Myths and Legends of the Second World War (9 page)

A Lance-Corporal Johnstone, late of the Royal Engineers, gave a broadly similar account in a letter to the
Evening News
. The events described appear to have taken place early in September:

We had almost reached the end of the retreat, and after marching a whole day and night with but one half-hour's rest in between, we found ourselves in the outskirts of Langy, near Paris, just at dawn, and as the day broke we saw in front of us large bodies of cavalry, all formed up into squadrons – fine, big men, on massive chargers. I remember turning to my chums in the ranks and saying: ‘Thank God! We are not far off Paris now. Look at the French cavalry.' They, too, saw them quite plainly, but on getting closer, to our surprise the horsemen vanished and gave place to banks of white mist, with clumps of trees and bushes dimly showing through.

When I tell you that hardened soldiers who had been through many a campaign were marching quite mechanically along the road and babbling all sorts of nonsense in sheer delirium, you can well believe we were in a fit state to take a row of beanstalks for all the saints in the calendar.

As well as supernatural visions of angels, phantom castles and spectral formations of cavalry, the foregoing accounts all share another factor in common: all were published some considerable time after the events they purport to relate. Charteris published his memoir in 1931, Richards his in 1964, while the
Evening News
and
Daily Mail
stories appeared in August and September 1915 respectively. Furthermore, without exception, all were published long after the appearance of
The Bowmen
, the celebrated short story by Arthur Machen first printed in the
Evening News
on September 29th 1914.

Arthur Machen, then aged 51, had worked as a staff writer at the paper since 1910, reporting chiefly on the arts and religion rather than current affairs. The son of an Anglican vicar, his true calling lay as a writer of gothic and fantastical fiction, a fascination which extended to his becoming a fringe member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a mystical society which also boasted Aleister Crowley and W.B. Yeats among its initiates. Although in September 1914
The Bowmen
occupied just 17 column inches on the third page of a London evening paper, it immediately provoked a popular reaction out of all proportion to its size and intent. The rather quaint story was written by Machen to boost public morale, and as a personal response to the imagined horrors of a war just two months old. Two decades later he confirmed that the specific spur was a brace of highly alarming headlines which appeared on August 30th, a Sunday, when
The Times
told of ‘Broken British Regiments Battling Against Odds' and the
Weekly Dispatch
revealed a ‘German Tidal Wave – Our Soldiers Overwhelmed by Numbers.' The paragraphs beneath them were almost unique in the annals of First World War reporting, for they offered the public a truthful account of the military situation across the Channel, and Machen's shocked response was typical:

I looked out of my window one Sunday morning towards the end of August 1914, and saw some newspaper bills in front of the little shop over the way, and saw that the night had come … I have forgotten the detail of the newspaper account of [the retreat]; but I remember it was a tale to make the heart sink, almost to deep despair. It told of the British army in full retreat, nay, in headlong, desperate retreat, on Paris … The correspondent rather pictured an army broken to fragments scattered abroad in confusion. It was hardly an army any more; it was a mob of shattered men … And I suppose that in the first place it was to comfort myself that I thought of the story of the Bowmen, and wrote it in the early days of September.

The Bowmen
unfolds as follows: during a particularly fierce rearguard action against overwhelming odds, a British soldier suddenly remembers the dinner plates at a favoured vegetarian restaurant in London, decorated with the figure of St George and the motto
Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius
: ‘may St George be a present help to the English'. In desperation the man utters this invocation aloud, and feels ‘something between a shudder and an electric shock' pass through his body. At once the roar of battle dies away, and in its place he hears a tumult of voices calling on St George to ‘grant us good deliverance' with ‘a long bow and a strong bow'. As the soldier hears these voices he spies beyond the trench a ‘long line of shapes, with a shining about … them', which resemble archers. With another shout the phantom bowmen let fly a cloud of arrows at the advancing Germans, who fall dead in their thousands. After the engagement the German General Staff, finding no wounds on the bodies of the dead, conclude that the British had used poison gas. However, the man ‘who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak' knew also that St George had summoned Henry V's yew hedge of archers from Agincourt to save the beleaguered BEF.

The romantic imagery conjured by Machen was highly attractive, and so great became the popularity of
The Bowmen
that in August of the following year the story was reprinted as a short book, together with five other stories by Machen in similar vein. Within a year worldwide sales had topped 100,000. The author included a lengthy introduction, in which he claimed that his original story had been responsible for the ‘snowball of rumour' that archers and angels had actually appeared over the field of battle. After expressing regret that ‘queer complications' had grown up around his work of fiction, in which the word angels nowhere appeared, the author blamed religious bodies for exploiting what he considered an unremarkable story, and concluded that any sightings of spectral hosts were explicable as mere hallucinations. Machen had already given much the same response to interested psychical journals such as
Light
and the
Occult Review
in October 1914, and there the matter rested.

That is, until April 1915. Although Machen had agreed to
The Bowmen
being reprinted in a number of small parish magazines, seven months after it had first appeared in the
Evening News
the legend gained a second wind. Precisely what triggered this resurrection is unclear, given that an official War Office propaganda department did not yet exist. Nevertheless, during that month the magazine
Light
claimed to have been visited by an unnamed ‘military officer', who stated that:

Whether Mr Machen's story was pure invention or not, it was certainly stated in some quarters that a curious phenomenon had been witnessed by several officers and men in connection with the retreat from Mons. It took the form of a strange cloud interposed between the Germans and the British. Other wonders were heard or seen in connection with this cloud which, it seems, had the effect of protecting the British against the overwhelming hordes of the enemy.

At the same time the orthodox religious press now developed an equivalent fascination with the legend. Later in April a Roman Catholic newspaper called
The Universe
published an account from ‘an accredited correspondent' based on a letter from an unnamed ‘Catholic officer' at the front, which told of deliverance by phantom bowmen led by St George, and hordes of dead Germans – all of them unmarked. This account closely mirrors
The Bowmen
, and as such differed greatly from the next account to appear, courtesy of Sarah Marrable in the
All Saints (Clifton) Parish Magazine
for May 1915. Miss Marrable, the daughter of Canon Marrable, claimed acquaintance with two anonymous officers:

Both of whom had themselves seen the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans when they came right upon them during the retreat from Mons … One of Miss M's friends, who was not a religious man, told her that he saw a troop of angels between us and the enemy. He has been a changed man ever since. The other man … and his company were retreating, they heard the German cavalry tearing after them … They therefore turned round and faced the enemy, expecting nothing but instant death, when to their wonder they saw, between them and the enemy, a whole troop of angels. The German horses turned round terrified and regularly stampeded. The men tugged at their bridles, while the poor beasts tore away in every direction …

Although pressed to reveal her sources by various investigators, Sarah Marrable declined to identify her informants more precisely. However, detailed analysis of the development of the various visions of 1914 reveals that the Marrable story marks an important turning point, in that it bears little resemblance to Machen's original story of Agincourt bowmen. In the subsequent angels legend there is no invocation of St George or foreknowledge of the words required, while the angels themselves have neither leader nor weapons, and no Germans are killed. Viewed in the round it has more in common with the reports of protective spectral cavalry, and the phenomenal cloud described by
Light
's enigmatic ‘military officer', than with the original bowmen fiction.

Bearing these substantial differences in mind, can Machen claim credit for originating the myth? In 1915 many thought not, and in his pamphlet
On the Side of the Angels
, Harold Begbie emerged as a particularly vociferous critic, accusing Machen of ‘amazing effrontery'. Begbie, in turn, was roundly lambasted by T.W.H. Crosland, in his own book
Find the Angels
. At least six more books and pamphlets supporting the reality of the angels appeared before the Armistice in 1918, as well as a stage play, a film (now lost), an Angel of Mons Waltz by Paul Paree, and a romantic gramophone record by Foster Richardson. As late as 1966 A.J.P. Taylor described certain of the military reports (presumably Charteris) as ‘more or less reliable', while in 1980, historian John Terraine also challenged Machen's ready assumption of sole responsibility, on the basis that Charteris had apparently written of angels as early as September 5th, and the fact that the anonymous Lieutenant-Colonel's letter to the
Daily Mail
had been published on September 14th 1914. But Terraine's source was wrong in dating the
Daily Mail
piece a full year before it actually appeared, and assumes that in 1931 Charteris published his wartime letters without editing or revision. That assumption must surely be questioned.

Ironically, the avowedly mystical Machen is probably correct, and the circumstances in which
The Bowmen
was published in the
Evening News
on September 29th may go some way towards explaining what subsequently transpired. Against a background of stringent War Office reporting restrictions and bland official communiqués, most papers had little option but to print personal accounts of battle by individual soldiers, the content of which readers were expected to accept at face value. The consequences were later highlighted by the war correspondent Philip Gibbs:

Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under Lord Kitchener's orders, to give any official credentials to correspondents, the British press, as hungry for news as the British public whose little professional army had disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, and wild statement, rumour, fairy tale or deliberate lie, which reached them from France and Belgium; and it must be admitted that the liars had a great time.

Machen had been a leader writer on the paper for four years, but had not previously published fiction within its pages. Indeed,
The Bowmen
was not flagged as fiction when it first appeared, despite the fact that another fictional piece on a different page in the same edition was clearly headed ‘Our Short Story'. To the general public, in a less media-literate age than our own, all of this may have tended to suggest that the bowmen described by Machen had actually appeared on the field, at a time when there was a pressing need in Britain to believe that the war had not been lost within the first eight weeks.

Thus uncorked, the genie refused to return to the bottle. By June of 1915 folkloric reports of angels, bowmen and protective clouds had become commonplace, and in the popular imagination came to represent the universal experience of the BEF on the long road from Mons. Tellingly, the contemporary sources were always second- or third-hand, and the witnesses, without exception, anonymous and untraceable. Several reports originated from Ireland and had a distinctly Catholic emphasis, while others took the form of quotes from sermons delivered by clergymen in churches and congregational halls, supposedly informed by letters from the Front. One vociferous believer was the Reverend Alexander Boddy, a vicar from Sunderland, who served as an army chaplain for two months in 1914, and publicized several anonymous tales of angels and spirit warriors. Another clergyman, who wrote to a religious periodical casting doubt on the truth of the story, was accused of revealing infirmity of faith. Inevitably, chinese whispers served to churn and embroider the legend still further, one example being that published in
Light
on May 8th 1915:

General N, who also had been at Mons, [stated] that in that rearguard action there was one specially critical moment. The German cavalry was rapidly advancing, and very much outnumbered our forces. Suddenly, he saw a sort of luminous cloud, or light interpose itself between the Germans and our forces. In the cloud there seemed to be bright objects moving: he could not say if they were figures or not, but they were moving and bright. The moment the cloud appeared the German onslaught seemed to receive a check; the horses could be seen rearing and plunging, and they ceased to advance. He said it was his opinion that if that check, whatever its cause, had not come, the whole force would have been annihilated in 20 minutes.

The same source alleged that another (anonymous) officer had told that:

After what I saw that day, nothing will make me doubt for one moment but that we shall win this war.