The Battle of Mons and the Angels That Followed

The Battle of Mons was one of the earliest battles of World War I. In the months after the battle, stories spread that a supernatural presence had covered the British army, preventing it from being destroyed. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly. So we've been
on this podcast for a while and and twice in
that time I've gotten a note that just turned out

(00:21):
to be from a college friend. So funny, Yeah, who
didn't know I was on this podcast? Um, and and
then went wait, I think that's it is uh And
So the first time it was my friend Dave. This
was way back after our episode on the Princess who
Swallowed the Glass Piano. I never answered you, Hi, Dave,
What a jerk you are? Well, it was a comments
on our blog and we were having that weird blog comment.

(00:42):
Probably we had a lot of issues with that. Yeah,
technical difficulties, please stand by forever forever. This time it
was Hayden, and Hayden was probably the most enthusiastic student
of history I knew in college and was way into
military history. So I jumped at the chance to ask
him for some military history suggestions, which brings us today's topic,

(01:05):
which was suggested by Hayden, and it is the Angel
of Mons. Uh So the Battle of Mons was one
of World War one's earliest battles were really rapidly approaching
the hundredth anniversary of both the start of World War
One and of this battle itself, and in the months
after the battle, these stories started to spread. That is,
supernatural presence, which was described either as Saint George or

(01:29):
as some ghostly archers or as angels, had covered the
British army as it withdrew from battle and had completely
prevented the army from being destroyed by the Germans. That
sounded like way too good of a story to pass up,
especially since at the time this tale became enormously inspiring
and heartening to both the troops on the Western Front

(01:50):
and the civilians at home in Britain. It sits right
at this intersection of folklore and fiction and patriotism and propaganda,
and it's a story that persists did for years and
years after the war was over. So for a little
bit of background, this is mostly tell you where in
the timeline we are, because World War One was complicated. Yes,

(02:12):
because there were many many factors that led up to
the start of World War One. But the thing that
is often cited as the final tipping point in sort
of the real catalyst for the actual events to unfold
was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro
Hungarian Empire and his wife, and this took place in Sarajevo, Bosnia,

(02:32):
on June twenty, nineteen fourteen. Austria suspected that Serbia was
behind this assassination, so a month later, Austria declared war
on Serbia, and just a few days after that, Russia,
which was one of Serbia's allies, announced that it was
mobilizing its forces, and a day later Germany declared war
on Russia. So it was almost like a domino effect

(02:53):
of one thing happening after another UH. And then Germany
declared war on France on one day in Belgium the next,
so Germany got very enthusiastic about its dominoes UH, and
their next step was to invade the neutral Belgium to
get better access to targets in France. That day, which
was August the fourth, Britain declared war on Germany, and
a whole lot of more declarations of war happened after

(03:16):
this point over the next few weeks, but at this
point in the story, Britain France and Germany are really
what's important. In Germany's plan was to send an enormous
army through Belgium and into France, cutting off the Allies
surrounding the city and winning the war in a matter
of weeks. This movement of German troops through Belgium and
France led to a series of battles known as the

(03:37):
Battles of the Frontiers. These all took place along the
Western Front, and they all started towards the end of
August nineteen fourteen, very early on in the war. August
in particular was devastating for the French, who lost about
twenty seven thousand soldiers in a single day, and the
Battle of Moms, which took place on August twenty three,

(03:59):
nineteen fourteen, was part of the Battles of the Frontiers,
and in this battle the British Expeditionary Forces or the
b e F joined the fighting and met the German
army in the field of battle for the first time
of the war. The BF had a total fighting force
of about seventy men in continental Europe at this point,
and about half of them were at the Battle of Mons.

(04:20):
Sir John French was commander in chief of the b
e F and the men under his command included both
infantry and cavalry. This was a highly trained army and
many of the men had previous combat experience from the
Boer Wars in South Africa. And just as a side note,
it's a little awkward to have a guy named French
and the French in this one episode of an audio podcast.

(04:44):
But it would sound kind of silly to call him
Sir John, which I did consider doing for like a second.
I suggested giving him a wacky nickname. Tracy did not
go for it. Um, So we're going to do our
best to make it clear whether we're talking about Commander
in Chief John French or the French. So the original

(05:07):
plan was for the BF troops to join French forces
near charle Ros, where fighting from one of the other
battles of the frontiers was still ongoing, and together the
French and British would try to break through the German lines.
The number of factors actually derailed this plan. They included
a late star for the British troops and a generally

(05:27):
contentious relationship between Commander French and General Charles lan Rozak,
who was in command of the French Fifth Army at Charlerois.
So instead the BF and the French fifth Army wound
up facing the Germans from two different positions, instead of
united with the French troops in France and the British
troops in Belgium. In Belgium, the BF objective was too

(05:50):
slow or stop the advance of the German army, and
to that end they established a position along the mons
Conde Canal. And the canal itself was about sixty eat
wide and in one area it made a sharp curve
and this formed a jutting promontory of land, which is
also called a salient, and the northern part of this
salient was where the German First Army, which outnumbered the

(06:12):
British two to one, focused its attack As it tried
to break through the British defenses. The Germans started shelling
and attacking with infantry at about nine am. General Alexander
van Koch of Germany didn't really make the greatest use
of his numerical advantage. He was kind of in a hurry.
He wanted to break through the British lines as fast

(06:33):
as possible, so he sent large numbers of infantry in
very tight formations to attack the salient, and there were
a lot of really expert marksmen among the British soldiers. Uh.
They were so efficient at firing and reloading that the
German officers allegedly reported back that the British were using
machine guns. The British marksmen inflicted huge casualties on the

(06:55):
shoulder to shoulder German troops. The British also had a
trenching device with them which let them reposition themselves and
dig a new trench for cover in response to where
the Germans focused their shelling. And thanks to all of
this UH, the BF was able to hold the salient
for six solid hours. But eventually the German assault, as
they adjusted their approach not to be such easy targets

(07:17):
for these marksmen, finally started to erode the British defenses.
On top of that, late in the day, General Lan
Rozac ordered his men to retreat from Charle, and this
meant that the British troops were at risk of being
surrounded by the Germans and cut off with no means
of escape. So Commander French gave the order to withdraw,

(07:38):
and they didn't just retreat. The British actually continued to
fight as they fell back, and in the end they
did slow the Germans by a day, but that uh
small success cost them about British troops. For the British,
this defeat was crushing and demoralizing as a society. The
British belief their army was the best and mo highly

(08:00):
trained in the entire world, and yet in their first
battle in continental Europe and almost a hundred years, they
had been forced to withdraw after just a few hours.
News reports in Britain and the following days characterized their
army as retreating and broken, and characterized the Germans as
a force that quote could no more be stopped than

(08:21):
the waves of the sea. And meanwhile, the Germans, as
the exact counter to how the British were feeling about
this situation, were completely emboldened by their victory at Mons
and elsewhere in the battles of the frontiers. So all
of that probably made the idea of their having been
some kind of supernatural and perhaps godly intervention quite appealing.

(08:45):
Day of sex Makina sounds pretty good in that situation. Yeah,
and we will talk a little more about that after
a brief word from a sponsor. So to return to
the story. In the months following the Battle of Months,
stories spread among the British troops at the front and
among the back at home in Britain that an angelic
figure or maybe even an entire angelic army had covered

(09:06):
the British withdrawal at Moms and basically saved the day,
and some described a host of glowing heavenly archers. Others
talked of more of like a holy shield that kept
the Germans from advancing, or perhaps it was St. George
Patron Saint of the British fighting forces and an army
called up from the Battle of Agincoorps, which was the

(09:27):
decisive British victory in the Hundred Years War, which we
talked about briefly in our Partiers episode We did. So,
whatever the exact version, the story of the Angel was
really widespread and widely believed. Back home and among the troops.
People started to hold it up as evidence that God
was on the side of the Allies. Clergy used it
in their sermons, and it was printed and reprinted in

(09:50):
different publications as different sources picked it up. On the
home front, not believing in the Angel became sort of unpatriotic. Uh.
One account of the Angel was printed on July thirty one,
nineteen fifteen, in the London Evening News, and this was
reportedly told to Phillis Campbell, who was a volunteer nurse

(10:10):
working with the troops in France. Her source was Lancashire fusilier,
who said, we all saw it first. There was a
sort of yellow mist like sort of rising before the
Germans as they came up to the top of the
hill come on like a solid wall they did, springing
out of the earth, just solid, no end to them.
I just gave up, no use fighting the whole German race,

(10:31):
thinks I it's all up with us. The next minute
comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears off,
there's a tall man with yellow hair in golden armor
on a white horse, holding his sword up and his
mouth open as if he was saying, come on, boys,
I'll put the kai bosh on the Devil's The minute
I saw it, I knew we were going to win it.
Fair bucked me up. As versions of the story floated around.

(10:53):
It featured ghostly Bowman and St. George and descriptions like
the one that we just read. One piece was printed
in the All Saints, which was a parish magazine from Bristol,
and it really cemented the idea that it was angels. Specifically,
this one sided a Miss Marvel, who was reportedly retelling
what she had heard from two of her friends. One

(11:13):
of these friends was not a religious man, and she
said his entire perspective on life had been changed by
seeing the angels. In this version, the angels were protectors
that shielded the troops, not attackers attacking the Germans. The
printing of the All Saints that contained the story sold out,
and people clamored for more copies. Miss Marble's rendition of

(11:34):
the story was one that was picked up in one
form or another again and again. But both of these sources,
and all of the many other purportedly firsthand in secondhand
accounts that circulated about a supernatural event having taken place
at month have some problems. So. Nurse Campbell from the
first example was the daughter of a novelist and a

(11:55):
writer of ghost stories herself. She had had a collection
of ghost stories published under pseudonym before the war. In
her war writing, she also seems to have reprinted anything
anyone said to her, no matter how far fetched it was.
No matter how obviously false it was without fact checking
or really considering what was said. And Miss Marrable from

(12:17):
the second version that we just talked about was a
real person. But when the Society of Psychical Research tried
to investigate her story and get her to name her sources,
she started backtracking a little bit. She said they weren't
really men that she knew that she had in fact
no idea who they had been. And even as her
story fell apart and things that were crucial to its

(12:38):
believability were disproved, people kept accepting the story as fact.
Papers and pamphlets that picked up her story later on
just omitted her name, sort of to get rid of
that whole credibility issue. Yeah, and these are just really
two examples. There were lots and lots of different versions
of the story with different people being cited as their sources.

(12:58):
A lot of them have the similarly murky anonymity in
who people were actually hearing the story from, or their
dates are kind of fuzzy um, or you know, it's
it seems kind of like an urban legend, third and
fourth hand. Yeah, but there are so many of them,

(13:19):
and they were spread so widely and believed so fully
that it's tempting to say that surely that must have
been based in some kind of grain of truth of
what happened at the battlefield at Moms. Except there is
a little problem, right, which is that they all seemed
to draw from a very short story which is called

(13:40):
The Bowman. And this was published in the London Evening
News on September twenty nine of nineteen fourteen, the absolute
earliest reference in writing to a supernatural event at Mams.
We're gonna kind of talk about some theories for how
this a story became repurposed as fact after another quick
break that sounds grand. Arthur Machen was a British fantasy

(14:04):
author who was making his ends meet by writing for newspapers.
His short story The Bowman was printed a little over
a month after the Battle of Moms, and it's the
story of a soldier at an unspecified battle on the front.
But this battle takes place in the story on a
salient as the Bottle of Mons did, and in the

(14:24):
face of an overwhelming advance from the Germans. The character
in this story remembers a prayer to St. George that
he saw on a plate at a vegetarian restaurant back home,
and he says the prayer that he remembers from the plate,
and this supernatural form appears along with a host of archers.
I want this story to be rewritten in the modern

(14:45):
day by Chuck Polinic. It's just I'm saying. It just
seems right of his alley. Uh. The story goes 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 toward the German hosts. And

(15:08):
in the last line of the story, this is uh
St George and the Agincourt bowman who came to the rescue.
This story was not labeled as fiction, but it certainly
reads like fiction. But even so, people started to write
to match In in the newspaper to ask if it
was true. Spiritualist publications wanted to reprint the story as fact,

(15:30):
and they were trying to get the names of the sources.
Kind of reminds me of the probably probably overhyped War
of the World's That's exactly what I was thinking of two. Yeah,
So this story of the angels didn't spread like wildfar
right away. I mean, there was immediate interest, but it
was not immediately established as fact in people's minds. It

(15:54):
took trench warfare to really do that. As a situation
in the Western Front turned into a stale mate and
the last of the trenches went down in November of
nineteen fourteen, people's interest in The Bowman started to revive.
It was a story that really gave people hope. It
became more and more obvious to people that this was
going to be a really long, really deadly war, and

(16:16):
the idea that an angel had had come to help
became the sort of wartime urban legend. And the whole time,
as this story was being reprinted in various versions all
over newspapers, pamphlets, and books, Arthur Matchin insisted that he
was one the only source for this story and that
the story was in fact on fiction, and his demand

(16:40):
rose for patriotic and inspiring writings. He republished the story
in a book called The Bowman in August of nineteen fifteen,
and he also wrote a new preface to the story
explaining that it was absolutely fictional. This book sold three
thousand copies in a single day, and it was eventually
translated into six languages, and this pop ularity kicked off

(17:01):
a big round of people trying to prove that the
story was, in spite of what he said, completely real.
One journalist named Harold Begbie even publicly argued that Matchin
must have had a telepathic impression from one of the
dying soldiers of the apparition that he had seen, and
that this telepathic moment must have inspired the story of

(17:23):
the Bowman. There's also some evidence that the British government
tacitly approved of this story, or at least the effects
that it was having on people's morale and patriotism. So
some months after this uh short story was originally published,
letters from the front started to come home that made
reference to people having actually seen this ghost. And these

(17:44):
are stories that all made it through the censors who
were going through censoring soldier's letters. Um the British government
press censor also allowed it in the press, and there's
even some evidence that this wasn't simply tacit approval, that
the army and the government actually played an active part
in bolstering the story. Brigadier General John Charteris wrote either

(18:07):
a journal entry or a letter to his wife. Sources
site this uh piece of writing both ways, and it
was dated September five, nineteen fourteen, weeks before the publication
of The Bowman, and it reads, quote the story of
the Angel of Marmls going strong through the second core
of how the Angel of the Lord on the traditional
white horse clad all in white with flaming sword, faced

(18:29):
the advancing Germans at Moms and forbade their further progress.
So on the surface, it seems like, well, this obviously
predates the short story that was published in the newspaper. However,
this little snippet is mixed in with descriptions of events
that definitely happened much much later than The Bowman's publication.
The copy of this piece of writing that survives today

(18:51):
is also from a collection of things that were compiled
and edited by his wife. But so there's not an
original document that can be authenticated and uh and examined.
So she basically said, I got this letter dated this
or I found this piece of writing dated this date,
and it said this. So in addition to we're not
really sure how much editing his wife did. The Brigadier

(19:13):
General was the b e F Chief intelligence officer, and
the spread of information and disinformation was part of his job.
So it's entirely within the realm of possibility that he
fudged the date on this document on purpose to add
more authenticity to this story and to try to establish
a reference in print that predated the Bowman's original publication.

(19:34):
And we know that Charteris had this sort of maneuver
in him already. He put disinformation to use during the war.
He's the one that started the rumor of the German
corpse factory, where the Germans were purportedly boiling the bodies
of the dead down into animal feed or munitions. So
he was adept at sort of seeding stories and spreading

(19:59):
concepts that were patently false. Yeah, this story continued to
be told and re told and re embellished long after
World War One was over. In the thirties, newspapers in
London and New York printed this version of the story
that cited a German officer who claimed that the British
had projected an image of an angel onto large screams

(20:21):
to kind of deter the German advance, which that did
not happen. That definitely did not happen. It's a lot
of tech to work up in the battle on the
fly and then Tupac showed up. It just seems like
so completely crazy to claim, But nowadays I think you
could almost claim that and people would be like, maybe,

(20:41):
but at this point they're not a really tall or not. Yeah. Uh.
No source that predates much in story has ever been verified,
And in the end, it really seems to have drawn
from a combination of religious faith, hope, patriotism, a tradition
of British folklore. You know, stories of St. George coming
to the aid of troops go all the way back

(21:02):
to the First Crusade. So it really seems like, uh, match,
a short story got picked up and then folded back
around in people's minds as a real event that had happened. Well,
it filled the psychological need of the entire country absolutely
World War One, especially as as people who had thought

(21:24):
that it was going to be a fast war that
would be over quickly when it became clear that it
was going to be long, slow, bloody trench warfare experience
that like that, there was definitely a huge need for
people to have something positive to believe in. Yeah, it's
easy to see the appeal. I mean there's a need there.

(21:46):
Uh with that, I need you to read some listener.
May I think that's a good plan. Uh. This is
from Arthur, and Arthur says thank you for your episode
on the Treaty of White Tangy. As a Phican New Zealander,
I e Kiwi of European descent, I've always been proud
that our country was formed by compromise rather than conquest,

(22:07):
and the ongoing work of the Waitangi Tribunal has been
instrumental in attempting to heal some of the wounds of
our colonial history. I was disappointed that more time was
not given over to the land wars that followed the
signing of the treaty and the intensification of European settlement
in AUTAROA. Doubly so because New Zealand's history syllabus at

(22:27):
school has traditionally forgotten about this crucial period in our
nation's history, and rather has preferred to highlight the more
palatable aspects of the Treaty of Waitangi story. Between eighteen
forty five and eighteen seventy two, there were a series
of conflicts, rebellions and guerrilla wars waged between the British
colonial administration and a number of Ewi or tribes of Maori.

(22:48):
The most intense fighting took place in the North Island
region of Taranaki in eighteen sixty and again when the
government invaded Taranaki in eighteen sixty three. The first Taranaki
War in sixty eight sparked was sparked by a dispute
over the legitimacy of a land sale of a two
d forty hector block of land, and was instigated by

(23:08):
Governor Thomas Browne, who was eager to suppress anti settler
chiefs who belonged to the King Tanga or Maori King movement,
a confederation of tribes who opposed land sales and who
held to the Maori translation of the of the Treaty.
The first battle was between five hundred government troops comprised
of professional soldiers, local militia forces and volunteers, and eighty

(23:31):
Maori warriors led by Wery mukini Uh. I looked for
pronunciations of all of these words and names, and I
could not find audio pronunciations for all of them. So
I apologize if I say any of these wrong. The
Maori had constructed a temporary disposable fort or paw, in
a strategic position commanding road access to the disputed land.

(23:51):
Despite a full day of bombardment by two hundred how
it surrounds in small arms fire. The Maori suffered no
casualties and abandoned the pot that night. Having proved to
other Ewi in the area that the colonial forces were
the aggressors in the conflict, will Mukini was able to
call on other tribes for assistance, and the war expanded
to involve British and New Zealand troops and six d

(24:15):
Maori fighters for the taranaki Ewie and the wider key
Tani movement, which was based in Waikato but had to
influence throughout the country. The first battles that the tone
for the rest of the war, with the colonial force
seeking to besiege fixed fortifications and engaged the Maori in
a traditional war of set battles, while the Maori would

(24:36):
construct ingenius cheap paw from wood and flax, lined with
trench systems, shooting positions that allowed defenders to fire under
the forts, walls and artillery bunkers, all designed to withstand
artillery fire and musket shot for a short time and
then be abandoned, and this way the Maori were able
to resist the colonial forces for a year. In the

(24:56):
first stage in the war ended in something of a draw,
with the mau winning a symbolic victory by having refused
to submit to British rule. However, this only led to
a brutal invasion of the Waikato and Taranaki regions. In
nineteen sixty three. Over fourteen thousand Imperial troops engaged in
a six year campaign of land confiscation, forcing both rebel

(25:17):
and loyalist Maori from their lands and clearing the captured
territory for white settlement and an effort to punish and
dominate the Maori people. Roughly sixteen thousand square kilometers was taken,
or nearly six percent of New Zealand's total land mass,
and over a thousand Maori were killed and many more
forcibly relocated. In time, the Waitangi Tribunal would find that

(25:39):
this was an illegal war of aggression instigated by the
Crown and award the affected ewe a settlement package worth
over a hundred forty one million New Zealand dollars, a
large sum, but considering that the confiscated land is worth.
They were two billion dollars today the Crown got off lightly.
Race relations in New Zealand to day continue to be
strained by the events of our colonial past. Maori continue

(26:00):
you to grapple with the legacy of colonialism and suffer
from poverty for health outcomes and a sort of lingering,
low grade racism that many white New Zealanders perpetuate almost unconsciously.
A popular strain of political rhetoric employed by our conservative
right wing politicians will periodically call for the Waitangi Tribunal
to be wound up and quote fair and final settlements

(26:20):
made to Maori eui, never mind that entire towns and
cities and thousands of acres of profitable farmland owned by
white New Zealanders only exist today because of the widespread
land compensations confiscations perpetuated by their ancestors. The Ewi who
received tribunal settlements have mostly used these funds to invest
in businesses such as fisheries, forestry, and real estate, and

(26:42):
use the proceeds from these businesses to provide scholarships and
investment for mary economic growth and welfare. However, the ongoing
overrepresentation of Maori in poverty and crime statistics continues. I
hate to give to you like a picture of the
heritage of the Treaty of White Tangy was certainly a
landmarket document, and I'm very proud that our country was
found it in a spirit of compromise. I often say
that New Zealand doesn't have a constitution as much as

(27:04):
an ongoing argument, and certainly the legacy of that spirit
of cooperation has had a profound impact on our history,
culture and national character. But it would be remiss to
neglect to mention the way the early colonial government broke
faith with the Maori and the ongoing impacts that this
history has today. Thanks again for an enjoyable and informative podcast.

(27:24):
You are sincerely Arthur who wrote to West from New Zealand.
Thank you very much, Arthur. We've had one other listener
mail about the Treaty of White Heaney episode, and it
was actually kind of a difficult decision to figure out
where to end that podcast, because we alluded to the
fact in the podcast that to try to talk about

(27:45):
what happened next, we would need to talk about the
entire history of New Zealand. That happens a lot. Well,
you know, like we'll talk about the hundred years ore
and that's something that had reverberations for you know, centuries. Yeah,
and we'll also we also get a lot of really
well meaning letters from people who say, can you do
an episode on the history of a place like a nation? No,

(28:09):
we cannot do an episode on the history of a nation.
I kind of what people do examine their perceptions of,
like who has a worthwhile history to talk about when
they make request like that, Yeah, well, all history is
worthwhile to talk about, but you can't take a chunk
that big and really get no something worthwhile out of it. No,

(28:30):
it's too broad. We cannot gloss over the entire history
of a nation in one episode. And that that was
sort of trying to figure out where to end the
Treaty of White Hanging episode With that, it's feeling like
we were like glossing over huge parts of things. Was
difficult because definitely to try to talk about the effects
that the treaty had, you would have to talk about many, many, many, many,

(28:52):
many other events that are all worth having their own
podcast on their own. So we trick about history. Everything
kind of affects things that them after it. Yeah so,
and in this case it was the thing that found
out a nation, so it definitely really affected things. Right,
So thank you so much to Arthur and to the
other people who have written about other events um that

(29:12):
happened after this. They are all things that are definitely
like they could warrant their own episodes. And as the
world is very big, I cannot say when we will
get to return to New Zealand History, but there's so
much other stuff to talk about. It's certainly not for
lack of desire to do so. Uh. If you would
like to write to us with uh more New Zealand
history or some stuff about World War One or whatever

(29:35):
you would like, you can. We are at history podcasts
at how Stuffworks dot com. Our Facebook is Facebook dot
com slash missed in history, and our Twitter is missed
in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler
dot com, or also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com
slash missed in History. If you'd like to learn a
little more about how some you know ideas that could
explain how the story of an angel became so entrenched

(29:58):
in the British consciousness, you income to our parent website,
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Legends in the search bar and you will find how
Urban Legends Work. You can also come to our website
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(30:19):
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