The uncanny on the western front in the first world war

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Malcolm Gaskill reviews A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War by Owen Davies in the London Review of Books (4 July 2019):

It’s a well-known story that British soldiers at Mons claimed they really did see angels – but that story, too, turns out to be unfounded. In September 1914 the Welsh writer Arthur Machen published a story called The Bowmen in the London Evening News. In it, spectral archers from the Battle of Agincourt come to the aid of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. 

To his dismay the story was widely taken as truth, and a "snowball of rumour" hardened into "the solidest of facts". "If I had failed in the art of letters," Machen wrote later, "I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit."

It’s ironic that the Great War’s most famous supernatural story was the creation of Arthur Machen when there were so many real reports of supernatural phenomena on the front line. In A Supernatural War, Owen Davies leads us from the conflict into a haunted world filled with magical thinking and uncanny experiences.

And the angels of Mons were only one of many encounters with the uncanny during the war:

From the outbreak of war, tales of the uncanny abounded. French Catholic troops at the Battle of the Marne and Russian Orthodox troops at the Battle of Augustov reported seeing the Virgin Mary. "Sport is more in my line than Spiritualism," a British officer wounded at Mons remarked, "but when you have experiences brought under your very nose again and again, you cannot help thinking that there must be something in such things."

Battlefield apparitions were nothing new: Roman legionaries saw Castor and Pollux; troops fighting in the Crimean War saw saints. Walter Scott thought this perfectly natural: "One warrior catches the idea from another; all are alike eager to acknowledge the present miracle, and the battle is won before the mistake is discovered." What made the First World War different was not just its mechanised slaughter, but the way it slammed together old and new habits of thought.

Nascent disciplines like psychology, sociology and social anthropology were quick to identify atavistic traits in 20th-century people. Granville Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, thought the Angels of Mons a fascinating expression of societal stress. "No war," he said, "was ever so hard on the nerves." 

The French historian Marc Bloch was thrilled to observe in the trenches "a wonderful renewal of oral tradition". Men moving up and down the line would exchange a few words, often passing on rumours that were groundless but hugely significant for the hearers.

There's more about the angels of Mons in an article by Dr Miriam Bibby on Historic UK.