Angels on the battlefield

March 28, 2005

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

It's a new-age fad to have a "special guardian" but there were believers long before now, writes Alan Gill.

Visit any bookshop. Look at the section marked "religion" - or more likely "spirituality" - and you'll find a plethora of books about angels.

Billy Graham - who wrote the bestselling Angels: God's Secret Agents in 1975 - once told me "angels" was the second most common topic he was asked about. (The first was "Will my dog go to heaven?")

Christians, Jews and Muslims have always believed in angels. These days people of little or no formal religious belief - including some who would normally consider themselves agnostic - seem to be turning to them.

Two recent books include Your Guardian Angel and You: Tune in to the Signs and Signals to Hear What Your Guardian Angel Is Telling You and In the Arms of Angels: True Stories of Heavenly Guardians.

Nine decades ago, when the world was plunged in the horrors of the Great War, British and French troops, fighting on the Western Front, sought comfort from a particular "angel", whose intervention and very existence remains the subject of controversy.

The story involves an incident during the retreat following the Battle of Mons on August 26 and 27, 1914. The regiments involved, notably the 3rd and 4th divisions of the British Expeditionary Force, including the Life Guards and Coldstream Guards, were being sorely pressed in the retreat. The Guards units were the last to be withdrawn, and in the half-light of a false dawn they became lost and wandered about trying to make contact with their main body.

There was thick fog, bullets were flying and the men feared they were about to blunder into the German lines. One of the Guardsmen saw a "warm glow" just ahead, and as my father, who was one of them, told it, assumed it was "some bloody fool farmer" carrying a lantern.

The glowing nimbus moved in closer and the Guardsmen perceived the dim outline of a female figure. As it became more distinct, they decided that they were looking at an angel: tall, slim and wearing a flowing gown. She had a gold band around her hair and Eastern-style sandals on her feet.

The angel beckoned the men to follow her, her right hand making an inviting gesture until the party came to a halt on the upper rim of a sunken road. The men recognised the road as the track they were supposed to follow. The vision smiled and vanished.

Within a few days the story of the Angel of Mons had trickled all along the front. Official censors were not sure what to make of it. One school of thought accepted it as a token of support from the Almighty, and therefore good propaganda. Another held it would make the troops look ridiculous, and urged caution.

By early 1915 the story had leaked out. Clergy preached sermons about it and wrote pamphlets. Sceptics claimed it was a hoax thought up by Arthur Machen, a Fleet Street writer and war correspondent known for his fertile prose. Machen revelled in the notoriety, claiming in a book, The Bowmen and other Legends of the War, that he had invented the Angel of Mons. Another author, Harold Begbie, retaliated with On the Side of the Angels, which set out to prove the story had circulated well before Machen had heard about it.

In April 1930, a former German intelligence officer, Colonel Friedrich Herzenwirth, claimed the Angel of Mons had been produced by magic lantern slides thrown upon "screens" of foggy cloudbanks by projectors with high-powered Zeiss lenses mounted on German aeroplanes which flew above the British lines.

His story was dismissed as implausible by technical experts, but the German stuck to his explanation. He said the vision, intended to frighten the British, had misfired because the Guardsmen assumed the angel was their protectress. Herzen- wirth said the Germans had achieved better luck with their cloud magic lantern shows on the Russian front in 1915. The Virgin was shown with uplifted hand, as if motioning to stop the "murderous" Russian night attacks.

"We knew from prisoners we took that in some cases companies actually killed their officers and flung their rifles away, shouting that they would not be guilty of firing upon an army over which the Mother of God hovered in protection," the colonel said.

With the French in Picardy and the Champagne region, the Germans made another miscalculation, however.

"Instead of taking the figure of a woman that we threw upon the clouds one night as that of the Virgin or a saint protecting our army, the French promptly recognised Joan of Arc," he said.

Those who had seen it insisted the Angel of Mons was true. My father died, in 1960, swearing its authenticity. The current fad for angels has renewed interest. There are books, plays and websites exploiting the story of the Angel of Mons. The late Marlon Brando was planning a film about the celestial visitor at the time of his death last July.

Some years ago Britain's The Observer newspaper ran a story about a group of socialites, partying at a swank London hotel, one of whom made reference to the Angel of Mons as among the "great hoaxes" of the 20th century. An elderly man of military bearing, at an adjoining table, broke into the conversation: "That was not a hoax, madam. I was there."

In the past 20 years I have tried to contact witnesses, other than my father, to the Angel of Mons. Letters in the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Australian War Memorial suggest the angel appeared in different locations, though at approximately the same time. There is disagreement about the angel's gender. Several letters claim there was not one angel but three.

Recently a Sydney University archivist drew my attention to a book which appears to support the "magic lantern" theory. Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria by Thaddeus Wittlin, contains an illustrations showing how a slide of Joseph Stalin was projected on a cloud above the Kremlin and beamed down to the crowds in Red Square. The act was thought up by the Secret Police to mark the Soviet dictator's 70th birthday on December 21, 1949. It is reasonable to assume that Zeiss lenses and equipment - the company was by then largely under East German control - were again involved.


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