The Weekly Machen
Three months after his article “Absolutely My Last Word on the Subject,” Arthur Machen returned to the Angel of Mons topic to review a poem purporting to narrate miraculous events on the battlefield. Unlike other works, he appreciated the artistry of this addition to the legends. Still, he doubted. Most interestingly, the penultimate paragraph is the most cogent summary of his nuanced take on the affair.
The Return of the Angels
by
Arthur Machen
July 3, 1916
The “Angels of Mons” are with us once more; and in my opinion, their latest appearance is by far their best.
Mrs. Margaret L. Woods has a noble and eloquent poem in the current number of the Fortnightly Review. It is called “The First Battle of Ypres,” and tells in heroic verse of the heroic resistance of the thin line of British with small French supports to the great push of the Germans for Calais.
This was the battle of October-November 1914. The British line was weak, the cooks and service men were hurried up to hold it against the flower of the Prussian Army. How was it that the Prussian Guard was driven back?
Why paused they and went backward,
With never a foe before,
Like a long wave dragging
Down to a level shore,
Its fierce reluctant surges, that came triumphant storming
The land, and powers invisible drive to Its deep returning?
And the answer is that we had Great Reserves; Reserves that were more than mortal.
Marlborough’s men, and Wellington’s, the burghers of Courtrai,
The warriors of Plantagenet, King Louis’ Gants gláces—
And the young, young dead from Mons and the Marne river.
Old heroic fighting men
Who fought for chivalry,
Men who died for England,
Mother of Liberty,
In the world’s dim heart, where the waiting spirits slumber
Sounded a roar when the walls were rent asunder
That parted Earth from Hell, and summoning them away,
Tremendous trumpets blew, as the Judgement Day—
And the dead came forth, each to his former banner.
Mrs. Woods, indeed, disclaims all connection between her poem and the legend which was originally in The Evening News under the title of “The Bowmen,” and then begot that group of legends known conveniently by that generic name of “The Angels of Mons.”
She says that the story was received from “a very competent witness,” who relates that the Germans broke through our line at Ypres three times and then retired, for no apparent reason.
On each of these occasions prisoners, when asked the cause of their retirement, replied: “We saw your enormous Reserves.” We had no Reserves. That story was incidentally confirmed by the remark of another officer on the curious conduct of the Germans in violently shelling certain empty fields behind our lines.
It may be so, but I think I remember that the “enormous Reserves” story was told with respect to the retreat from Mons.
And I note another point of contact between Mrs. Woods’s account and the accounts of “the Angels” that I was examining a year ago. That is, that the witnesses are anonymous. Now it is “a very competent witness” and “another officer.” Then it was a “nurse,” “a well-known baronet,” a clergyman in the west of England—a somebody without a name or an address.
Let me guard myself by saying that I by no means deny the truth of the story which Mrs. Woods has so beautifully elaborated. I know nothing about its truth or falsity; I simply suspend my judgement pending the production of first-hand, testable evidence. I do not think that we should be called upon to accept the story of a specific miraculous occurrence on evidence which is not evidence, but merely rumour and gossip.
And, pending the production of real testimony, I am strongly inclined to think that this poem of dead warriors rising in dreadful array and gathering again to their ancient banners is the most worthy and valiant offspring of an unworthy father: “The Bowmen.”
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darklybrightpress.com 
Thank you for another fascinating part of ‘the story’! And for the introduction to Mrs. Woods therewith. What an interesting-sounding body of work Wikipedia reports. Following its Project Gutenberg link I find not only what Wikipedia describes as “Her most unusual novel, The Invader, […] a fantasy about a young female scholar (one of the earliest women students accepted by Oxford University), who is possessed by the spirit of a similar fore-bearer” (!) but The Book of the Homeless, also from 1916, “sold for the benefit of the American Hostels for Refugees and for the benefit of The Children of Flanders Relief Committee, founded in Paris by Mrs. Wharton in November, 1914, and enlarged by her in April, 1915, and chiefly maintained hitherto by American subscriptions” (as Theodore Roosevelt says in his “Introduction”), with an enormous variety of famous (and, to me, less famous) contributors, among whom is Mrs. Woods, whose poem imagines “the ship that comes for bearing /
Sore-wounded souls to Avalon”!
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I just got round to checking, and found two recordings on YouTube of Stravinsky’s contribution to The Book of the Homeless, “Souvenir d’Une Marche Boche”, and a snippet from D’Indy’s opera, La Légende de Saint Christophe, in the Book listed as “unfinished”, but in his French Wikipedia article with the Opus number 67 and dated “1920” – though the snippet I found on YouTube is not the one included in the Book.
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