ANGELS OF MONS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 365, 29 October 1932, Page 2

ANGELS OF MONS

BEAUT1FUL MYTH WONDERFUL STORY OF RETIRED LONDON JOURNALIST. BELIEVE'D TO BE TRUE. The Angels of Mons. . . Eveh today mention of th'e heavenly host, whose flaming swords ' held' hack the grey armies of Germany, brings a hiush upon any ass.embly of men, says Mr. R. K- Macauley in an artiele in the Sunday Graphie. Even to-day there are thousands who b'elieve in thfe angels, which, it is said, saved the British Army from utter annihilation in that retreat, ;as sincerely as they believe the miracles of Judea. The story, doubtless; will go down in the history of the British people as long as any reeords of the Great War remain. But is is a beantiful and wonderful myth. Mr; Macaulay says he has met the man who gave it hirth. The nation aclcnowledged, recently, a measure of its debt to that man for his eontribution to literature by granting him a eivil pension of £100 a year. xie is Arthur Maehen, for over 30 years a London journalist, and in his quiet cottage in old Amersham he told the story. ; The story. began on that dre'adful Sunday in August, 1914, when the newsp'apers were full of the terrible details of the Mons retreat, following the battle in which 5000 British soldiers lost their lives. It is significant to remember that the German losses were more than double.

Story of the "Angels." Mr. Maehen told the narrative as f ollows. "Ali that morning in church I conld not forget the details of that retreat. I seemed to see a furnaee of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated and in th'e midst of the burning was the British Army. In the midst of the flame, cohsumed by it and yet aureoled ih it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred -and forever glorious — so I saw our men with a shining about them. "In the following September I wrote a short story" called 'The Bowman.' It was pure fantasy, a story in which St. George arose to save England on the field of battle ii* her hour of need. "The soldiers in the trenehes saw before them — so I wrote— a long line of shapes with a shining about them. They were like irien who drew the bow, and their cloud of arrows went singingi and tingling through the air toward the German hosts which melted away. No wounds were .afterward found on the bodies of the German dead. "I did not consider that 'The Bowmen' was by any means the best thing_ I had ever writt'an. In fact, I didn't think much of it as a piece of craftsmanship at all. Imagine my complete amazement, therefore, six months latar when the first whrsperings began to get abont that the story was gospel truth. It hecame helieved as authentic history. "The clergy began to preach sermons about the story in the churches, the newspap'ers and magazines took it up with avidity, and gradually different variations began to creep in until the bowmen of England became the Angels of iuons. Hundreds of letters came pouring in to me. I was hard put to it explaining emphatically that the original story was pure undiluted fiction. Nobody believed me. They said it must be true. A Great Moral Effect. "The' fact of the matter is, I suppose, that people wanted the story to be true. The horrors of war, the long casualty lists, the grief-stricken homes, made people turn somewhere for comf ort. ' W e are in the right over this war,' they said to themselves. 'IV e .are on the side of the angels. Heaven defend us in our hour of peril.' "One cannot deny the tremendous moral effect the story of the Angels of Mons had upon the nation. It went all round the world and was echoed in every eountry. It gave the mothers and the sweethearts and the wives great solace to think th'at their men were protected by supernatural guidance on the fields of death. If it broughti comfort to them I am glad, but no one has ever yet come forward to say at first hand they ever saw an angel at Mons. "Stori'es got about that thousands upon thousands of Germans were found dead in Flanders, pierced through and through with arrows, but no one has yet come forward who ever saw the corpses. All I could ever fiiake of it was that someorie (unknown) met a nurse (unnamed) who attended a soldier (anoriymous) who had seen the angels. That is not evidence. "There is just this," eoncluded Mr. Maehen quietly. "If a miracle on the shores of Galilee is credible, I do not say that a miracle on the battlefieids of Flanders cannot he credible too."