The Angels of Mons (second edition)/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
I have been asked to write an introduction to the story of "The Bowmen," on its publication in book form together with five other tales of similar fashion. And I hesitate. This affair of "The Bowmen" has been such an odd one from first to last, so many queer complications have entered into it, there have been so many and so divers currents and cross-currents of rumour and speculation concerning it, that I honestly do not know where to begin. I propose, then, to solve the difficulty by apologising for beginning at all.
For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced. If, for example, a man has made an anthology of great poetry, he may well write an introduction justifying his principle of selection, pointing out here and there, as the spirit moves him, high beauties and supreme excellencies, discoursing of the magnates and lords and princes of literature, whom he is merely serving as groom of the chamber. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
I appreciate the absurdity, nay, the enormity of the position in all its grossness. And my excuse for these pages must be this: that though the story itself is nothing, it has yet had such odd and unforeseen consequences and adventures that the tale of them may possess some interest. And then, again, there are certain psychological morals to be drawn from the whole matter of the tale and its sequel of rumours and discussions that are not, I think, devoid of consequence; and so to begin at the beginning.
This was in last August; to be more precise, on the last Sunday of last August. There were terrible things to be read on that hot Sunday morning between meat and mass. It was in The Weekly Dispatch that I saw the awful account of the retreat from Mons. I no longer recollect the details; but I have not forgotten the impression that was then made on my mind. I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the British Army. In the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and for ever glorious. So I saw our men with a shining about them, so I took these thoughts with me to church, and, I am sorry to say, was making up a story in my head while the deacon was singing the Gospel.
This was not the tale of "The Bowmen." It was the first sketch, as it were, of "The Soldiers' Rest," which is reprinted in this volume. I only wish I had been able to write it as I conceived it. The tale as it stands is, I think, a far better piece of craft than "The Bowmen," but the tale that came to me as the blue incense floated above the Gospel Book on the desk between the tapers: that indeed was a noble story—like all the stories that never get written. I conceived the dead men coming up through the flames and in the flames, and being welcomed in the Eternal Tavern with songs and flowing cups and everlasting mirth. But every man is the child of his age, however much he may hate it; and our popular religion has long determined that jollity is wicked. As far as I can make out modern Protestantism believes that Heaven is something like Evensong in an English cathedral, the service by Stainer and the Dean preaching. I do not know how two places so very different from one another have come to be confounded.
Well, I have long maintained that on the whole the average church, considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place than the average tavern; still, as I say, a man's age masters him, and clouds and bewilders his intelligence, and the real story of "The Soldiers' Rest," with its "sonus epulantium in æterno convivio," died at the moment of its birth, and it was some time later that the actual story, as here printed, got written. And in the meantime the plot of "The Bowmen" occurred to me. Now it has been murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters that before I wrote the tale I had heard something. The most decorative of these legends is also the most precise: "I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting." This was not the case; and all vaguer reports to the effect that I had heard some rumours or hints of rumours are equally void of any trace of truth. I wrote thus far in the Introduction to the first edition of "The Bowmen." I am sorry to say that some persons, after reading this passage, have still persisted in insinuating that I stole my story from rumour. May I, then, declare, once and for all, that these persons are . . . mistaken.
Again I apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiæ of my bit of a newspaper story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears that the subject interests the public, and I comply with my instructions. I take it, then, that the origins of "The Bowmen" were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms, that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high immortal seats to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then Kipling's story of the ghostly Indian regiment got into my head and got mixed with the mediævalism that is always there; and so "The Bowmen" was written. I was heartily disappointed with it, I remember, and thought it—as I still think it—an indifferent piece of work. However, I have tried to write for these thirty-five long years, and if I have not become practised in letters, I am at least a past master in the Lodge of Disappointment. Such as it was, "The Bowmen" appeared in The Evening News of September 29th, 1914.
Now the journalist does not, as a rule, dwell much on the prospect of fame; and if he be an evening journalist, his anticipations of immortality are bounded by twelve o'clock at night at the latest; and it may well be that those insects which begin to live in the morning and are dead by sunset deem themselves immortal. Having written my story, having groaned and growled over it and printed it, I certainly never thought to hear another word of it. My colleague "The Londoner" praised it warmly to my face, as his kindly fashion is; entering, very properly, a technical caveat as to the language of the battle-cries of the bowmen. "Why should English archers use French terms?" he said. I replied that the only reason was this—that a "Monseigneur" here and there struck me as picturesque; and I reminded him that, as a matter of cold historical fact, most of the archers of Agincourt were mercenaries from Gwent, my native country, who would appeal to Mihangel and to saints not known to the Saxons—Teilo, Iltyd, Dewi, Cadwaladyr Vendigeid. And I thought that that was the first and last discussion of "The Bowmen." But in a few days from its publication the editor of The Occult Review wrote to me. He wanted to know whether the story had any foundation in fact. I told him that it had no foundation in fact of any kind or sort; I forget whether I added that it had no foundation in rumour, but I should think not, since to the best of my belief there were no rumours of heavenly interposition in existence at that time. Certainly I had heard of none. Soon afterwards the editor of Light wrote asking a like question, and I made him a like reply. It seemed to me that I had stifled the "Bowmen" mythos in the hour of its birth.
A month or two later, I received several requests from editors of parish magazines to reprint the story. I—or, rather, my editor—readily gave permission; and then, after another month or two, the conductor of one of these magazines wrote to me, saying that the February issue containing the story had been sold out, while there was still a great demand for it. Would I allow them to reprint "The Bowmen" as a pamphlet, and would I write a short preface giving the exact authorities for the story? I replied that they might reprint in pamphlet form with all my heart, but that I could not give my authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure invention. The priest wrote again, suggesting—to my amazement—that I must be mistaken, that the main "facts" of "The Bowmen" must be true, that my share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical history. It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size. I say that the snowball began its career in April or thereabouts; and herein I refer to its visible and public course, as it were, in the press. But no doubt many hidden hands had been patting and preparing it in the darkness; there had been many months of gossip by word of mouth before hearsay attained the honours which the compositor bestows.
It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation to their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant appeared, and St. George was the chief character. In one case an officer—name and address missing—said that there was a portrait of St. George in a certain London restaurant, and that a figure, just like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked by him, with the happiest results. Another variant—this, I think, never got into print—told how dead Prussians had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds in their bodies. This notion amused me, as I had imagined a scene, when I was thinking out the story, in which a German general was to appear before the Kaiser to explain his failure to annihilate the English.
"All-Highest," the general was to say, "it is true, it is impossible to deny it. The men were killed by arrows; the shafts were found in their bodies by the burying parties."
I rejected the idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy. I was therefore entertained when I found that what I had refused as too fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult circles as hard fact.
Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will be noted, has disappeared—he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic variants—and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. But so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I think that I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.
In "The Bowmen" my imagined soldier saw "a long line of shapes, with a shining about them." And Mr. A. P. Sinnett, writing in the May issue of The Occult Review, reporting what he had heard, states that "those who could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings' between the two armies." Now I conjecture that the word "shining" is the link between my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels and nothing else, and must be angels, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become "the Angels of Mons." In this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere.
And here, I conjecture, we have the key to the large popularity of the delusion—as I think it. We have long ceased in England to take much interest in saints, and in the recent revival of the cultus of St. George, the saint is little more than a patriotic figurehead. And the appeal to the saints to succour us is certainly not a common English practice; it is held Popish by most of our countrymen. But angels, with certain reservations, have retained their popularity, and so, when it was settled that the English army in its dire peril was delivered by angelic aid, the way was clear for general belief, and for the enthusiasms of the religion of the man in the street. And so soon as the legend got the title "The Angels of Mons" it became impossible to avoid it. It permeated the Press: it would not be neglected; it appeared in the most unlikely quarters—in Truth and Town Topics, The New Church Weekly (Swedenborgian) and John Bull. The editor of The Church Times has exercised a wise reserve: he awaits that evidence which so far is lacking; but in one issue of the paper I noted that the story furnished a text for a sermon, the subject of a letter, and the matter for an article. People send me cuttings from provincial papers containing hot controversy as to the exact nature of the appearances; the "Office Window" of The Daily Chronicle suggests scientific explanations of the hallucination; the Pall Mall in a note about St. James says he is of the brotherhood of the Bowmen of Mons—this reversion to the bowmen from the angels being possibly due to the strong statements that I have made on the matter. The pulpits both of the Church and of Nonconformity have been busy: Bishop Welldon, Dean Hensley Henson (a disbeliever), and many other clergy have occupied themselves with the matter. Dr. Horton preached about the "angels" at Manchester; Sir Joseph Compton Rickett (President of the National Federation of Free Church Councils) stated that the soldiers at the front had seen visions and dreamed dreams, and had given testimony of powers and principalities fighting for them or against them. Letters come from all the ends of the earth to the Editor of The Evening News with theories, beliefs, explanations, suggestions. It is all somewhat wonderful; one can say that the whole affair is a psychological phenomenon of considerable interest, fairly comparable with the great Russian delusion of last August and September.
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Now it is possible that some persons, judging by the tone of these remarks of mine, may gather the impression that I am a profound disbeliever in the possibility of any intervention of the superphysical order in the affairs of the physical order. They will be mistaken if they make this inference; they will be mistaken if they suppose that I think miracles in Judæa credible but miracles in France or Flanders incredible. I hold no such absurdities. But I confess, very frankly, that I credit none of the "Angels of Mons" legends, partly because I see, or think I see, their derivation from my own idle fiction, but chiefly because I have, so far, not received one jot or tittle of evidence that should dispose me to belief. It is idle, indeed, and foolish enough for a man to say: "I am sure that story is a lie, because the supernatural element enters into it"; here, indeed, we have the maggot writhing in the midst of corrupted offal denying the existence of the sun. But if this fellow be a fool—as he is—equally foolish is he who says: "If the tale has anything of the supernatural it is true, and the less evidence the better"; and I am afraid this tends to be the attitude of many who call themselves occultists. I hope that I shall never get to that frame of mind. So I say, not that super-normal interventions are impossible, not that they have not happened during this war—I know nothing as to that point, one way or the other—but that there is not one atom of evidence (so far) to support the current stories of the angels of Mons. For, be it remarked, these stories are specific stories. They rest on the second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by "a soldier," by "an officer," by "a Catholic correspondent," by "a nurse," by any number of anonymous people. Indeed, names have been mentioned. A lady's name has been drawn, most unwarrantably as it appears to me, into the discussion, and I have no doubt that this lady has been subject to a good deal of pestering and annoyance. She has written to the Editor of The Evening News denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. The Psychical Research Society's expert confesses that no real evidence has proffered to her Society on the matter. And then, to my amazement, she accepts as fact the proposition that some men on the battlefield have been "hallucinated," and proceeds to give the theory of sensory hallucination. She forgets that, by her own showing, there is no reason to suppose that anybody has been hallucinated at all. Someone (unknown) has met a nurse (unnamed) who has talked to a soldier (anonymous) who has seen angels. But that is not evidence; and not even Sam Weller at his gayest would have dared to offer it as such in the Court of Common Pleas. So far, then, nothing remotely approaching proof has been offered as to any supernatural intervention during the Retreat from Mons. Proof may come; if so, it will be interesting and more than interesting.
But, taking the affair as it stands at present, how is it that a nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything—save the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be "nobly wild, not mad." Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to seduce him in body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff that will make him ignobly wild and mad indeed. It took hard, practical men of affairs, business men, advanced thinkers, Freethinkers, to believe in Madame Blavatsky and Mahatmas and the famous message from the Golden Shore: "Judge's plan is right; follow him and stick."And the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs undoubtedly lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the Church of England. Christianity, as Mr. W. L. Courtney has so admirably pointed out, is a great Mystery Religion; it is the Mystery Religion. Its priests are called to an awful and tremendous hierurgy; its pontiffs are to be the pathfinders, the bridge-makers between the world of sense and the world of spirit. And, in fact, they pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it seems to me.
So far this Introduction is, with certain unimportant alterations, omissions and additions, a reprint of the Introduction to the first edition of "The Bowmen," which was published on August 10th. As the book was going through the press I received, through the courtesy of the editor of The Occult Review, the advance sheets of an article by Miss Phyllis Campbell, which appeared in the August issue of that periodical. The article was called "The Angelic Leaders."
Miss Campbell says that she was in France when the war broke out. She became a nurse, and while she was nursing the wounded she was informed that an English soldier wanted a "holy picture." She went to the man and found him to be a Lancashire Fusilier. He said that he was a Wesleyan Methodist, and asked "for a picture or medal (he didn't care which) of St. George . . . because he had seen him on a white horse, leading the British at Vitry-le-François, when the Allies turned."
This statement was corroborated by a wounded R.F.A. man who was present. He saw a tall man with yellow hair, in golden armour, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he were saying, "Come on, boys! I'll put the kybosh on the devils." This figure was bareheaded—as appeared later from the testimony of other soldiers—and the R.F.A. man and the Fusilier knew that he was St. George, because he was exactly like the figure of St. George on the sovereigns. "Hadn't they seen him with his sword on every 'quid' they'd ever had?"
From further evidence it seemed that while the English had seen the apparition of St. George coming out of a "yellow mist" or "cloud of light," to the French had been vouchsafed visions of St. Michael the Archangel and Joan of Arc. Miss Campbell says:—
"Everybody has seen them who has fought through from Mons to Ypres; they all agree on them individually, and have no doubt at all as to the final issue of their interference."
Such are the main points of the article as it concerns the great legend of "The Angels of Mons." I cannot say that the author has shaken my incredulity—firstly, because the evidence is second-hand. Miss Campbell is perhaps acquainted with "Pickwick," and I would remind her of that famous (and golden) ruling of Stareleigh, J.: to the effect that you mustn't tell us what the soldier said; it's not evidence. Miss Campbell has offended against this rule, and she has not only told us what the soldier said, but she has omitted to give us the soldier's name and address.
If Miss Campbell proffered herself as a witness at the Old Bailey and said, "John Doe is undoubtedly guilty. A soldier I met told me that he had seen the prisoner put his hand into an old gentleman's pocket and take out a purse"—well, she would find that the stout spirit of Mr. Justice Stareleigh still survives in our judges.
The soldier must be produced. Before that is done we are not technically aware that he exists at all.
Then there are one or two points in the article itself which puzzle me. The Fusilier and the R.F.A. man had seen St. George "leading the British at Vitry-le-François, when the Allies turned." Thus the time of the apparition and the place of the apparition were firmly fixed in the two soldiers' minds.
Yet the very next paragraph in the article begins:—
"'Where was this?' I asked. But neither of them could tell."
This struck me as odd. But Miss Campbell has explained that the soldiers said nothing about Vitry-le-François, that she inserted the name of the town from her own knowledge of the military position at the time. So a minor difficulty is cleared up; but then there occurs to me a major doubt. Surely the "turn" of the Allies preceded by some days the action at Vitry, which took place, I think, on or about September 11th?
Another point. The soldiers knew that the figure on the horse was St. George by his exact likeness to the figure of the saint on the English sovereign.
This, again, is odd. The apparition was of a bareheaded figure in golden armour. The St. George of the coinage is naked, except for a short cape flying from the shoulders, and a helmet. He is not bareheaded, and has no armour—save the piece on his head. I did not quite see how the soldiers were so certain as to the identity of the apparition.
Again Miss Campbell has explained. The soldiers knew that it was St. George by the "tout ensemble." Surely this will never do. The French phrase that I have quoted signifies "general effect," and the general effect of a man almost naked cannot resemble the general effect of a man in complete armour; the general effect of a helmeted man is dissimilar from the general effect of a bareheaded man. Suppose there was a man named Jones whom I daily met at the public baths, whom I only knew in the exiguities of bathing costume. And suppose I said that I had been vouchsafed a vision of Jones in Hyde Park, that he was clad in the full-dress uniform of a Field Marshal, and that I recognised him, from afar, by the "tout ensemble." I insert "from afar" for this cause, that there can be no question of recognising a St. George of vision by his facial resemblance to the image of the coins, since the features of the figure on the sovereign are too small to be recognisable. Well, it seems to me that if I told that supposed tale of the Apparition of Jones in Hyde Park, and gave the reasons I have indicated as the grounds of my recognition of the visionary Jones: I should not be believed.
So far I have taken this great and important history up to the point of the publication of "The Bowmen." Here and there I have gone forward a little, as in the case of Miss Campbell's reply, and my reply to her reply. These events, of course, took place after the issue of the book. But, in the main, we may now suppose ourselves to be contemplating the universe and the publication of "The Bowmen" on August 10th, 1915. Up to that date my own position was that recorded in the previous pages. I had so far received no single morsel of evidence to show that anything of a supernormal nature had happened during the retreat from Mons. Indeed, an old friend of mine, a soldier of some months' standing at the Front, had just written to me, enclosing a newspaper cutting concerning "the Angels," and asking me in bewilderment what it was all about.
The army, he said, was a perfect hotbed of rumours of all sorts, and some of them were wild enough, but so far he had heard no hint or whisper of a rumour of angelic or supernormal intervention. So, he added, would I kindly tell him what it all meant.
Now my friend's ignorance was in itself evidence—not evidence that there had been no supernormal intervention, certainly; but strong evidence proving that Miss Campbell was wrong when she said that "everybody" who had fought from Mons to Ypres had seen the visions. Let us take "everybody" generously, and make it mean the majority of the soldiers engaged. Let us again be over generous, and allow that ten thousand men of the Expeditionary Force had been killed in action or had died of their wounds by November. Let us furthermore concede that all the men who were dead came from the ranks of "everybody"—that is from that majority which had seen the visions. Then there would be at least thirty thousand men left who had had this wonderful experience, who had seen, as it were, the opening of the heavens and the shining of the hosts of the Lord; who could testify that there need be no fear for our dear England, since the Company of Heaven fought for us.
Never shall I believe that these thirty thousand witnesses could keep silence and secrecy in such a cause. Yet if they had spoken, nay, if but a thousand, if but a hundred of them had spoken, who can doubt that their testimony would have gone like a forest-flame from end to end of all the armies, till the trenches and the camps burned and glowed with the fervency and the triumph of such a witness.
And yet my friend—I have his letter in the original envelope with the Censor's pale magenta stamp upon it—had not heard a word of it all, not a hint, not a whisper, nothing.
Indeed, I cannot help concluding that, even if we allow "everybody" the most generous latitude of meaning, Miss Campbell was mistaken in saying that "everybody" had seen the visions. This, at all events, is clear.
Then; the very day after the issue of "The Bowmen" there was a great surprise. A representative of The Daily Mail found in a hospital a lance-corporal who testified that he himself had seen a vision in the sky during the retreat from Mons. The appearance was as of three figures, in shining robes. The figure in the centre was the largest, and had, as it were, stretched out wings. The lance-corporal was examined a week or two later by Mr. Harold Begbie, and was able to particularise the duration of the vision. It lasted for thirty-five minutes. It has been ingeniously suggested by a correspondent of Light that the apparition was not of angels, but of the Rood—that is the figure of Our Lord upon the Cross, with the figures of Our Lady and of St. John, that stood in Christian times in the midst of the screen separating the church choir from the nave.
That story told by the lance-corporal constitutes the first piece of evidence—as distinguished from gossip, hearsay, tittle-tattle, and tarradiddle—that was advanced to show that there had been supernatural manifestations during the retreat from Mons.
I have since received a second piece of evidence. A distinguished officer wrote to me from the front—his letter is in my possession. He said that he had read "The Bowmen," and had noted my remark as to the oddity of the circumstance that "Nobody" had come forward to bear witness to the supposed visions. So he felt that he must tell me his own experiences. His story, which appeared in The Evening News of September 14th, is a most interesting one—
"On August 26th, 1914, was fought the battle of Le Cateau. We came into action at dawn and fought till dusk. We were heavily shelled by the German artillery during the day, and in common with the rest of our division had a bad time of it.
"Our division, however, retired in good order. We were on the march all the night of the 26th and on the 27th with only about two hours' rest.
"The brigade to which I belonged was rearguard to the division, and during the 27th we took up a great many different positions to cover the retirement of the rest of the division, so that we had very hard work, and by the night of the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with fatigue—both bodily and mental fatigue.
"No doubt we also suffered to a certain extent from shock; but the retirement still continued in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were still quite sound and in good working condition.
"On the night of the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers. We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep on our horses.
"As we rode along I became conscious of the fact that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen.
"These horsemen had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were going, and keeping level with us.
"The night was not very dark, and I fancied that I could see squadron upon squadron of these cavalrymen quite distinctly.
"I did not say a word about it at first, but I watched them for about twenty minutes. The other two officers had stopped talking.
"At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in the fields. I then told him what I had seen. The third officer then confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the past twenty minutes.
"So convinced were we that they were really cavalry that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out to reconnoitre, and found no one there. The night then grew darker, and we saw no more.
"The same phenomenon was seen by many men in our column. Of course, we were all dog tired and overtaxed, but it is an extraordinary thing that the same phenomenon should be witnessed by so many different people.
"I myself am absolutely convinced that I saw these horsemen; and I feel sure that they did not exist only in my imagination. I do not attempt to explain the mystery—I only state facts."
The writer of this letter is a lieutenant-colonel and a member of a distinguished order of knighthood. I must suppose myself to be asked the questions: "What do you make of the Lieutenant-Colonel's evidence? And what do you make of the Lance-Corporal's evidence?" These are questions that I have asked myself. The answer to both is simple, but quite unsatisfactory: I don't know what to make of these two pieces of evidence. I have a theory, which I hold in a quite tentative manner, without any degree of obstinacy. Like the famous politician, I can easily change my theory on the production of further and fuller and more demonstrative evidence.
This theory is that the visions, both of the corporal and the colonel, were the hallucinations of men utterly worn out and exhausted, both in body and mind. There is an alternative theory which is implied in the following letter written to The Evening News by Lance-Corporal A. Johnstone, late of the Royal Engineers. His letter appeared in The Evening News of August 11th:—
"We had almost reached the end of the retreat, and, after marching a whole day and night with but one half-hour's rest in between, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Langy, near Paris, just at dawn, and as day broke we saw in front of us large bodies of cavalry, all formed up into squadrons—fine, big men, on massive chargers.
"I remember turning to my chums in the ranks and saying, 'Thank God! We are not far off Paris now. Look at the French cavalry!'
"They, too, saw them quite plainly, but on getting closer, to our surprise the horsemen vanished and gave place to banks of white mist, with clumps of trees and bushed dimly showing through them!
"Quite a simple illusion, yet at the time we actually picked out the lines of man and horse as plainly as possible, and almost imagined we heard the champing of the horses' bits!
"When I tell you that hardened soldiers who had been through many a campaign were marching quite mechanically along the road and babbling all sorts of nonsense in sheer delirium, you can well believe we were in a fit state to take a row of beanstalks for all the saints in the calendar."
There is also to be considered the testimony of an officer, which I give with all reserve, since I am not personally aware of his identity. But this officer is reported to have written an account of his experiences during the Retreat—an account of soldiers marching blindly through the night, half dead with weariness, more than half asleep, and troubled by appearances as of monstrous men advancing towards them; of chairs "and lights and things" in the middle of the road. These soldiers were illuded, but they were not deluded; they knew that they were hallucinated, that their senses, worn out by fatigue, were being deceived.
These, then, are the documents and quasi-documents open for our consideration in weighing the evidence of the lance-corporal and the lieutenant-colonel. And it seems to me that there are four hypotheses open to us.
Firstly, these experiences may have been true vision, the sight "coelorum apertorum," of the Rood set flaming in the heavens, of the companies of the hosts of the Lord.
At the opposite extreme to this possibility is the hypothesis of mere mistaking of effects of cloud and light and mist. The lieutenant-colonel's experience may have been the experience of Lance-Corporal A. Johnstone: "We saw in front of us large bodies of cavalry, all formed up into squadrons." Corporal Johnstone and his friends were certain that there were squadrons of French cavalry; they almost heard "the champing of the horses' bits"—and it was but wreaths and banks of mist and trees and bushes. So the lance-corporal who testified in The Daily Mail may have been misled by an effect of afterglow or an aurora mingled with strange-shaped clouds. One has seen clouds that are dragonish; there is no reason why better figures should not be formed by wind and cloud and light on the circle of the skies.
Then there is the possibility of hallucination to which I incline for the present, awaiting clearer light. In the case of the corporal, and in the case of the colonel, there was present that condition which is most favourable to hallucination; that is, extreme fatigue—fatigue of mind and of body too. Why this should be I know not; but it seems certain that hallucination depends very largely on this toxic state, or rather, perhaps, on the stupor that it induces. You may obtain this stupor, with its hallucinations, by overdoses of alcohol; and then the result is called delirium tremens. You may obtain it by the poison of scarlet fever; it is then mere delirium. You may obtain it by gazing into a crystal, or a pool of ink, or any bright surface; and then the resultant appearances will be called clairvoyance. For I am strongly inclined to believe that there is a link between the snakes and rats of the drunkard and the varied appearances in the crystal. The one observer obtains his curious results by operating from within—by poisoning his system with exorbitant alcoholic doses; the other works from without, by dazing his eyes. And then there is the third method: the method of the man who induces the toxic state by being tired to death. [I myself once combined two of these methods. I was wearied almost to stupor, and I gazed—by accident, not design—in a bright surface, and I was duly hallucinated.] And so it is possible that the corporal and the lieutenant-- colonel were hallucinated, they being, as they both aver, in a state of the profoundest fatigue and exhaustion.
Fourthly, there may have been in these two cases a certain admixture of hallucination with a mistaken judgment as to the actual forms of mists, trees, clouds, and light.
There is one point in both the experiences that we are considering that seems worthy of attention. That is the duration of the apparitions, or whatever they were. The corporal is precise; he saw the shining shapes in the sky for thirty-five minutes exactly. The lieutenant-colonel does not give us so definite a measure; but he and one of his brother officers had watched the ghostly squadrons for more than twenty minutes. Now, it needs the curious learning of the late Andrew Lang to draw conclusions from this circumstance of duration. That learning I do not at all possess, but I would appeal to any inheritor of this knowledge, if such there be, to enlighten us on this point, to tell us what deductions we ought to make from the thirty-five minutes of the one case, and the more than twenty minutes of the other.
Speaking as a mere amateur in ghosts, I should incline to think the duration of the appearances much greater than is usual either in cases of true vision or of hallucination. I hesitate; but I should have said that the duration of such appearances is more often reckoned by seconds than by minutes. But the man who is really learned in ghostcraft will be able to speak precisely, to point out, no doubt, certain cases in which the experience was prolonged, and to compare these with the two cases now before us.
But there is another point which occurs to me, and in the consideration of this no abstruse learning is required. There is one palmary and striking difference between the evidence of the two soldiers and the mass of foolish gossip which I have treated in the former part of this introduction. The gossip, as I still believe, derived proximately or remotely from the story of "The Bowmen." In "The Bowmen" heaven is implored and the help of heaven granted when the British Army and the whole cause of the Allies were, by the hypothesis of the tale, entering on their agony. The need was dire, the cause admitted of no delay: "dignus erat vindice nodus." Help came to earth from heaven when earth was helpless.
And so all the derived fictions which pretended to be facts followed their original in this matter. Many of these tales have slipped out of my memory, I am glad to say, but I know that they were all true to type in this respect. Whether the deliverer was a dark obscuring cloud, a row of shining beings, the ghosts of slain soldiers still fighting for England—I have come across "traces," as the analysts would say, of this form of the story—St. George, St. Michael, the Blessed Joan of Arc, or angels; the intervention is always in the very nick of time, at the sharp moment of dreadful and instant need.
Thus my fable and the other fables; but there is nothing of this in the two pieces of evidence before us. The corporal says that the Uhlans had been beaten back with heavy loss some time before the showing of the shapes in the sky; when the vision was seen the need was no longer instant. The lieutenant-colonel agrees here with the corporal: "We came into action at dawn and fought till dusk. We . . . in common with the rest of our division had a bad time of it. Our division, however, retired in good order." This was on the night of August 26th. The retirement continued throughout the 27th; and on the night of the 27th the apparition occurred. There was no action in progress, the men were in no extremity save that of fatigue; the acute peril had passed.
One final word, and a personal one. I have been charged, I believe, in certain quarters with the offence of taking a foolish pride in boasting—very falsely as the accusers declare—of being the originator of all the legends of "the Angels of Mons." Some ass, whose name I have no desire to recollect, wrote me a solemn letter charging me to walk humbly and to give thanks for having been made the vessel and channel of this new revelation. A clergyman declared that I "strutted" in a highly unbecoming manner.
To all of which I would say simply that I cannot conceive of anyone being foolish enough to take pride in the begetting of some of the silliest tales that have ever disgraced the English tongue.