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| Each year in Mons, Belgium Allied tanks roll through the city to mark their liberation from the Nazis in 1944 (Courtesy: battlefield-tours) |
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| Liberation of Mons, 1944
(Photo: us.army.39.45.soforums.com)
|
This
year however, September 2 was more special than usual because it marked the
75th anniversary of that glorious day when Belgians were once again free. To honor
the occasion, tanks annually roll into Mons
While
many people have never heard of Mons
It
happened in late August 1914 when the first major engagement of the British Expeditionary Force in
the First World War occurred at the Battle
of Mons.
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| Mons is free once more (Photo: us.army.39.45.soforums.com) |
forces
were thrown back by heavily outnumbered British troops, who suffered heavy
casualties and, being outflanked, were forced into rapid retreat the next day.
The retreat and the battle were rapidly perceived by the British public as
being a key moment in the war.
Inspired
by accounts he had read of the fighting at Mons ,
Welsh author Arthur Machen published a short story entitled
"The Bowmen" for the London
Though
Machen's story was pure fiction, it was not labeled as such when it was
published and, because he had written several legitimate war stories previously
for the paper, many readers took it to be a true account.
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| Town Hall in Mons, Belgium is a popular year-round gathering spot (Photo: Pixabay) |
Further
complicating the problem was the fact that Machen frequently wrote in the first-person
in order to create the illusion of being an eye-witness. A technique which
further added credibility to his imaginary tale at Mons
Much
like Orson Welles with his Halloween radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds (1938),
Machen had no desire to create a hoax, but the fuse had
already been lit.
In
"The Bowmen" Machen's soldier saw "a long line of shapes, with a
shining about them." Writing in the Occult Review, A.P. Sinnett, stated that "those who
could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings' between the two armies,"
which led Machen to suggest that the bowmen of his story had become the "Angels
of Mons."
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| The Angel of Mons pays homage to a World War I legend created by Arthur Machen
(Photo: David Dixon --
licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
license)
|
Before long, variations of the story began to
appear as authentic histories, including one account describing corpses of two German
soldiers with arrow wounds that had been found on a battlefield.
In April
1915, an account in the British Spiritualist magazine
told of a mysterious force that had miraculously intervened
to help the British during the decisive moment of the battle.
This quickly resulted in a flurry of
similar stories and the spread of wild rumors, the most popular version of
which grew to describe the saviors of the British soldiers as angelic warriors.
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| Church organ in Mons (Photo: Pixabay) |
By May,
a full-blown controversy had erupted, with the angels being used as proof of divine
providence on the side of the Allies in sermons across Britain
In an
effort to end the gossip, Machen republished his fable in August in book form,
with a long preface detailing that the rumors had begun with his original
story.
Unexpectedly,
the book became a bestseller, resulting in a large series of other
publications claiming to provide evidence of the Angels' existence.
The
sudden spread of misinformation in the spring of 1915, six months after the
events and Machen's story was published, is difficult to explain. The most
detailed, and popular, examination of the Mons story comes from David Clarke which suggests the men
may have been part of a covert attempt by military intelligence to spread
morale- boosting propaganda and disinformation.
With
the sinking of the Lusitania, Zeppelin attacks
and failure to achieve a breakthrough on the Western Front, it was a difficult
period of doubt and low morale for the troops. Thus, the timing would make
military sense.
Some of
the stories went so far as to claim that sources could not be revealed for
security reasons.
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The Belgian royal family walking in
(Photo: Lensens,
|
The most
detailed study of the event suggests that Machen's story provided the genesis
for the vast majority of the tales. which clearly boosted morale on the
home front, as popular enthusiasm had been eroding in 1915. In that regard, the
Angels of Mons were every bit as real as people believed them to be.
Three
decades later, the angels returned in the form of tanks and soldiers to
liberate Mons and Belgium
As Hope
might have said to the citizens of Mons
Americans
would do well to observe the message learned from Mons
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