It was murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters, Machen says, that before he wrote the tale he had “heard something.” The most decorative of these whisperings was this: “I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting.” And, presumably, as is the custom with all popular legends, most everyone had a cousin or a brother-in-law who had been there. By the time the story had been reprinted in parish periodicals and spread by word of pulpit, it began to seem to Machen that he had failed in the art of letters. There began to be variations on the theme—such as one in which the German dead were found to be punctured with arrow wounds. The occultists next had a go at it, then the scientists began to talk learnedly of “mass hallucination.”
The legend was then translated into several languages including, at any rate, the French. The shining figure of St. George became, variously, St. Michael the Archangel and St. Joan of Arc. The Germans, for security reasons no doubt, offered no opinion or explanation of their abrupt halt or of the tale. However, as Machen observes, “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 be 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 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 (1915) 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 nothing else, 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.”
Pamphlets were published, as is usual in such cases. The Theosophists published an “answer to Mr. Arthur Machen.” Another worker in the field collected “numerous Confirmations, Testimonies, Evidences of the Wounded” and other materials in an “authentic record” of the event. The furore died out after the war and the Angels of Mons rested in legend with only sporadic appearances in the pages of the Sunday supplements. Within a few years the legend had graduated to the sphere of science or pseudo-scientific study.
2
In 1930 there was published in London a book called The Mystery and Lore of Apparitions, with Some Account of Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms and Boggerts in Early Times by Harold Shaylor, an investigator in various fields of the marvelous.
The Frontispiece of this comfortably plump volume is “from a Drawing by A. Forestier, reproduced by kind permission from the Illustrated London News.” The sketch shows eight or nine soldiers in a trench in the foreground firing at advancing hordes of Germans. To the right and standing above the parapet of the trench are three gigantic bowmen, helmeted and with swords at their sides, launching arrows (visible in the sketch) at the Germans. A fourth bow and part of an arm are visible at the extreme right. The Germans are falling in great numbers, at least one is visibly pierced by an arrow.
Within the book, among the many marvels, we find this:
“Considerable discussion took place in the Press during the autumn of 1914 and the early part of 1915, with respect to the phenomena said to have been seen at the Battle of Mons.