September 1914
It was early afternoon on August 24, 1914. Captain Arthur Osborn of the 4th Dragoon Guards had had a nightmare couple of weeks. Now, waiting to intercept units of German cavalry, he looked at the thundery sky and was reminded of a verse from Revelation 12 in the Bible: “And the great dragon was cast out… and his angels were cast out with him.” His present surroundings added nothing to his mood. He was in the Belgian mining town of Mons, a marshy area intersected with canals, and littered with towering slag heaps. He and his companions in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had been sent to France at the outbreak of war. Facing him, and the other British, French and Belgian troops, were one and a half million German soldiers, hellbent on reaching Paris as part of General Schlieffen’s strategy to win a quick victory.
In between marching for days on end, Osborn and his men faced moments of terror when they were caught by advance German units or artillery fire. When their generals commanded them to stand and fight, they confronted hordes of enemy soldiers, advancing in ranks so thick, they seemed to resemble dark clouds sweeping though the green fields towards them. A soldier fighting in such conditions reaches a condition of exhaustion unimaginable to most people. In such a state, men reported seeing imaginary castles on the horizon, towering giants or squadrons of charging cavalry in the far distance – all, of course, hallucinations.
The losses the British troops were taking were disastrous – an average BEF infantry battalion of 850 men would be left with barely 30 by the time the German advance had been halted and the trenches set up. Osborn, and many others like him, could not help but feel they were living in apocalyptic times. It was during their desperate retreat that one of the strangest stories of the war arose: it was whispered that a host of angels had come to the aid of British troops at Mons. Not only had the angels saved the soldiers from certain death, but they had also struck down the attacking Germans. Extraordinary though the story was, it was widely believed for decades after the war ended.
During the early stages of the fighting, the army authorities allowed no real news out from the battlefield and, in consequence, wild and fanciful 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, and wild statement, rumour, fairy tale or deliberate lie, which reached them from France or Belgium” was readily accepted. “The liars had a great time,” he reflected.
In this feverish atmosphere, the story of the Angels of Mons began to circulate among the British public. Like all urban legends, it was always told second-hand – a friend of a friend had learned… a friend had heard of a letter from the front which mentioned… an anonymous officer had reported… The legend blossomed. Sometimes a mysterious, glowing cloud featured in the story, sometimes it was a band of ghostly horsemen or archers, or even Joan of Arc. But most of 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 the origin of this one was more innocent. It was a newspaper article in the September 29 edition of the London Evening News, written by freelance journalist Arthur Machen. A fanciful and rather opaque piece of fiction, it tells of a group of British soldiers at Mons, under attack by a vast phalanx of German troops. As the Germans advance towards them, and death seems moments away, one of the soldiers mutters the motto Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius – May St. George be present help to the English. Just then, according to the story:
“the roar of battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur… [then] he heard, or seemed to hear thousands shouting ‘St. George! St. George!’ 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 host [a large group of soldiers].”
The story had a potent mixture: England’s patron saint and ghostly bowmen, the spirits of those archers, perhaps, who had won a famous English victory against the French at Agincourt in 1415. Perhaps the fiction was believed to be true because it appeared in the news section of the paper – probably due to problems fitting it elsewhere, or a simple misunderstanding by a designer on the paper, rather than any deliberate attempt by the Evening News to mislead its readers. The original tale was preposterous enough but, in the weeks and months after it was printed, the retellings became even more fanciful. British newspapers stoked the strange hysteria by reproducing illustrations showing pious British troops praying in their trench, as ranks of ghostly bowmen pour down deadly, glowing arrows on the approaching Germans. As it swept through the country, the tale evolved, with the bowmen becoming angel archers instead.
Machen never claimed his story had a grain of truth to it. “The tale is mere and sheer invention,” he freely admitted. “I made it all up out of my own head.” He was extremely embarrassed at the effect it had on the British public. But the authenticity of the story was still being debated decades after the war ended. In the late 1920s, one American paper carried a report quoting a German officer who declared the angels were actually motion picture images projected onto the clouds by aircraft. The idea, said the officer, had been to spread terror among the British soldiers, but the plan had backfired badly when the British assumed the ghostly figures were on their side. Curiously, 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. And even in the 1970s and 80s, Britain’s Imperial War Museum was still being asked about the authenticity of the story.
Nowadays, it is easy to scoff at the naiveté of those who believed such stories. But the fact that the tale was so widely believed tells us much about the society that fought the war. Captain Osborn, who appears at the start of this chapter, was lucky enough to survive, but thousands of other men had been killed in the opening months of the conflict. For those who had lost husbands or sons, there was a great need for consolation. Stories like the Angels of Mons brought reassurance to grieving relatives. For them, it was especially pleasing to note that God was so obviously on the side of the British, rather than the Germans.
Other unlikely stories continued to circulate throughout the war. Some were based on the usual far-fetched tales told by troops on leave from the trenches. It was widely believed, for example, that a renegade, international band of deserters ran loose in No Man’s Land, the territory that lay between the opposing trenches. Other stories were deliberately fabricated by a British government propaganda unit, to bolster morale at home and also to lure America into the war on the side of the Allies.
In fact, for 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 had dealt brutally with any resistance from Belgian civilians to the invasion of their country – hostages were shot and villages massacred in reprisals. From the bones of such stories, British propaganda built a picture of the entire German people as a nation of godless barbarians. “Huns” was the term most often used, after the 4th-century soldiers of Attila, who had laid waste Rome and much of Italy.
Sometimes, this propaganda was almost 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 that German soldiers killed in the fighting were sent there, so their 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 British royal family changed their German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. But mainly the stories created an atmosphere of intense fear and hatred of the enemy – as they were intended to do. Many of those who rushed to join the army in the opening months of the war were convinced they were fighting for civilization against a barbaric foe who would rape and mutilate their wives and children, should they ever cross the channel and invade Britain.
After the war, people realized that much of the news concerning the war, and their German enemy, had been outright lies. Newspapers would never be so openly trusted again. This attitude still persisted during the Second World War. This meant that in the early stages of that war, when stories of German death camps first broke, they were widely disbelieved. It was too much of an echo of the corpse factory story from 20 years before.