The Strange Case of ''The Angels of Mons : Arthur Machen's World War I Story, the Insistent Believers, and His Refutations

The First World War began disastrously for the English when the Germans routed them at Mons, Belgium, on 23 and 24 August 1914. Less than a month later, the Anglo-Welsh writer Arthur Machen fictionalized this encounter in a newspaper story, claiming that the English were saved by the appearance of angels, but his newspaper fiction became accepted as fact. The believers - and they included figures as notable as G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and C. S. Lewis - wrote pamphlets, testimonies, poems, parodies; they even performed music and created motion pictures attesting to the existence of the guardian angels. The Angels of Mons provides a documented history of this controversy and collects and annotates for the first time Machen's work and many of the responses it inspired. Owing to their fragility and rarity, many of these responses have not been digitized and have not been available since their publication a century ago; biographical data on the writers are also provided, many for the first time. Also reprinted for the first time are a number of Machen's responses to the believers including "The Angels of Mons: Absolutely My Last Word on the Subject" and "The Return of the Angels: This Time They Are at Ypres."