During the Great War thousands came to believe that a miracle had happened during the British Army’s first desperate clash with the advancing Germans at Mons in Belgium. In some versions a vision of St George and phantom bowmen halted the Kaiser’s troops, while others claimed angels had thrown a protective curtain around the British, saving them from disaster. The battle of Mons took place on 23 August 1914 and within weeks the ‘angels of Mons’ had entered the realms of legend. By the end of the war it became unpatriotic, even treasonable, to doubt the claims were based on fact.

Gothic horror writer Arthur Machen maintained until his dying day that the Angel of Mons was fiction.