It was the fall of 1914 when a heady rumor began to circulate amongst the Allied troops of World War I. In August of the same year, the British Expeditionary Force made its first incursion into German-occupied Belgium, only to find itself greatly outnumbered at the city of Mons. St. George and an armed brigade of angels, the story went as it passed from man to man, had appeared on the frontline and repelled — or, in some tellings, smited — the enemy horde, allowing the English to mount a safe retreat.

Passing beyond mere word of mouth in wartime France, the incident was circulated in English newspapers. Local parish publications picked it up and repeatedly reprinted the initial accounts of the miraculous apparition for their congregations. After much repetition, the story of the “Angels of Mons” was deemed credible enough that once skeptical thinkers were citing it as proof of divine intercession.

That is until Arthur Machen, a writer with The Evening News — the very paper where the story had originated — pointed to one of his fiction pieces, “The Bowmen,” that had gone to print on September 29th, 1914. Due to a misprint in its initial publication, Machen’s fantastical retelling of the events at Mons — St. George and all — had been taken by many to be a factual news article. But there had been skeptics from the beginning. After being told the story shortly after its publication, Brigadier-General John Charteris wrote from France: “Men’s nerves and imaginations play weird pranks in these strenuous times.”

After the truth behind the erstwhile urban legend came to light, Machen’s early novels and stories — which had fallen out of favor around the turn of the century — enjoyed a brief renaissance. Initially an author of gruesome and wanton horror stories, the Welsh novelist’s critics had labeled him as an apologist of black magic — the supreme irony being that, in fact, he was. Fifteen years before his the story of the “The Bowmen” was disseminated in churches across England, he had been a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — an occult secret society that also counted William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley as members.

Those Machen’s fortunes waxed and waned as the angels incident receded from public memory, references to the man and his work have cropped up in works by later authors including H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, Stephen King and Iain Sinclair. His novels and stories remain in print today — though, in a testament to the selling power of a good urban legend, tale of angelic archers on the battlefield is more often than not republished under the title that made it famous, “The Angels of Mons.”

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