The Angels of Mons written by Arthur Machen
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Arthur Machen >> The Angels of Mons
THE ANGELS OF MONS
The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
by
ARTHUR MACHEN
1915
Introduction
I have been asked to write an introduction to the story of "The
Bowmen", on its publication in book form together with three other
tales of similar fashion. And I hesitate. This affair of "The Bowmen"
has been such an odd one from first to last, so many queer
complications have entered into it, there have been so many and so
divers currents and cross-currents of rumour and speculation
concerning it, that I honestly do not know where to begin. I propose,
then, to solve the difficulty by apologising for beginning at all.
For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to
imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be
introduced. If, for example, a man has made an anthology of great
poetry, he may well write an introduction justifying his principle of
selection, pointing out here and there, as the spirit moves him, high
beauties and supreme excellencies, discoursing of the magnates and
lords and princes of literature, whom he is merely serving as groom of
the chamber. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and
classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things;
and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which
appeared in _The Evening News_ about ten months ago.
I appreciate the absurdity, nay, the enormity of the position in all
its grossness. And my excuse for these pages must be this: that though
the story itself is nothing, it has yet had such odd and unforeseen
consequences and adventures that the tale of them may possess some
interest. And then, again, there are certain psychological morals to
be drawn from the whole matter of the tale and its sequel of rumours
and discussions that are not, I think, devoid of consequence; and so
to begin at the beginning.
This was in last August, to be more precise, on the last Sunday of
last August. There were terrible things to be read on that hot Sunday
morning between meat and mass. It was in _The Weekly Dispatch_ that I
saw the awful account of the retreat from Mons. I no longer recollect
the details; but I have not forgotten the impression that was then on
my mind, I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and
terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the
British Army. In the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet
aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and
for ever glorious. So I saw our men with a shining about them, so I
took these thoughts with me to church, and, I am sorry to say, was
making up a story in my head while the deacon was singing the Gospel.
This was not the tale of "The Bowmen". It was the first sketch, as it
were, of "The Soldiers' Rest". I only wish I had been able to write it
as I conceived it. The tale as it stands is, I think, a far better
piece of craft than "The Bowmen", but the tale that came to me as the
blue incense floated above the Gospel Book on the desk between the
tapers: that indeed was a noble story--like all the stories that never
get written. I conceived the dead men coming up through the flames and
in the flames, and being welcomed in the Eternal Tavern with songs and
flowing cups and everlasting mirth. But every man is the child of his
age, however much he may hate it; and our popular religion has long
determined that jollity is wicked. As far as I can make out modern
Protestantism believes that Heaven is something like Evensong in an
English cathedral, the service by Stainer and the Dean preaching. For
those opposed to dogma of any kind--even the mildest--I suppose it is
held that a Course of Ethical Lectures will be arranged.
Well, I have long maintained that on the whole the average church,
considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place
than the average tavern; still, as I say, one's age masters one, and
clouds and bewilders the intelligence, and the real story of "The
Soldiers' Rest", with its "sonus epulantium in aeterno convivio", was
ruined at the moment of its birth, and it was some time later that the
actual story got written. And in the meantime the plot of "The Bowmen"
occurred to me. Now it has been murmured and hinted and suggested and
whispered in all sorts of quarters that before I wrote the tale I had
heard something. The most decorative of these legends is also the most
precise: "I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in
typescript by a lady-in-waiting." This was not the case; and all
vaguer reports to the effect that I had heard some rumours or hints of
rumours are equally void of any trace of truth.
Again I apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiae of my bit
of a story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears
that the subject interests the public, and I comply with my
instructions. I take it, then, that the origins of "The Bowmen" were
composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the
thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms,
that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high
immortal places to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then
Kipling's story of the ghostly Indian regiment got in my head and got
mixed with the mediaevalism that is always there; and so "The Bowmen"
was written. I was heartily disappointed with it, I remember, and
thought it--as I still think it--an indifferent piece of work.
However, I have tried to write for these thirty-five long years, and
if I have not become practised in letters, I am at least a past master
in the Lodge of Disappointment. Such as it was, "The Bowmen" appeared
in _The Evening News_ of September 29th, 1914.
Now the journalist does not, as a rule, dwell much on the prospect of
fame; and if he be an evening journalist, his anticipations of
immortality are bounded by twelve o'clock at night at the latest; and
it may well be that those insects which begin to live in the morning
and are dead by sunset deem themselves immortal. Having written my
story, having groaned and growled over it and printed it, I certainly
never thought to hear another word of it. My colleague "The Londoner"
praised it warmly to my face, as his kindly fashion is; entering, very
properly, a technical caveat as to the language of the battle-cries of
the bowmen. "Why should English archers use French terms?" he said. I
replied that the only reason was this--that a "Monseigneur" here and
there struck me as picturesque; and I reminded him that, as a matter
of cold historical fact, most of the archers of Agincourt were
mercenaries from Gwent, my native country, who would appeal to
Mihangel and to saints not known to the Saxons--Teilo, Iltyd, Dewi,
Cadwaladyr Vendigeid. And I thought that that was the first and last
discussion of "The Bowmen". But in a few days from its publication the
editor of _The Occult Review_ wrote to me. He wanted to know whether
the story had any foundation in fact. I told him that it had no
foundation in fact of any kind or sort; I forget whether I added that
it had no foundation in rumour but I should think not, since to the
best of my belief there were no rumours of heavenly interposition in
existence at that time. Certainly I had heard of none. Soon afterwards
the editor of _Light_ wrote asking a like question, and I made him a
like reply. It seemed to me that I had stifled any "Bowmen" mythos in
the hour of its birth.
A month or two later, I received several requests from editors of
parish magazines to reprint the story. I--or, rather, my editor--
readily gave permission; and then, after another month or two, the
conductor of one of these magazines wrote to me, saying that the
February issue containing the story had been sold out, while there was
still a great demand for it. Would I allow them to reprint "The
Bowmen" as a pamphlet, and would I write a short preface giving the
exact authorities for the story? I replied that they might reprint in
pamphlet form with all my heart, but that I could not give my
authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure invention. The
priest wrote again, suggesting--to my amazement--that I must be
mistaken, that the main "facts" of "The Bowmen" must be true, that my
share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration
and decoration of a veridical history. It seemed that my light fiction
had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the
solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if
I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in
the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April,
and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling
ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a
monstrous size.
It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told
as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation
to their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant
appeared, and St. George was the chief character. In one case an
officer--name and address missing--said that there was a portrait of
St. George in a certain London restaurant, and that a figure, just
like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked
by him, with the happiest results. Another variant--this, I think,
never got into print--told how dead Prussians had been found on the
battlefield with arrow wounds in their bodies. This notion amused me,
as I had imagined a scene, when I was thinking out the story, in which
a German general was to appear before the Kaiser to explain his
failure to annihilate the English.
"All-Highest," the general was to say, "it is true, it is impossible
to deny it. The men were killed by arrows; the shafts were found in
their bodies by the burying parties."
I rejected the idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy. I was
therefore entertained when I found that what I had refused as too
fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult circles as hard
fact.
Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed
between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some
examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy;
in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of
the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will he noted, has
disappeared--he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic
variants--and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. But so far
angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I think
that I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.
In "The Bowmen" my imagined soldier saw "a long line of shapes, with a
shining about them." And Mr. A.P. Sinnett, writing in the May issue of
_The Occult Review_, reporting what he had heard, states that "those
who could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings' between the two
armies." Now I conjecture that the word "shining" is the link between
my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and
benevolent supernatural beings are angels, and so, I believe, the
Bowmen of my story have become "the Angels of Mons." In this shape
they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or
almost everywhere.
And here, I conjecture, we have the key to the large popularity of the
delusion--as I think it. We have long ceased in England to take much
interest in saints, and in the recent revival of the cultus of St.
George, the saint is little more than a patriotic figurehead. And the
appeal to the saints to succour us is certainly not a common English
practice; it is held Popish by most of our countrymen. But angels,
with certain reservations, have retained their popularity, and so,
when it was settled that the English army in its dire peril was
delivered by angelic aid, the way was clear for general belief, and
for the enthusiasms of the religion of the man in the street. And so
soon as the legend got the title "The Angels of Mons" it became
impossible to avoid it. It permeated the Press: it would not be
neglected; it appeared in the most unlikely quarters--in _Truth_ and
_Town Topics_, _The New Church Weekly_ (Swedenborgian) and _John
Bull_. The editor of _The Church Times_ has exercised a wise reserve:
he awaits that evidence which so far is lacking; but in one issue of
the paper I noted that the story furnished a text for a sermon, the
subject of a letter, and the matter for an article. People send me
cuttings from provincial papers containing hot controversy as to the
exact nature of the appearances; the "Office Window" of _The Daily
Chronicle_ suggests scientific explanations of the hallucination; the
_Pall Mall_ in a note about St. James says he is of the brotherhood of
the Bowmen of Mons--this reversion to the bowmen from the angels being
possibly due to the strong statements that I have made on the matter.
The pulpits both of the Church and of Non-conformity have been busy:
Bishop Welldon, Dean Hensley Henson (a disbeliever), Bishop Taylor
Smith (the Chaplain-General), and many other clergy have occupied
themselves with the matter. Dr. Horton preached about the "angels" at
Manchester; Sir Joseph Compton Rickett (President of the National
Federation of Free Church Councils) stated that the soldiers at the
front had seen visions and dreamed dreams, and had given testimony of
powers and principalities fighting for them or against them. Letters
come from all the ends of the earth to the Editor of _The Evening
News_ with theories, beliefs, explanations, suggestions. It is all
somewhat wonderful; one can say that the whole affair is a
psychological phenomenon of considerable interest, fairly comparable
with the great Russian delusion of last August and September.
* * * * *
Now it is possible that some persons, judging by the tone of these
remarks of mine, may gather the impression that I am a profound
disbeliever in the possibility of any intervention of the
super-physical order in the affairs of the physical order. They will
be mistaken if they make this inference; they will be mistaken if they
suppose that I think miracles in Judaea credible but miracles in France
or Flanders incredible. I hold no such absurdities. But I confess,
very frankly, that I credit none of the "Angels of Mons" legends,
partly because I see, or think I see, their derivation from my own
idle fiction, but chiefly because I have, so far, not received one jot
or tittle of evidence that should dispose me to belief. It is idle,
indeed, and foolish enough for a man to say: "I am sure that story is
a lie, because the supernatural element enters into it;" here, indeed,
we have the maggot writhing in the midst of corrupted offal denying
the existence of the sun. But if this fellow be a fool--as he is--
equally foolish is he who says, "If the tale has anything of the
supernatural it is true, and the less evidence the better;" and I am
afraid this tends to be the attitude of many who call themselves
occultists. I hope that I shall never get to that frame of mind. So I
say, not that super-normal interventions are impossible, not that they
have not happened during this war--I know nothing as to that point,
one way or the other--but that there is not one atom of evidence (so
far) to support the current stories of the angels of Mons. For, be it
remarked, these stories are specific stories. They rest on the second,
third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by "a soldier," by "an
officer," by "a Catholic correspondent," by "a nurse," by any number
of anonymous people. Indeed, names have been mentioned. A lady's name
has been drawn, most unwarrantably as it appears to me, into the
discussion, and I have no doubt that this lady has been subject to a
good deal of pestering and annoyance. She has written to the Editor of
_The Evening News_ denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. The
Psychical Research Society's expert confesses that no real evidence
has been proffered to her Society on the matter. And then, to my
amazement, she accepts as fact the proposition that some men on the
battlefield have been "hallucinated," and proceeds to give the theory
of sensory hallucination. She forgets that, by her own showing, there
is no reason to suppose that anybody has been hallucinated at all.
Someone (unknown) has met a nurse (unnamed) who has talked to a
soldier (anonymous) who has seen angels. But _that_ is not evidence;
and not even Sam Weller at his gayest would have dared to offer it as
such in the Court of Common Pleas. So far, then, nothing remotely
approaching proof has been offered as to any supernatural intervention
during the Retreat from Mons. Proof may come; if so, it will be
interesting and more than interesting.
But, taking the affair as it stands at present, how is it that a
nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle
rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is
contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole
atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything--save
the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated
spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be "nobly wild,
not mad." Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to seduce him in
body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff that will make him
ignobly wild and mad indeed. It took hard, practical men of affairs,
business men, advanced thinkers, Freethinkers, to believe in Madame
Blavatsky and Mahatmas and the famous message from the Golden Shore:
"Judge's plan is right; follow him and _stick_."
And the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs
undoubtedly lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the
Church of England. Christianity, as Mr. W.L. Courtney has so admirably
pointed out, is a great Mystery Religion; it is _the_ Mystery
Religion. Its priests are called to an awful and tremendous hierurgy;
its pontiffs are to be the pathfinders, the bridge-makers between the
world of sense and the world of spirit. And, in fact, they pass their
time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality,
in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer
and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it
seems to me.
The Bowmen
It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of
the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But
it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin
and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away;
and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them
and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had
entered into their souls.
On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms
with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little
English company, there was one point above all other points in our
battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat,
but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and
of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a
salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English
force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned,
and Sedan would inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against
this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The
men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets
about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the
shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and
tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did
the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The
English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it
was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another,
"It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast
ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British
trenches.
There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of
these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated
hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and
destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches
that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of
the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German
infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey
world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.
There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man
improvised a new version of the battlesong, "Good-bye, good-bye to
Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there". And they all went
on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity
for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans
dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, "What price
Sidney Street?" And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody
knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and
battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and
stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.
"World without end. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some
irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered-he says
he cannot think why or wherefore--a queer vegetarian restaurant in
London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets
made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates
in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue,
with the motto, _Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius_--May St. George be a
present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and
other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey
advancing mass--300 yards away--he uttered the pious vegetarian
motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had
to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out
as he did so that the King's ammunition cost money and was not lightly
to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something
between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The
roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead
of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a
thunder-peal crying, "Array, array, array!"
His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him,
as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons.
He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: "St. George! St.
George!"
"Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!"
"St. George for merry England!"
"Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us."
"Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow."
"Heaven's Knight, aid us!"
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.
The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no
hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley.
Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English,
"Gawd help us!" he bellowed to the man next to him, "but we're
blooming marvels! Look at those grey... gentlemen, look at them! D'ye
see them? They're not going down in dozens, nor in 'undreds; it's
thousands, it is. Look! look! there's a regiment gone while I'm
talking to ye."
"Shut it!" the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, "what are ye
gassing about!"
But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the
grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the
guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers
as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the
earth.
All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry: "Harow! Harow!
Monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! St. George help us!"
"High Chevalier, defend us!"
The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air;
the heathen horde melted from before them.
"More machine guns!" Bill yelled to Tom.
"Don't hear them," Tom yelled back. "But, thank God, anyway; they've
got it in the neck."
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.