The Angels of Mons

The Angels of Mons, despite denials by the author of “The Phantom Bowmen”, considered a real supernatural phenomenon by some even today. How could a short story, by a truly great but also obscure writer, become part of the history of World War I? (For the same reason, some people believe The Necronomicon is real. On some level, they wish it was true.) The author was Arthur Machen. He is famous for many stories but never got rich to go with that famous. He lived much of his life in poverty despite writing several classics. Translating The Memoirs of Casanova (1894), writing the controversial “The Great God Pan” and “The Phantom Archers” all gained him fame. Hanging out with The Golden Dawn crowd, including Aleister Crowley didn’t hurt either. He is beloved by horror fans, in part thanks to H. P. Lovecraft, but often forgotten by mainstream critics. His yellow and purple volumes were part of the Yellow ’90s.

The Battle of Mons took place on August 23-24, 1914. It was part of a large campaign that began the First World War. The British did not do well over-all in the fighting, having to retreat into France. This fact, in my mind, is why the story of “The Phantom Archers” appealed so greatly. A loss for the BEF was easier to digest if the phantoms of another battle (The Battle of Crecy on August 26, 1346) showed up to help. This sign of divine assistance told the people of Commonwealth that God was on their side.

Machen’s story originally appeared in The Evening News on September 29, 1914, about a month after the actual battle. The story is quite short, only 1224 words. It begins: “It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand…” In 1914 that was all you needed to set the scene, so fresh was the news. Machen describes the terrible conditions for the British soldiers during the bombardment at the beginning but with a little black humor. He tells how the Tommies made up songs and took bets even as they were being cut down.

One of these soldiers (like many an Oxford man) is a scholar of Latin. The shelling makes him recall a vegetarian restaurant where they serve fake steak made from nuts and lentils (something we are still trying to perfect today). The pseudo-meat is served on blue plates bearing the Latin phrase: “Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius“, which means: ” May St. George be a present help to the English.” The man says this over and over even as he machine guns down Germans. The tides of battle grow desperate for the BEF when out of the sky come St. George and his ghostly friends:

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.

Machen finishes the tale with a poke at the Germans’ logical minds at the same time he applauds British common sense. He points out the Germans’ scientific natures as a fault. Machen was not a big fan of Science or the results of Science on the British landscape.

In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.

Machen wrote a 3258 word long introduction for The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915), making his explanation of the story about three times longer than the original text. He spends the first part apologizing for having an introduction at all, where he points out: “Again I apologize for entering so pompously into the minutiae of my bit of a story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho…” When he finally gets down to the business ( that I suspect his publishers strongly encouraged him in) of explaining that he made it all up, he meanders. In his wandering he does explain reading the account in the newspaper, envisioning British soldiers in fiery flames, then recalls Kipling’s “story of the ghostly regiment got in my head and got mixed up with the medievalism that is always there…” The Kipling story is “Haunted Subalterns” from Plain Tales From the Hills (1888). He also says he prefers another piece written at the same time: “The Soldiers’ Rest”.

“The Phantom Bowmen” was reprinted in Weird Tales in July 1928 without the introduction. Instead, Farnsworth Wright added his own short explanation:

Copyright by G. P. Putnam’s Sons and printed here by permission of the publisher. This story, originally appeared in an English newspaper during the World War, won wide popularity, and was responsible for the legend that phantom  archers had come to the assistance of the British army during the retreat at Mons.

The story did not appear in any other Pulps or horror magazines after Weird Tales, though it has appeared in anthologies and Machen collections pretty much continuously since, well over fifty times. The Angels of Mons became a part of our collective ghost story heritage. So it isn’t surprising to see it end up in the comics.

Forbidden Worlds #1 (July-August 1951) gave us “The Ghostly Army of Bethune” by an unknown author. The artwork was done by H. C. Kiefer.

“The Phantom Bowmen” in Weird Horrors #5, December 1952, did it in one page. The author is not known but the artist is Andre LeBlanc.

“Phantom Armies” appeared in Out of the Night #6, December 1952-January 1953. It may have been written by Richard Hughes with art by Harry Lazarus.

“Bewitched Battalion” appeared in Fantastic Comics #11, January-February 1955. The writer and artist are not known.

This comic version has more moving parts than Machen’s original. In the story no one directly speaks with a ghost dressed like a Viking. The scholar recites the Latin phrase and then it happens. We follow this officer from joining to battle, to seeing g-g-ghosts to being told to tell the truth by the spirits. Somehow it is longer but less impressive than Arthur Machen’s tale.

These comics are in the public domain and can be downloaded at DCM.

Covers

Of course, “Bewitched Battalion” wasn’t the only comic to use The Angels of Mons or the idea of ghosts in war. In fact, DC created an entire comic around the idea called Weird War Tales. There have been other uses of the concept such as “The Weeping Angels of Mons” in the Doctor Who franchise.