The Angel of Mons is a legend, not a fact. Consequently, there is no version that can

be factually accurate. The facts about the legend, however, are well known. They begin with the publication of Arthur Machen’s short story, “The Bowmen” in The Evening Standard on September 29, 1914, over a month after the Battle of Mons. This is only one of several versions. Sergeant Thomas Fitzpatrick, who is written about in this article, is also a character in my novel, The Angel of Mons: A World War I Legend. He appears in Chapter Eleven entitled: “The Quarry, St. George, and the Angels of the Golden Mist.”

In 2008, when Sarah Barker and I were taken to visit sites related to the battle by a local historian, expert in the Battle of Mons, and the Deputy Director of the Mons Tourism Bureau. We were taken to an old path into a forest. To our surprise, the historian said that along that path on the night of August 23 Sergeant Fitzgerald and his fifty soldiers, including the Company band, were guided to safety by the Angel of Mons.

A recent article in the British publication Wexford People.ie writes his story under the headline “Wexford Born Soldier was Angel of Mons Hero in the Great War.” Read the story and read the chapter. If you don’t own the book you can 1) buy one on Amazon or 2) thought Singing Bone Press, 3) or ask your library to buy it, 4) or request it on interlibrary loan. 5) Or you can request a copy of the chapter from me. I will be glad to send it to you as a .pdf file. Find out more.

Angels fighting with us against the Huns at Mons

Of course God was on our side in the Great War and an early proof of this came in August 1914 at the Battle of Mons when, it was reliably reported, He sent His angels to repulse the Huns as they seemed about to overrun the British. One hundred years ago this week London’s New Statesman reported that belief in the Mons miracle was growing.

“The announcement by Dr. Reverend Horton [a popular and influential Manchester preacher and occultist] of his belief in the story of the angels who appeared on the side of the British at the battle of Mons and stuck terror into the Germans, and even into their horses, has created a great deal of interest.

“Whatever its origin, it is now going the rounds of the parish magazines, and is likely to take a permanent place among the legends, true and false, of the war.

“This belief in the active interference of divine and semi-divine beings in the conflicts of men is as old as the memory of the race. The most interesting vision of angels ever seen was that of a French girl-soldier. Poor Joan of Arc saved her country and lost her life owing to the vision of an angel.

“Her story is at least as incredible as the story of the angels at Mons, and yet how many of us in our hearts disbelieve it? Angels … are too vital in the grave procession of history to be dismissed with a lofty omniscience of unbelief.”

This review appeared on Amazon — read and enjoy

By David Wetzel on June 27, 2015

Format: Kindle Edition

Jerred Metz’s The Angel of Mons is certainly a work of magical realism, but that term fails to describe the shimmering interplay (and interplayfulness) of the real and supernatural in this rich, dense, mythically powerful novel. Based on a legend—or was it?—that grew out of the first battle in World War I between the British and Germans on August 23, 1914, at Mons, Belgium, the story begins with the factual death of Maurice Dease, commander of a Vickers machine gun crew at the Nimy Bridge, and describes a meteorological phenomenon—or was it?—that enveloped and stymied the advancing German army in what many observers described as the image of St. George, allowing the vastly outnumbered British forces to begin an orderly retreat. From there Metz elaborates on that sighting, blending the story of the British retreat through the Forest of Mormal in northern France with visions of Joan d’Arc who guides them to safety along a whispering road cut through the forest, though never discovered in history books. They eventually make it to the British Front by way of other visions and miracles descending on characters both historical and fictional.

If this were the extent of The Angel of Mons, it would be good magical realism. But returning the British forces to safety only begins Metz’s fictional celebration-study of legend and myth. Using the deaths of three key participants—Dease, Malcom Leckie, and Tommy Atkins—Metz takes us into what could be considered the shared Twilight Zone of the Coleridge-Wordsworth dynamic: Coleridge making the ethereal real and Wordsworth making the real ethereal. A secondary cast of characters (who happen to be icons of modern history transmuted into entirely believable fictional counterparts) draw out the mystery of Mons through a superb device: twentieth-century spiritualism and psychic phenomena. We find connections between W. B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle (and his “living” counterpart Sherlock Holmes), and even Winston Churchill—all connected, in some way, with the question of proving communication with the dead. It appears that such proof does exist—if only within Metz’s London of early September 1914.

This is the Coleridge side of the dynamic. But the book ends on the Wordsworth side, with the death, in the very last hour of the war—and again at Nimy Bridge—of Private Atkins. In his exalted afterlife, he speaks directly to the reader as the Angel of Grief and Memory, calling forth an image both apocalyptical and transcendent. The vision seems to come out of the Book of Revelation, the theosophical idea of the Brotherhood, and—well—Moby Dick. Truly, the spiritual and philosophical density of Metz’s The Angel of Mons is much like Melville’s, and it’s filled with character, dialogue, and drama worthy of what we might see and overhear on the decks of the Pequod. In short, it is a fascinating book on many levels.