“I think you told me about that before,” said I—and he had. “It was the same person who brought the first news of the Russian troops going through England—he had seen them on the platform of Crewe stamping off the snow they had brought on their boots from Archangel; and afterwards he had been talking with a soldier who had seen the angels at Mons, and had been ordered home to be one of the shooting party at the Tower of London, when Prince Louis was court-martialled and sentenced.”
“Quite true,” he cried. “My God! what an experience for any one man to go through. But we are living in extraordinary times—that's what I've never shrunk from saying, no matter who was present—extraordinary times.”
I could not but agree with him I did not say that what I thought the most extraordinary feature of the times was the extraordinary credulity of so many people. The story of the Mons angels was perhaps the most remarkable of all the series. A journalist sitting in his office in London simply introduced in a newspaper article the metaphor of a host of angels holding up the advancing Germans, and within a week scores of people in England had talked with soldiers who had seen those imaginary angels and were ready to give a poulterer's description of them, as Sheridan said some one would do if he introduced the Phoenix into his Drury Lane Address.
It was no use the journalist explaining that his angels were purely imaginary ones; people said, when you pointed this out to them:—
“That may be so; but these were the angels he imagined.”
Clergymen preached beautiful sermons on the angel host; and I heard of a man who sold for half a crown a feather which had dropped from the wing of one of the angels who had come on duty before he had quite got over his moult.
When Dorothy heard this she said she was sure that it was no British soldier who had shown the white feather in France during that awful time.
“If they were imaginary angels, the white feather must have been imaginary too,” said Olive, the practical one.
“One of the earliest of angel observers was an ass, and the tradition has been carefully adhered to ever since,” said Friswell, and after that there was, of course, no use talking further.
But when we were still laughing over our antiquarian and his novelties in the form of verse and anecdote, Friswell himself appeared with a newspaper in his hand, and he too was laughing.