part0006

E arly afternoon on August 24, 1914. It’s been a nightmare couple of weeks waiting to intercept the German cavalry. I looked at the thunderous sky and was reminded of a verse from Revelations, "And the great dragon was cast out…And his angels were cast out with him." My present surroundings added to this mood.

I was in the Belgian mining town of Mons, a marshy area intersected with canals, and littered with towering trash heaps.

I was the captain of the 4th Dragoon guards in the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) and have been sent to France at the outbreak of war. We faced over a million German soldiers that were hell-bent on reaching Paris as part of general Schlieffen’s strategy to win a quick victory.

In between marching for days on end, I faced moments of sheer terror when caught by advanced German units or artillery fire. When I had to command my men to stand and fight. They confronted hordes of enemy soldiers, advancing in ranks so thick, they seemed to resemble dark clouds sweeping through the green fields towards them. Soldiers fighting in such conditions suffer from a state of exhaustion unimaginable to most people. In such a state, they reported seeing imaginary castles on the horizon, towering giants and squadrons of charging cavalry in the far distance–all, of course, hallucinations.

Our losses have been catastrophic—an average BEF infantry battalion of 850 men would be left with barely 30 men by the time the German advance was halted, and the trenches set up. I feel like we’re living in apocalyptic times. It was during one desperate retreat that one of the strangest stories of my adventures in the war arose: it was whispered that a host of angels had come to the aid of British troops at Mons.

Not only had Angels saved our soldiers from certain death, but then also struck down the attacking Germans. Extraordinary as this story was, it was widely believed for decades after the war ended.

During the early stages of fighting, the Army authorities allowed no real news out from the battlefield and, in consequence, wild and fancy stories began to circulate. War correspondent Philip Gibbs wrote that the press and public were so desperate to know what was happening that:

"Any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, wild statement, rumor, fairytale or deliberate lie, which reached them from Belgium or France was readily accepted.”

The liars must've had a great time. In this feverish atmosphere, the story of the Angels of Mons spread like wildfire. Like all urban legends, it was always told secondhand. A friend learned of a letter from the front which mentioned, or an anonymous officer had reported—the legend blossomed from there. Sometimes a mysterious, glowing cloud was featured in the story. Sometimes it was a band of ghostly horsemen or archers or even one time it was Joan of Arc herself. But most the time, it was a host of angels that had come to rescue the beleaguered British troops.

Many wild stories from this time were the result of government propaganda. But this one was more innocent. It was a newspaper article in the September 29th edition of the London evening news, written by a freelance journalist. A mysterious fiction story, it told of a group of British soldiers at Mons, under attack and vastly outnumbered by German troops.

As the Germans advanced, and death seemed moments away, the soldiers muttered the motto–May St. George be present to help the English. According to the story:

"The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur. Then, he heard, or seemed to hear thousands shouting St. George! St. George! As the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench 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 through the air towards the German host."

The story was a poet mixture. England's patron saint and ghostly Bowman, the spirits of those archers, perhaps, who’d won a famous English victory against the French and Agincourt in 1415. Maybe the story was believed to be true because it appeared in the new section of the paper—probably due to problems fitting it elsewhere. Or a simple misunderstanding by the designer, rather than any deliberate attempt to mislead its readers .

The original telling was absurd enough, but, in the weeks and months after it was printed, the retellings became even more ridiculous. British newspapers stoked a strange hysteria by reproducing illustrations. They showed pious British troops praying in the trench, as ranks of ghostly bowmen fire glowing arrows at the approaching Germans. It swept through the country, and the story evolved into the bowmen becoming angel archers.

The journalist never claimed his story had a grain of truth to it:

He was so embarrassed by the effect it had on the British public.

The authenticity of the story was still being debated decades after the war ended. In the late 1920s, when an American paper declared the Angels were motion picture images projected onto the clouds by aircraft. The idea was to spread terror among the British soldiers. Still, the plan backfired, and the British assumed the ghostly figures were on their side. This report took it for granted that the Angels had appeared. It was merely offering a logical, if extremely implausible, explanation for why they were seen. Even in the 1970s and 80s, Britain's Imperial War Museum was still being asked about the authenticity of the story.

Nowadays, it's easy to scoff at the foolishness of those who believe such stories. But the fact the tale was widely believed tells us much about the society that fought the war. I was lucky enough to survive, but thousands of other men had been killed in the opening months of this conflict.

For those that lost husbands or sons, there was a great need for consolation. Stories like this brought reassurance to grieving relatives. It was especially pleasing to note that God was so obviously on the side of the British rather than the Germans. Other unlikely stories circulated throughout the war. Some were based on the usual far-fetched tales told by troops on leave from the trenches.

It was widely believed that a renegade, international band of deserters ran loose in no man's land, the territory that lay between the opposing trenches. These stories were deliberately fabricated by the British government propaganda unit, to bolster morale at home and lure America into the war.

Most of the time, German military forces behaved no better or worse than any other army. But, during the desperate early stage of the war, the German army dealt brutally with resistance from Belgian civilians to the invasion of their country.

Hostages were shot in villages massacred in reprisals. From the bones of such stories, British propaganda built a picture of the German people as a nation of godless barbarians. Huns was the term most often used after the fourth-century soldiers of Attila, who destroyed Rome and much of Italy.

Sometimes, this propaganda was ridiculous in its grotesque imagery. German soldiers, it was reported, had replaced the bells in Belgian church steeples with hanging nuns. Later in the war, stories were planted in the British press saying that the Germans had their own corpse factory. And the German soldiers killed in the fighting were sent there, so the bodies could be made into explosives, candles, industrial lubricants and boot polish.

The reaction such stories produced in Britain was sometimes equally bizarre. German dachshund dogs were stoned in the street. Shops with German immigrant owners were attacked and looted. The stories created an atmosphere of intense fear and hatred of the enemy—as they were intended to do. Many rushed to join the Army in the opening months of the war. They were convinced that they were fighting for civilization against the barbaric foe who would rape and mutilate their wives and children. If the Germans should ever cross the Channel and invade Britain.

After the war, people realized that much of the news concerning the war, and the German enemy had been outright lies. Newspapers would never be so openly trusted again. This attitude persisted into the early stages of the second world war. This meant that when the stories of German death camps first broke, they were widely disbelieved. It was too much of an echo of the corpse factory story, 20 years before.