Angel of Mons
Contents:
But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed.
The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron. There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, "It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it.
Angels of Mons Story
So it was in these British trenches. There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them.
And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards. There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battle-song, Good-bye, Good-bye to Tipperary, ending with "And we shan't get there.
The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, "What price Sidney Street? But everybody knew it was of no use.
The Angels of Mons
The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered - he says he cannot think why or wherefore - a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak.
On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass - yards away - he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King's ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, "Array, array, array!
The Angels of Mons is a popular legend about a group of angels who supposedly protected members of the British Army in the Battle of Mons at the outset of the. The Angel of Mons was not only a military first, it was also fairly influential in popular culture at the time. Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Mary Norton, author of the.
His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. The legend took on different forms.
References & Further Reading
The angels were presented in different ways, either as a cloud of light or a winged horseman. The famous legend of Mons is still widely written about today, after years after the war began.
The Angels of Mons. Doomed to death While the Battle of Mons raged and they had lost count of the number of British soldiers who had been killed by enemy fire, the 8th brigade was fighting tooth and nail to defend Mons. Les anges de Mons. La Bataille de Mons. A legend that has gone down in history The church and then the British government used this event to motivate soldiers to continue to fight. It became a bestseller , and resulted in a vast series of other publications claiming to provide evidence of the Angels' existence.
Arthur Machen and his regret at starting the First World War myth of the Angels of Mons
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. A careful investigation by the Society for Psychical Research in 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 , "prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumour, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source.
- Delusions (Affinity Book 2).
- My grandfather said he saw the Angel of Mons;
- Bitcoin, monnaie libre (French Edition).
- The Angel of Mons;
The sudden spread of the rumours in the spring of , 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 and they demonstrate the usefulness of religion in wartime. After the war the story continued to be frequently repeated but no evidence to support the claim that the angels existed was ever given by those who were there.
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However it appears from examination of his original letters he wrote those entries after the war and falsified the dates. He made little money from the story then or later. The sudden revival of interest in appearances of angels from the s onwards, especially in the United States, not only amongst Christians, but those interested in the New Age , has caused uncritical accounts of the story of the angels who saved the British Army to be regularly published in books and magazines. Similarly, the story is also often used by sceptics as a good example of how believers in the supernatural can become convinced of fantastic things by slender evidence.
The Friends of Arthur Machen frequently publish articles on developments in the case. In , 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.