.
- “Angels of Mons.” John Simkin, Spartacus Educational, January 2020.
- “In the Arms of the Angels.” John Grehan, Britain at War Magazine, August 2014.
- “Visions of Bowmen and Angels.” Kevin McClure, Magonia Online, August 18, 2007.
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
© 2023 Rupert Taylor
