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However, the curious turnings and twistings of legend are not yet finished. The miracles of 1915 became the mass hallucinations of 1930, and the creator of the slight story of The Bowmen had been quite forgotten in the furore attending each of them. But by far the most curious circumstance in the whole curious affair is contained in the most recent, to my knowledge, mention of the Mons legend. It occurs in an article by Meyer Berger, entitled Legends of the War, published in Harper’s Bazaar in January, 1944.
Mr. Berger is an extremely competent correspondent for the New York Times. As a matter of fact, it was out of respect for Mr. Berger’s worth as a correspondent that I saved from salvage the magazine in which his article appeared. Early in the spring of 1944 I was cleaning out the winter’s accumulation of magazines and newspapers and readying them for the next paper pick-up. The baroque Bazaar is not, usually, to my taste, but seeing Berger’s name over an article I placed the magazine to one side and took it up to read some nights later.
The article concerns legends of the war. Mr. Berger remarks, sensibly, that war nurtures in the soldier some dormant sense that opens the door to superstition, to mysticism, and to visions of the supernatural. He then outlines the various legends of the White Lady on various fronts, the Christ in Flanders legend and, of course, the Angel of Mons. Mr. Berger uses the singular, and so one supposes, there is an Angel of Mons legend as well.
Mr. Berger outlines the legend briefly, explaining that there was no earthly reason for the Jerries to have stopped the pursuit, but stop they did—and the wherefore of this astonishing halt forms the basis for the story.
“Arthur Machen said later,” continues the Berger article, “that he conceived the legend of the Angel of Mons as he daydreamed in church over the news of the German’s miraculous halt.” This is not quite what Machen said, of course. Machen explained that he conceived the story of the Bowmen as he brooded in church over the news of the British retreat. Berger goes on to relate that when Machen’s story appeared in the London Evening News as fiction it was, to his (Machen’s) astonishment, taken up and spread all over the world as something that actually happened. “There is no reason,” remarks Berger, “to question his explanation.”
On the other hand Berger spoke in France with Tommies who swore that, Machen or no Machen, they saw the Angel at Mons, though not as he described it in his piece. “The Machen story said that when the British were hardest pressed at Mons, there appeared in the heavens, above the battlefield, an unusual cloud formation. This changed into a giant likeness of St. George, flanked by rows of medieval English bowmen whose flights of arrows killed virtually all the German horde. When the bodies were examined there was no sign of a wound.”
Whatever this may be, it is not the Machen story. Machen has no cloud, no giant St. George ... only “a long line of shapes with a shining about them.” Mr. Berger also talked with a Sergeant Coombs of the King’s Royal Rifles at an English base hospital in Trouville. Coombs swore he had seen the Angel of Mons and Berger had reason to believe him, “if only because he wore the Mons Star.” Coombs describes “a kind of triple cloud” ... a large center cloud with two clouds at either side. They had no particular shape at first but they gradually became a great angel ... “the two smaller clouds were enormous wings, and the angel spread its wings as if it were signalling the jerries to stop where they were.”
This seraphic semaphore is a refinement that had not previously appeared in any of the many versions of the legend. One of the legend’s variations, writes Berger, “has a faintly humorous side.” It appeared in the North American Review in August, 1915.
“It told of a soldier, hard-pressed with the rest at Mons and ready to drop, who found himself murmuring, ‘Adest Anglis Sanctus Georgius.’ He knew no Latin and he didn’t know what moved him to the utterance. Even as it came to his lips, he recalled that he had seen it lettered on a plate in a vegetarian restaurant in London, before he was called up to service. It means, roughly, ‘May St. George be a present help to England.’ Something like an electric shock convulsed the soldier and his shock-packed ears dimly heard men around him shouting, ‘St. George for Merrie England.’ From that point, the story followed the Machen pattern—archers appeared in the sky and the Germans dropped by thousands.”
Now this version, with the “faintly humorous side,” which appeared according to Mr. Berger in the North American Review in August, 1915, is the Machen story. Whether or not the North American Review version was written by Machen I have been unable to discover. There are differences, of course, even in the very condensed portion offered by Berger. The North American’s soldier knew no Latin ... he merely recited, incorrectly at that, and at a very propitious moment, a motto he had seen in a vegetarian restaurant. Machen’s soldier, although he had apparently patronized that very same vegetarian restaurant, did know Latin “and other useless things.”
And so the legend of the legend of the Angel or Angels of Mons continues to grow out of Arthur Machen’s tale of The Bowmen.