Rumours of angels: a legend of the First World War

Folklore, Oct, 2002 by David Clarke

Within weeks of publication, all the copies of the magazine had been sold and requests for more poured in. Writing in June 1915, the Revd Gilson describes how surprised he was:

   to find that our modest little parish magazine has suddenly sprung into
   almost world-wide notoriety; every post ... has brought letters from all
   over the country, not asking merely for single copies, but for dozens of
   copies, enclosing quite embarrassing numbers of stamps and postal orders,
   the more so since there were no more magazines to be had ("The Angelic
   Guard at Mons: Comments by the Vicar of All Saints." Bladud, The Bath
   Society Paper [9 June 1915], 14).

Miss Marrable's circumstantial account was accepted by thousands who had hitherto remained sceptical. Her story was featured as the centrepiece of a sermon delivered by an influential nonconformist pastor, the Revd R. F. Horton, in Manchester on 13 June 1915 against a backdrop of stalemate in Ypres and at Gallipoli. Horton said of the angels: "... this is a story repeated by so many witnesses that if anything can be established by contemporary evidence it is established ... of the retreat from Mons." Horton claimed the appearance of the angels was "the salvation of our men" and was of the opinion that:

   when soldiers and officers, who were in the retreat from Mons say they saw
   a batch of angels between them and the enemy, and that the horses of the
   German cavalry stampeded and thus our troops were saved from destruction,
   no thoroughly modern man is foolish enough to disbelieve the statement or
   to pooh-pooh the experience as hallucination ("Dr Horton and `The Bowmen'."
   London Evening News [17 June 1915], 2).

Miss Marrable's testimony and the Revd Horton's sermon broke the floodgates. The story was reprinted by the national and regional newspapers and was reproduced in pamphlets distributed to soldiers fighting on the Western Front. It was the first to stand apart from the early rumours that had drawn largely upon the imagery in "The Bowmen." The "angels" in Miss Marrable's story appear without warning and protect the English soldiers from harm, rather than attacking the enemy as was the case in Machen's tale. On the surface the story appeared to have been drawn indirectly from a personal experience described by two individuals known to the narrator. This was not in fact the case. It was based not upon first-hand testimony from "soldiers and officers," as the Revd Horton had assured his congregation, but came from a source that remained, like the others that had preceded it, unnamed and untraceable. Newspapers and an investigator from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) pursued Miss Marrable and tried to obtain direct testimony from a named officer who had been present at the battle of Mons. When pressed for names, Miss Marrable said she could not corroborate the story for, contrary to Revd Gilson's account, she did not personally know the officers. Evidently annoyed that she had been misquoted, she wrote to the London Evening News: "I shall be much obliged if you will inform the Editor of The Occult Review that I know nothing whatever of officers or men who saw the angels" ("No Escape from the Bowmen." London Evening News [30 July 1915], 2). Similarly, in a reply to the SPR dated 28 May 1915, she wrote: "I cannot give you the names of the men ... as the story I heard was quite anonymous, and I do not know who they are" (Verrall 1915, 108).