General Charteris, in an entry for February 1915 mentioned in At GHQ, offers his own unlikely explanation for the genesis of the myth:
I have been at some trouble to trace this rumour to its source. The best I can make of it is that some religiously minded man wrote home that the Germans halted at Mons, AS IF an Angel of the Lord had appeared in front of them. In due course the letter appeared in a Parish Magazine, which in time was sent out to some other men at the front. From them the story went back home with the ‘as if’ omitted, and at home it went the rounds in its expurgated form.
The angels made an obscure, if psychologically telling, swansong appearance above the Thames Estuary at Thurrock during the summer of 1917, as the latest costly Allied offensive on the Western Front, Third Ypres, bogged down in a sea of mud at Passchendaele. According to the Grays and Tilbury Gazette for August 18th:
‘Have you seen the angels?’ is the latest topic which is arousing interest in Grays. Although stories are varied, and, as usual, conflicting, most circumstantial tales are going round regarding alleged angelic visitations seen from the beach on the evenings of Tuesday and Wednesday this week. It is not a case of the ‘Angels of Mons’ this time, for all the stories agree that those now seen are harbingers of Peace . . .
‘All Argent Street was out after them,’ said one speaker. ‘They appeared over the Exmouth, two of them sitting on two rainbows with “Peace” in between. Then they faded away, leaving only the rainbow.’ This was on Tuesday evening, when a rainbow did actually appear . . . Inquiries in Argent Street failed to elicit more definite confirmation, though it was clearly a similar version of the apparition that had been going the rounds. ‘It was three angels, I was told,’ said one speaker . . . ‘They had roses wreathed in their hair,’ added another story-teller, who had evidently heard a more detailed version . . .
In another version, coming from a relative of one said to have witnessed the apparition . . . the angels are generally seen about 9.30. According to her they are the ‘Angels of Mons’, but the description given is rather different from that of those legendary beings. These visitations are three angels seated and chained together, a long chain linking them up . . .
Everyone agreed that they were ‘Peace Angels’ and one prophesied that the ‘Angels of Mons’ were due to arrive next week. In fact, from all accounts the sea wall is likely to have an increase of traffic during the next few nights . . . Numerous mothers agreed that they had heard tales of ‘angels’ from their children, and generally expressed the opinion that probably the youngsters were getting a bit ‘nervy’ in the present times of stress, and hence the remarkable ‘visions.’ In all probability the tale had its origin somewhat in this way.
The following week this attractive story was given a new twist, the same paper reporting on the 25th:
A fresh version was given to a Gazette representative by a Globe Terrace resident. Speaking of the previous Tuesday evening, she said: ‘I don’t know about any angels, but I saw a wonderful cloud. We were out with my landlady and the children, and we were looking at the rainbow. Then I saw a white cloud a little distance away. It was shaped just like a woman.’
She continued: ‘I don’t know what it was, but it was just like a woman. It quite unnerved me. My husband is away in the army, and I thought it meant something over the water. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of it. It was a wonderful thing. I’ve never seen a cloud like it before and don’t want to again.’
The paper concluded that the so-called ‘Riverside Apparitions’ were caused either by the Northern Lights, or else a rare conjunction of cloud and sunlight producing an effect known as rayons de crépuscule, or rays of twilight. It is also possible that impressionable children deliberately exaggerated an unusual (but wholly natural) meteorological phenomenon, much in the same spirit that Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith created the celebrated Cottingley fairy photographs, fabricated just a month earlier. Then again, aerial angels would also be reported by civilians during the Battle of Britain in 1940.
No less dubious was a report in the Daily News in February 1930, based on an American newspaper story. According to Colonel Friedrich Herzenwirth, said to be a former member of the German intelligence service:
The Angels of Mons were motion pictures thrown upon ‘screens’ of foggy white cloudbanks in Flanders by cinematographic projecting machines mounted in German aeroplanes which hovered above the British lines . . . The object of the Germans responsible for these scientific ‘visions’ was to create superstitious terror in the Allied ranks.
According to Herzenwirth, the plan backfired, and was successfully exploited by the British for their own benefit. However, the very next day the Daily News published a corrective report, explaining that its Berlin correspondent had been informed by official German sources that there was no record of the mysterious colonel, whose story was now dismissed as a hoax. Curiously, the projection idea would be resurrected by British propaganda agencies in March 1940, who in the midst of the static Phoney War, gave consideration to ‘a suggestion for an apparatus to project images or clouds’ over the German lines by means of an unspecified ‘magic lantern’ apparatus.
The idea was not pursued. However, further evidence of the remarkable staying power of this particular myth came in March 2001, when it was announced that actor Marlon Brando had paid £350,000 for spectral footage of angels shot by William Doidge at Woodchester Park in the Cotswolds during the Second World War.Doidge, a veteran of the BEF and the Retreat from Mons, was said to have been obsessed with the angels legend of 1914, believing they could lead him to his lost Belgian sweetheart. Like Machen’s original story published by the Evening News, the film promised excellent entertainment, but was later revealed as a hoax.
The legend of the Comrade in White is another battlefield myth from the first year of the war which was clearly promulgated to underline the moral and religious rectitude of the Allied cause. As we have seen, the legend of the Bowmen at Mons lay dormant for six months after its initial publication 1914, only to return with more pronounced angelic and religious overtones in April 1915. To those who chose to accept such evidence at face value, further proof that God was on the side of the Allies, rather than Germany, came in the form of the Comrade in White, or white helper, first encountered on the battlefields of the Western Front at more or less the same time.
The first account was given in Bladud, described as the Bath Society Paper, in June 1915. According to Dr R.F. Horton, a well-known Congregational minister from Manchester, and a devout believer in the Angel of Mons:
Now and again a wounded man on the field is conscious of a comrade in white coming with help and even delivering him. One of our men who had heard of this story again and again, and has put it down to hysterical excitement, had an experience. His division had advanced and was not adequately protected by the artillery. It was cut to pieces, and he himself fell. He tried to hide in a hollow of the ground, and as he lay helpless, not daring to lift his head under the hail of fire, he saw One in White coming to him. For a moment he thought it must be a hospital attendant or a stretcher bearer, but no, it could not be; the bullets were flying all around. The White-robed came near and bent over him. The man lost consciousness for a moment, and when he came round he seemed to be out of danger.
The White-robed still stood by him, and the man, looking at his hand, said, ‘You are wounded in your hand.’ There was a wound in the palm. He answered, ‘Yes, that is an old wound that has opened again lately.’ The soldier says that in spite of the peril and his wounds he felt a joy he had never experienced in his life before.
A similar account, In the Trenches, yet again from an unknown soldier in an unidentified sector, was printed in Life and Work magazine in June 1915, from which the following extracts are drawn:
George Casey told me all he knew . . . After many a hot engagement a man in white had been seen bending over the wounded. Snipers sniped at him. Shells fell all around. Nothing had power to touch him. He was ei
ther heroic beyond all heroes, or he was something greater still. This mysterious one, whom the French called the Comrade in White, seemed to be everywhere at once. At Nancy, in the Argonne, at Soissons and Ypres, everywhere men were talking of him with hushed voices.
The writer continues, explaining that he had hardly expected such phenomenal help should he be injured in battle. Then, during an advance on the enemy trenches, he was hit in both legs, and lay immobile in a shell crater until nightfall.
The night fell, and soon I heard a step, but quiet and firm, as if neither darkness nor death could check those untroubled feet. So little did I guess what was coming that, even when I saw the gleam of white in the darkness, I thought it was a peasant in a white smock, or perhaps a woman deranged. Suddenly, with a little shiver of joy or fear, I don’t know which, I guessed that it was the Comrade in White. And at that very moment the German rifles began to shoot. The bullets could scarcely miss such a target, for he flung his arms out as though in entreaty, and then drew them back till he stood like one of those wayside crosses that we saw so often as we marched through France.
And he spoke. The word sounded familiar, but all I remember was the beginning, ‘If thou hadst known,’ and the ending, ‘but now they are hid from thine eyes.’ And then he stopped and ushered me into his arms – me, the biggest man in the regiment – and carried me as if I had been a child. I must have fainted, for I woke to consciousness in a little cave by the stream, and the Comrade in White was washing my wounds and binding them up. It seems foolish to say it, for I was in terrible pain, but I was happier at that moment than ever I remember to have been in all my life before . . . And while he swiftly removed every trace of blood or mire, I felt as if my whole nature was being washed, as if all the grime and soil of sin were going, and as if I were once more a little child.
I suppose I slept, for when I awoke this feeling was gone, I was a man, and I wanted to know what I could do for my friend to help him or to serve him. He was looking towards the stream, and his hands were clasped in prayer: and then I saw that he, too, had been wounded. I could see, as it were, a shot-wound in his hand, and as he prayed a drop of blood gathered and fell to the ground. I cried out. I could not help it, for that wound of his seemed to be a more awful thing than any that bitter war had shown me. ‘You are wounded, too,’ I said faintly. Perhaps he heard me, perhaps it was the look on my face, but he answered me gently ‘This is an old wound, but it has troubled me of late.’
And then I noticed sorrowfully that the same cruel mark was on his feet. You will wonder that I did not know sooner. I wonder myself. But it was only when I saw his feet that I knew him.
Several other contemporary accounts may be found in David Clarke’s excellent study, The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians. Ultimately the Comrade in White seems always to have been identified with Jesus Christ, a fact reflected in contemporary illustrations such as the painting by G. Hillyard Swinstead (Plate 12). The basic concept has something in common with the more modern conception of near-death experience, which is perhaps explicable by medical science, although the white helper legend is heavily, if attractively, embroidered. The elements of deliverance and moral truth are particularly clear from the inference that Christ’s wounds had lately opened, no doubt as a result of Hun bullets and frightfulness. It is interesting, too, that like the resurgent angels in 1915 the story seems to have spread first from the vicinity of Bath and Bristol, rather than the front line, although this may be purely coincidental.
A new twist on the legend of the white helper was published in the American magazine Fate in 1968. The author, an American clergyman from Massachusetts, claimed to have been told the story some 12 years earlier by an English engineer, who had been in the line at Ypres in August 1915 during one of the early German poison gas attacks:
They looked out over No Man’s Land and saw a strange grey cloud rolling towards them. When it struck, pandemonium broke out. Men dropped all around him and the trench was in an uproar. Then, he said, a strange thing happened. Out of the mist, walking across No Man’s Land, came a figure. He seemed to be without special protection and he wore the uniform of the Royal [Army] Medical Corps (RAMC). The engineer remembered that the stranger spoke English with what seemed to be a French accent.
On his belt the stranger from the poison cloud had a series of small hooks on which were suspended tin cups. In his hand he carried a bucket of what looked like water. As he slid down into the trench he began removing the cups, dipping them into the bucket and passing them out to the soldiers, telling them to drink quickly. The engineer was among those who received the potion. He said it was extremely salty, almost too salty to swallow. But all of the soldiers who were given the liquid did drink it, and not one of them suffered lasting effects from the gas.
When the gas cloud had blown over and things calmed down the unusual visitor was not to be found. No explanation for his visit could be given by the Royal Medical Corps – but the fact remained that thousands of soldiers died or suffered lasting effects from that grim attack, but not a single soldier who took the cup from the stranger was among the casualties.
The story has few, if any, elements in common with the contemporary reports of the Comrade in White from 1915, and although more scientific in tone is scarcely more credible. Certainly there is no evidence that the story of a miraculous French RAMC orderly with a bucket of brine was in circulation on the Western Front at the time, or indeed reported at all during the war years.
Several accounts which followed in the wake of the legend of bowmen and angels at Mons made reference to remarkable clouds, sometimes glowing, which concealed and delivered British troops from the enemy. Far more notorious, however, is the oft-told legend of the Vanished Battalion, in which mysterious clouds took on a more malevolent aspect. The most well-known version of the tale is set against the background of the ill-starred Gallipoli campaign, and in particular the bitter fighting around Hill 60, near Suvla Bay, in August 1915. According to a report first published in 1965, on August 21st a group of New Zealand sappers watching from trenches on a spur overlooking Hill 60 noted:
Perhaps six or eight ‘loaf of bread’ shaped clouds – all shaped exactly alike, which were hovering over Hill 60. It was noticed that in spite of a four or five mile an hour breeze from the south, these clouds did not alter their position . . . Also stationary and resting on the ground right underneath this group of clouds was a similar cloud in shape, measuring about 800 feet in length, 220 feet in height, and 200 feet in width. This cloud was absolutely dense, solid-looking in structure, and positioned about 14 to 18 chains from the fighting in British-held territory . . . Its colour was light grey, as was the colour of the other clouds.
The account goes on to relate that a British unit, stated to be the 1st/4th Norfolk Regiment, comprising several hundred men, was noticed marching up a sunken road or creek towards Hill 60:
However when they arrived at this cloud they marched straight into it, with no hesitation, but no-one ever came back out to deploy and fight at Hill 60. About an hour later, after the last of the file had disappeared into it, this cloud very unobtrusively lifted off the ground and . . . rose slowly until it joined the other similar clouds . . . As soon as the singular cloud had risen to their level they all moved away northwards, i.e. towards Thrance [Bulgaria]. In a matter of about three-quarters of an hour they had all disappeared from view.
The written statement was signed by Frederick Reichardt, who served throughout the Gallipoli campaign as a Sapper with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and was supported by two other ANZAC veterans named Newnes and Newman. Reichardt’s fantastical story was first printed in April 1965 in Spaceview, a New Zealand journal, and in March of the following year reached a wider audience courtesy of the American UFO magazine Flying Saucers. Since then the myth of the Vanished Battalion has been repeated in countless books and magazines, usually bracketed with supernormal phenomena such as the Bermuda Triangle and unsolved disappe
arances. Some later re-tellings held that the cloud took the form of a giant cross, although it seems unlikely that divine intervention can be inferred. New heights of silliness were scaled by French writer Jacques Vallée in his book Passport to Magonia, which offered the theory that the unit had marched into a cloud which concealed a UFO. A similar theory was advanced by the British ufologist Brinsley le Poer Trench (the Earl of Clancarty) in his book The Eternal Subject, published in 1973.
The truth of the matter is less sensational. On August 12th, rather than the 21st, several hundred men of the 1/5th (Territorial) Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment were ordered to clear a valley on the Anafarta Plain of Turkish snipers and machine gun posts, in anticipation of a major British assault scheduled for the following day. The Norfolks were lead by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp and were flanked by the 8th Hampshires and the 5th Suffolks. For reasons which remain unclear, the Norfolks turned half right as they advanced, thereby opening up a dangerous gap between them and the rest of the attacking force. While still some way short of the Turkish line, the already exhausted Norfolks fixed bayonets and charged towards Kavak Tepe ridge. The attack faltered on difficult, unfamiliar terrain, and over the next few hours the battalion was decimated by sniper, machine gun and artillery fire. Amidst this unfolding disaster, Colonel Proctor-Beauchamp continued to advance at the head of a party comprising approximately 250 officers and men, only to meet with almost complete annihilation after being cut off at an isolated farm.
Myths and Legends of the First World War Page 8