Myths and Legends of the Second World War (10 page)

Clear inferences of divine sanction, deliverance and virtue can be seen in other variants of the angels legend. Previously a hard drinker, one Mons veteran, said to have seen the angels with his own eyes, afterwards became teetotal and a pillar of the community. A Nonconformist pastor preaching in Manchester, Dr R.F. Horton, offered that he had heard all those who had taken part in the retreat were changed men, and had felt a spiritual uplifting. Elsewhere, during the retreat around the dense Forest of Mormal, a detachment of Coldstream Guards were said to have become lost, and in grave danger of being overrun. An angel then appeared as a female figure in dim outline, tall and slim, and wearing a white flowing gown. The Guardsmen, it was said, followed the glowing figure across an open field to a sunken road, otherwise hidden from view, and were able to make good their escape. Naturally the incident does not appear in regimental histories or other primary sources, in common with every other version of the legend.

Whereas the likes of Sarah Marrable and Harold Begbie were simply gullible, others were downright unscrupulous. Begbie found support in the dubious writings of Phyllis Campbell, by her own account a nurse in forward hospitals in France, whose booklet
Back of the Front
was published in late 1915, after being trailed in the
Occult Review
. The text is wholly propagandist, and dwells at length on the kind of discredited atrocity fantasies examined in Chapter Four. This familiar litany is followed by a highly embroidered version of the angels legend, now joined by Joan of Arc, St Michael and golden clouds. Exalted soldiers knew that they had seen St George, apparently, because they were ‘familiar with his figure on the English sovereign, and had recognized it'. A brief example illustrates well the generally hysterical tone of Campbell's lurid reportage:

Poor Dix, when he came into hospital with only a bleeding gap where his mouth had been, and a splintered hand and arm, he ought to have been prostrate and unconscious, but he made no moan, his pain had vanished in contemplation of the wonderful things he had seen – saints and angels fighting on this common earth, with common mortal men, against one devilish foe to all humanity. A strange and dreadful thing, that the veil that hangs between us and the world of Immortality should be so rent and shrivelled by suffering and agony that human eyes can look on the angels and not be blinded. The cries of mothers and little children – the suffering of crucified fathers and carbonized sons and brothers, the tortures of nuns and virgins, and violated wives and daughters, have all gone up in torment and dragged at the Ruler of the Universe for aid – and aid has come.

No more helpful was a report from the
Daily Mail
on August 24th 1915, in which it was stated that a Private Robert Cleaver of the Cheshire Regiment had signed an affidavit to the effect that he had been present at Mons, and had seen a vision of angels with his own eyes. The paper was rightly excited, since at no time had any firsthand testimony from an identifiable witness come to light. On September 2nd, however, the paper announced with regret that further enquiries had revealed that Private Cleaver's draft arrived in France only on September 6th 1914, from which readers could draw their own conclusions. A rigorous investigation conducted by the Society for Psychical Research in 1915 also reached a generally negative conclusion on the reality of the various visions:

Of 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.

Machen was again obliged to deny any factual element to his original short story in July 1916, following the publication of ‘The First Battle of Ypres', a stirring patriotic verse by Margaret Woods. The poem told of ‘enormous reserves' which appeared more than mortal, and which caused the Germans to retreat in a state of consternation. In the July 3rd edition of the
Evening News
, Machen observed:

Pending the production of real testimony, I am strongly inclined to think that this brave poem of brave warriors rising in dreadful array and gathering again to their ancient banners is the most worthy and valiant offspring of an unworthy father:
The Bowmen
.

So why did such an unlikely legend gain widespread credence? Begbie criticized what he saw as Machen's callousness in ignoring the depth of suffering caused by heavy BEF losses, and ‘the intense eagerness for consolation' in England. The climate on the Home Front was clearly a highly suggestible one, with pantomime spies on every street corner and frosted Russian soldiers demanding vodka at every railway station. An almost total blackout on news reporting from France and Belgium until June 1915 meant that almost all wild rumour was likely to be believed, at least by a proportion of the population. Yet more than this, and in common with the atrocity stories from Belgium, the story had the ring of moral truth. The legend of heavenly intervention offered proof that God was on the side of the Allies, and that victory was certain. The capture of the first German prisoners in August had caused widespread indignation when it was discovered that the words ‘Gott Mit Uns' were cast on their belt buckles. The Angel of Mons provided a perfect rebuttal.

General Charteris, in an entry for February 1915 mentioned in
At GHQ
, offers his own unlikely explanation for the genesis of the myth:

I have been at some trouble to trace this rumour to its source. The best I can make of it is that some religiously minded man wrote home that the Germans halted at Mons, AS IF an Angel of the Lord had appeared in front of them. In due course the letter appeared in a Parish Magazine, which in time was sent out to some other men at the front. From them the story went back home with the ‘as if' omitted, and at home it went the rounds in its expurgated form.

The angels made an obscure, if psychologically telling, swansong appearance above the Thames Estuary at Thurrock during the summer of 1917, as the latest costly Allied offensive on the Western Front, Third Ypres, bogged down in a sea of mud at Passchendaele. According to the
Grays and Tilbury Gazette
for August 18th:

‘Have you seen the angels?' is the latest topic which is arousing interest in Grays. Although stories are varied, and, as usual, conflicting, most circumstantial tales are going round regarding alleged angelic visitations seen from the beach on the evenings of Tuesday and Wednesday this week. It is not a case of the ‘Angels of Mons' this time, for all the stories agree that those now seen are harbingers of Peace …

‘All Argent Street was out after them,' said one speaker. ‘They appeared over the Exmouth, two of them sitting on two rainbows with “Peace” in between. Then they faded away, leaving only the rainbow.' This was on Tuesday evening, when a rainbow did actually appear … Inquiries in Argent Street failed to elicit more definite confirmation, though it was clearly a similar version of the apparition that had been going the rounds. ‘It was three angels, I was told,' said one speaker … ‘They had roses wreathed in their hair,' added another story-teller, who had evidently heard a more detailed version …

In another version, coming from a relative of one said to have witnessed the apparition … the angels are generally seen about 9.30. According to her they are the ‘Angels of Mons', but the description given is rather different from that of those legendary beings. These visitations are three angels seated and chained together, a long chain linking them up …

Everyone agreed that they were ‘Peace Angels' and one prophesied that the ‘Angels of Mons' were due to arrive next week. In fact, from all accounts the sea wall is likely to have an increase of traffic during the next few nights … Numerous mothers agreed that they had heard tales of ‘angels' from their children, and generally expressed the opinion that probably the youngsters were getting a bit ‘nervy' in the present times of stress, and hence the remarkable ‘visions.' In all probability the tale had its origin somewhat in this way.

The following week this attractive story was given a new twist, the same paper reporting on the 25th:

A fresh version was given to a
Gazette
representative by a Globe Terrace resident. Speaking of the previous Tuesday evening, she said: ‘I don't know about any angels, but I saw a wonderful cloud. We were out with my landlady and the children, and we were looking at the rainbow. Then I saw a white cloud a little distance away. It was shaped just like a woman.'

She continued: ‘I don't know what it was, but it was just like a woman. It quite unnerved me. My husband is away in the army, and I thought it meant something over the water. I couldn't sleep for thinking of it. It was a wonderful thing. I've never seen a cloud like it before and don't want to again.'

The paper concluded that the so-called ‘Riverside Apparitions' were caused either by the Northern Lights, or else a rare conjunction of cloud and sunlight producing an effect known as
rayons de crépuscule
, or rays of twilight. It is also possible that impressionable children deliberately exaggerated an unusual (but wholly natural) meteorological phenomenon, much in the same spirit that Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith created the celebrated Cottingley fairy photographs, fabricated just a month earlier. Then again, aerial angels would also be reported by civilians during the Battle of Britain in 1940.

No less dubious was a report in the
Daily News
in February 1930, based on an American newspaper story. According to Colonel Friedrich Herzenwirth, said to be a former member of the German intelligence service:

The Angels of Mons were motion pictures thrown upon ‘screens' of foggy white cloudbanks in Flanders by cinematographic projecting machines mounted in German aeroplanes which hovered above the British lines … The object of the Germans responsible for these scientific ‘visions' was to create superstitious terror in the Allied ranks.

According to Herzenwirth, the plan backfired, and was successfully exploited by the British for their own benefit. However, the very next day the
Daily News
published a corrective report, explaining that its Berlin correspondent had been informed by official German sources that there was no record of the mysterious colonel, whose story was now dismissed as a hoax. Curiously, the projection idea would be resurrected by British propaganda agencies in March 1940, who in the midst of the static Phoney War, gave consideration to ‘a suggestion for an apparatus to project images or clouds' over the German lines by means of an unspecified ‘magic lantern' apparatus.

The idea was not pursued. However, further evidence of the remarkable staying power of this particular myth came in March 2001, when it was announced that actor Marlon Brando had paid £350,000 for spectral footage of angels shot by William Doidge at Woodchester Park in the Cotswolds during the Second World War. Doidge, a veteran of the BEF and the Retreat from Mons, was said to have been obsessed with the angels legend of 1914, believing they could lead him to his lost Belgian sweetheart. Like Machen's original story published by the
Evening News
, the film promised excellent entertainment, but was later revealed as a hoax.

The legend of the Comrade in White is another battlefield myth from the first year of the war which was clearly promulgated to underline the moral and religious rectitude of the Allied cause. As we have seen, the legend of the Bowmen at Mons lay dormant for six months after its initial publication 1914, only to return with more pronounced angelic and religious overtones in April 1915. To those who chose to accept such evidence at face value, further proof that God was on the side of the Allies, rather than Germany, came in the form of the Comrade in White, or white helper, first encountered on the battlefields of the Western Front at more or less the same time.

The first account was given in
Bladud
, described as the Bath Society Paper, in June 1915. According to Dr R.F. Horton, a well-known Congregational minister from Manchester, and a devout believer in the Angel of Mons:

Now and again a wounded man on the field is conscious of a comrade in white coming with help and even delivering him. One of our men who had heard of this story again and again, and has put it down to hysterical excitement, had an experience. His division had advanced and was not adequately protected by the artillery. It was cut to pieces, and he himself fell. He tried to hide in a hollow of the ground, and as he lay helpless, not daring to lift his head under the hail of fire, he saw One in White coming to him. For a moment he thought it must be a hospital attendant or a stretcher bearer, but no, it could not be; the bullets were flying all around. The White-robed came near and bent over him. The man lost consciousness for a moment, and when he came round he seemed to be out of danger.

The White-robed still stood by him, and the man, looking at his hand, said, ‘You are wounded in your hand.' There was a wound in the palm. He answered, ‘Yes, that is an old wound that has opened again lately.' The soldier says that in spite of the peril and his wounds he felt a joy he had never experienced in his life before.

A similar account,
In the Trenches
, yet again from an unknown soldier in an unidentified sector, was printed in
Life and Work
magazine in June 1915, from which the following extracts are drawn:

George Casey told me all he knew … After many a hot engagement a man in white had been seen bending over the wounded. Snipers sniped at him. Shells fell all around. Nothing had power to touch him. He was either heroic beyond all heroes, or he was something greater still. This mysterious one, whom the French called the Comrade in White, seemed to be everywhere at once. At Nancy, in the Argonne, at Soissons and Ypres, everywhere men were talking of him with hushed voices.

The writer continues, explaining that he had hardly expected such phenomenal help should he be injured in battle. Then, during an advance on the enemy trenches, he was hit in both legs, and lay immobile in a shell crater until nightfall.