Tag Archives: World War I

Introduction to an Old-Fashion Table of Contents

The Angels of Mons,

 

The Angel of Mons: A World War I Legend features a Table of Contents that is reminiscent of a form found in older books. You may recall seeing such tables of contents in old novels, histories, and books on a variety topics. The idea here is to introduce the many parts of the novel with a title that is instructive and entertaining. The reader gets a “preview of coming attractions” by reading the table of contents. The novel is divided into five books, seventeen chapters, and 123 sections. The table of contents occupies four pages! An oddity, for certain. I will here present Book One’s titles. Next week I will present Books Two and Three, the fourth and fifth in two weeks. Do the titles give you a sense of what each chapter and section will contain?St.George-cover

                                                                             BOOK 1

                                             THE ANGEL ST. GEORGE FROM THE CLOUD

Chapter One: The Sun Gaily Passed                                Page 3

Dusk: The End of the First Day’s Battle – Across the Canal — The Judgment – A Bullet       Found Lieutenant Dease

Chapter Two: War will Call Us Soon                             Page 9

Training – The Lectures – Who will be the Top Vickers Teams? – In the Workshop – In the Common Room – Interlude: “The Laughing Husband” and Lord Gooseberry Tart – Gunners Godley and Sanders Report to the Section Leader – On the Firing Range and Fields at Hythe and Grantham – Knackers Hauled a Dozen Dead Horses – The Tournament – Lt. Colonel Norman R. McMahon Congratulates the Winners –Passing out Parade – The Ruffians and Victors Plan their Tableau – Celebration — Next Day, At the Manufactory – Comments, Congratulations, Salutations, and Wishes for Success

Chapter Three: To Mons                                                 Page 34

These Vickers Machine Gun Squads Went on Ahead – Unloading the Limbers – Our Ladies – The Briefing – “Mons Shares St. George with You British”

Chapter Four: The Priest’s Sermon: St. George and MonsPage 43

“God and Monseigneurs Saint Georges” – “The Golden Arrows of God

Chapter Five: The Angel St. George of Mons              Page 49

Preparation – Sunday Morning – By Tonight We Will be Victorious – The Cloud of Dust – Where the Canal Makes a Sharp Turn – On the Slag Heaps –Tommy Atkins’ First Death – At the Victors: St. George and his Horde of Angels Descends

Chapter Six: Across the Canal the Germans Saw The Phenomenon in the Heavens                                                        Page 66

And So They Saw – From Drunk with Gladness to Sober with Grief – Lieutenant Maurice Deasy’s Ascent and Transfiguration – Even German Officers and Staff in the Field Saw the Angel –They Fought through the Hours to the End of Day: The Retirement – Escape into the Twilight and the Night – That Night the British Generals Marched the Exhausted BEF Thirty-two Miles

Chapter Seven: Jeanne d’Arc and the Road Through                       Page 75

Ahead Lay the Certainty – The Locale – From the Distance Came the Barking of Dogs and Lantern Light – Mongo Black Disappeared into the Gloom, The Victors Following — The Road where No Road Was – The Cyclists – Goullet Goes Forward – The Return – Captain Ashburner’s Conversion – Report to General Smith-Dorrien: A Pawn Offers Itself for Sacrifice – After Prolonged Silence – The Generals’ Meeting – General Smith-Dorrien’s Dream – The General’s Determination – The Ride Back – Protecting the Secret

 Do the titles give you a sense of what each chapter and section will contain? Let me know. Comment. Share with friends.

This is the forty-seventh blog I have written. Most are about The Angel of Mons. Collectively, they give a detailed and inside look at the book—a study guide?

Blessed with a fine review

The Angels of Mons,
Nickolas Bird is a contributor to the Spectator, a military historian, a partner in Bird Battlefield Tours. He wrote this review of The Angel of Mons: A World War I Legend
A SPIRITUAL FANTASY WITHIN THE HELL OF BATTLE

By Nicholas Bird 

Sarah and I had the benefit of touring with Nick and Tony Bird and five other English folks to Le Cateau and the Somme battlefields in August. Nick graced the novel with this review.
posed picture soldiers nimy

Jerred Metz has written an original book on 1914, one that skillfully fuses history and fiction, imaginary characters and historical figures (like Churchill and Conan Doyle and W.B Yeats), with – at the core – a spiritual fantasy. That he succeeds is because at heart Metz is a meticulous historian who has done his research. His description of Mons and the Retreat, of Le Cateau and Nimy, of real characters like Dease and Godley, who both won the VC holding the bridge at Mons, and General Smith-Dorrien and FM French, ring true because they are true. Metz, although an American who has never visited Britain, seems to have an uncanny sense of Tommy Atkins’ character; and his surly but dogged cussedness. And he has a felicitous turn of phrase: of the lull before the storm of Mons he writes – ‘Thus ended the busman’s holiday before the busman’s hell.’ Metz knows the ground, he has walked from Mons to Le Cateau, he knows the soldiers and their generals, and he knows the weaponry. All this is reassuring, because novels and histories where there is the slightest confusion between a Parados and a Parapet, between VD and a VAD, tend to lose the reader’s confidence.

But above all the book must stand or fall on the credibility of its central theme – that of the appearance during the crucial point of battle of the Angel of Mons, and of the secret order, The Brotherhood of God and Monseigneur Saint Georges. Around this vision, and this mystical order, Metz weaves his story. And it is a tribute to his skill that he engages our belief, or wish to believe, in the miraculous moment that inspired and saved the BEF. Metz begins by quoting Harold Begbie who wrote in On the Side of the Angels (1915) – Long after the war is over, and the facts of it have been recorded in histories, one of the most widely known events will be the appearance of St. George and angel-warriors fighting in defence of the British (at) Mons.

The event may have originated in a short story by Arthur Machen (‘The Bowmen’) in the London Evening News but Metz makes of the vision something more – something real that connect Mons and Britain, their joint patron saint, St George. And he skirts round the actual genesis of the Angel by an ingenious plot involving the satanist Aleister Crowley, Yeats, G.B.Shaw and Machan.

At its crux perhaps is what a central character Captain Henri Lambert of the Belgian army points out to Dease and Godley: ‘There is eternal warfare between the forces of good and evil for the hearts of men, for souls. Satan never rests [but] each time the good Saint George came to our salvation. Prayer, penitence, blood, and death. Each time he redeemed us…know that tomorrow you and your squads will be initiated…St. George chose you.’

Towards the end of the book an angel appears in battle and has to be fought… there is mysticism here, and symbolism, and a spiritual thread but I would not wish to reveal the plot or assume to preach as to its meaning, which readers will deduce for themselves. Quibbles concerning minor solecisms (like ‘Sir’ Winston Churchill before he was knighted and some rather precise language for the normally foul-mouthed and inarticulate Tommy) this is a wholly different book on 1914 than the plethora of historical debates recently published, and one which will appeal to anyone with a mystical mien, or an open mind.

Metz has recognized that soldiers in desperate situations will clutch at any straw or semblance of hope that might deliver them from the imminence of death. It might be the arrival of Russians with snow on their boots, it might be the Seventh Cavalry, or it might be the Angel of Mons. There are no atheists in foxholes. And for Metz, as for the soldier in his foxhole (to use a phrase from a later war), the semblance of a thing is as real as the thing itself.

Christmas Truce, 1914

The Angels of Mons, ,

This Christmas is the one hundredth anniversary of the Christmas Truce. The story is touching and sad. As the name implies, a truce between the British and Germans took place on Christmas Eve, 1914. Amazingly, the truce took place all along the four hundred mile long line of trenches. An article in The Wall Street Journal claims that this night’s truce is unique in the history of warfare. There are many accounts of the events. Now there are three books and a wonderful, moving song.

I was so moved by the song when I heard it long ago, I knew I would include the event in The Angel of Mons. In the final chapter, “Tommy Atkins,

Angel of Memory, Grief, and Tears” I inserted this tale.

 

Whenever I fought at a moment of need, one of the Ruffians or Victors would appear. Gabriel Jessop or Carrew Nancarew might help me repair the gun, hand me a part. Catchpole and Palmer might march along to the trenches, full kit, singing a London stage ditty, its verses replaced with ribald lyrics to lighten my heart, make me blush. “How’s old Vicki holding up? Had to piss in the canister to keep her cool when there is no water about?” Catchpole might ask.

 

“You uncouth old fool. Besides, I am Gunner One now. Not my task.”

 

Or at night under the glory and glare of tracer bullets, looking across No Man’s Land at the Somme. At the Christmas Truce, December 24, 1914, the Victors and Ruffians, all eleven killed, filed onto the field, made up a proper football squad, played against a German team. For all I knew, the Germans might also have been departed dead playing.

 

The Victors broke out a case of brandy, the Ruffians, wine. We drank with the Germans, toasted St. George. The Germans raised their glasses to St. Michael. Our hearts begged the saints to signal that we would not fire another shot, the war over, the peace to hold forever, all to return to homes and families. We ate sausage spread with dark mustard spread on rye bread, pickles, and roasted potatoes. We served up plum pudding with hard sauce and mince pies. That night my angel brothers reverently carried the dead and tenderly moved the wounded to aid stations.

 

I awoke next morning to gunfire and bombardment. My heart, filled with joy and hope the night before–last night a heavenly miracle–shriveled to a walnut-hard center of grief and regret.

***

I encourage you to read more ab

An Object has the Force of a Character: Nimy Bridge

The Angels of Mons, , , ,
Nimy Bridge over the Mons-Conde Canal
Nimy Bridge over the Mons-Conde Canal

Sometimes a place or an object can have the force of a character in a novel or story. Consider novels whose title is the name of a place. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, the Malabar Hills in F.M. Forester’s A Passage to India. Sites in Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

So it is that Nimy Bridge, that crosses the Mons-Conde Canal, and the canal itself, almost has the role of a character in The Angel of Mons. The bridge was the place of greatest vulnerability and, at the same time, the point in greatest need of defense by the British on the first day of battle. It was understood that the Germans would at some time in the long day’s battle breech the defense of Nimy Bridge, and make its way into the city of Mons. The longer the bridge could be held, the better would be the prospects of an orderly retreat for the BEF who fought that day.posed picture soldiers nimy

It was the task of the Royal Fusiliers, Company “A”, to hold the bridge. The machine gunners and the musketry fought courageously that day. The first two Victoria Crosses awarded in the war went to two soldiers who manned the machine guns—Lieutenant Maurice Dease and Private Sidney Godley. This was the first and the only day that Dease fought. Godley, holding the gun on his own, was taken prisoner by the Germans and spend all the rest of the war in a POW camp.

At the foot of the Nimy Bridge is a memorial plaque commemorating their brave defense and its importance to the battle.

 

The bridge is the first point battlefield tours visit because of its importance. On the one hundredth anniversary f the battle on August 23, 1014 commemorative exercises began there.

What places strike you as being of great significance in novels, stories, poems, or plays and rise to the standing of characters?

There Is No Telling with Angels

The Angels of Mons, ,

For writers, poets, painters, sculptors, and film makers, angels can present any ideas or The Angel of Mons: one versionconceptions the imagination calls up. Angels can be of any size, shape, form, or even religion. They can be the fat babies with wings, the cherubim, we see in so many Renaissance paintings. They can be magnificent, stately beings of glorious proportions standing beside Jesus or God. They take many forms in the Hebrew Bible. There are innumerable representations of St. George. Type his name in Google and see many ways artists have depicted him. They can be demi-gods or even demonic. The great angels of the apocalyptic writings herald the coming of the end of time. They do much of God’s work.

Thus, St. George, Joan of Arc, and the myriad angels they command saving the British Expeditionary Force are part of the tradition writers and artists follow, making angels part of mankind tales.

It pleased me to have angels serve the story, saviors of the soldiers, instruments of peace after four years of war.

Two Major Collections Add The Angel of Mons: A First World War I Legend

The Angels of Mons, , , , ,

At the Toronto Public Library The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, one of the most important

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Doyle and Doyle-related collections in the world, has added a copy of The Angel of Mons: A First World War I Legend.

Conan Doyle and his family appear in five chapters in the book. Three feature Conan Doyle’s brother in-law, Captain Malcolm Leckie, RAMC. Sherlock Holmes appears in two.

www.acdfriends.org

 

                                       Two official notices about Dr. Malcolm Leckie
                    Dr. Malcolm Leckie, Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. Royal Army Medical Corps.   malcolm leckie               Supernumerary Captain, Restored to the establishment. Returned in February. 1914

Daily Chronicle

              Malcolm Leckie Burial, after Aug 28, 1914, Register B 202, Plot 1, row B. Grave 1.            Frameries Communal Cemetery. Age 34.
            8 December, 1914. DSO. First British Medical Officer to die in the war
            London Gazette

The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection in the Ernest F. Hollings Collections Library, University of South Carolina has also added The Angel of Mons to the collection.

Four documents are the foundation for the legend.

1) Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen”,
2) Phyllis Campbell’s account in the Occult Review,
3) “The Angel Warriors at Mons”

including numerous confirmatory testimonies,
Evidence of the Wounded
And certain Curious Historical Parallels
An Authentic Record by Ralph Shirley,
editor of The Occult Review

4) Harold Begbie’s On The Side of Angels (1915)

Several of these are in the collection. The Great War Collection added The Angel of Mons, not because the book is rare, but because it recognizes the library’s resources being put to use.

People Believe that St. George and his Angels Saved the British

The Angels of Mons, ,

I give the impression in all the blogs I have written about The Angel of Mons that from the start the The Angel of Mons: one versionaccount was taken to be a legend, something made up. This is not the case. In England it was taken to be an appearance and an intercession that really took place at the battle of Mons. People from England who I know tell me that at school it was taught as fact. And at the least, they report that the British and German soldiers saw the angels, but what they saw was a hallucination—a result of fatigue, hunger, and thirst, and the terrors of battle. An example: In his introduction to his translation of The Voyage of Argo, the classic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes, E.V. Rieu recounts a scene in which the Argonauts saw a vision of Apollo. Then he wrote, “Our own men in the retreat from Mons had labored even harder (than the Argonauts.) And each party had its own appropriate vision: Angels for the British troops: Apollo for the Greeks.”

Even a classical scholar believed that the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force reported seeing angels.

Even more closely do the people of Mons hold to the belief that St. George and his angels came to save the British, and, hence, Belgium and Europe.

Please share these blogs with people you think might be interested in reading them. Buy, read, enjoy, and share The Angel of Mons.

 

The 3 D Projection of The Angel of Mons

The Angels of Mons, ,

The Legend of the Angel of Mons In an earlier blog I wrote about seeing a 3-D projection telling a version of the story of the Angel of Mons when we were in Mons, Belgium for the centenary commemorations of the battle.  Here’s a video of the projection.

The text of the video is in French. I knew that I would enjoy the story more if I knew what was being said. I asked a friend, Gail Bienstock, if she could translate the text. She tried to do it by watching the YouTube recording, but found it too difficult. So she sent an e-mail to the Ministry of Culture in Mons asking if she could get a copy of the script. She used my name, which were the magic words. The author sent it to her and she translated it.  Here is the script of La Legende des Anges, in both English and French.

This version, my book The Angel of Mons: A World War Legend, and a graphic novel are all fiction. This version gives a visual depiction, while mine, of course, as a novel, creates a much more detailed version of the events. In any case, enjoy.

 

Who is Real and Who is Made Up?

The Angels of Mons, , , ,
Angel of Mons Valse-Cover Art
Angel of Mons Valse-Cover Art

Readers have asked which characters are real people and which fictional creations. Everything portrayed in the novel is fiction. To discover the facts regarding the Angel of Mons I recommend the Angel of Mons by David Clarke. After you read his book you will see what I did with the facts to make them interesting in the novel.

Characters of Historical Significance

 Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Writer
William Butler Yeats, poet, Hierophant, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Minor Historical Characters

Members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Maude Gonne, Actress, political activist, mystic, subject of many of Yeats’s poems
Florence Farr, Actress, Praemonstratrix
Arthur Machen, writer, author of “The Bowmen”,
Alliester Crowley, mystic, magician
John Todhunter, author, playwright

 The Conan Doyle Circle

Lady Jean Doyle, wife of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Oliver Lodge, physicist, President, British Psychical Society
Miss Lily Symmons-Loder

The Churchill Circle

Lady Archibald Campbell, occultist, aunt of Winston Churchill
Phyllis Campbell, occultist, niece of Lady Campbell, author of an account of St. George’s appearance

Historical Characters, Military

General Horace Smith-Dorrian, in command of II Corps, British Expeditionary Force at Mons and Le Cateau
N.R. McMahon, “the musketry manic”, head of musketry and machine gun training before the war
Captain L.F. Ashburner commanding, 4th Royal Fuliliers
Captain Malcolm Leckie, RAMC. brother in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Quartermaster Fitzpatrick
Lieutenant Maurice Dease, Vickers machine gun squad leader, first recipient of the Victoria Cross
Private Sidney Godley, also at Nimy Bridge, a first recipient of the Victoria Cross
World champion bicycle racers Goullet, France, and Bailey, Australia

Rather than hyperlink each of the names above, I suggest that you google any of the names you would like to learn more about. You can do the same for the three fictional characters in the next group.

Fictional Characters

Sherlock Holmes
St. George
Joan of Arc

Fictional Soldiers

The two Vickers machine gun crews

Ruffians

Lieutenant Dease, Privates Tommy Atkins, William Catchpole, Louis “Ziggy” Palmer, Paul Carmichael

Victors

Sergeant Henry Sanders, Privates Gabriel Jessop, Anthony Hardy, Howard Thomas Lang, Walter Sage, Carrew Nancarrew

You will meet them as you read, and see what each character does.

Sigfried Sassoon: A Continuation of Last Week’s Blog

The Angels of Mons, ,

Last week I wrote about our visit to the canal at Sambre-Oise Canal at Ors where the poet SassoonWilfred Owen was killed. That same afternoon the Bird brothers took us to the Point 110 New Cemetery to talk about the poet Sigfried Sassoon. Sassoon was Owen’s poetic mentor during the war. It is well worth reading about their relationship and the influence Sassoon had on Owen’s poetry. Their experience in the war led to a poetry critical of the war. “Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. Their view was vastly different from that of the jingoists like Kipling and Rupert Brooke.” Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war.

Both poets became widely read in the United States during the Vietnam War. I read them several years before while working on my master’s thesis.

At New Cemetery we stood before three graves, one next to the other. Tony and Nick described the significance.D.C. Thomas

“On March 18, 1916 (this, before the Battle of the Somme) Robert Graves and Sigfried Sassoon were devastated when, within a space of 24 hours, three subalterns were killed, 2nd Lt. David Thomas, Prichard, and Richardson. Sassoon was particularly upset at Thomas’ death, with whom he was clearly in love.” Le Cateau & The Somme: A Tour: Aug 25-28, 2014 by Antony and Nicholas Bird.

Sigfried Sassoon stood at the foot of the hole while three were buried. Thereafter, “He began to undertake dangerous duties, especially patrols, sometimes going into No Man’s Land. Sassoon became known as ‘Mad Jack.’”

The day before we toured the Military Museum in Peronne, France. I watched an official British Army film showing the burial of a dozen soldiers. Each was wrapped in a canvas shroud, the shroud tied with rope. With care, the bodies were handed from a couple of soldiers at the top of the dirt mound to those in the hole. Around the perimeter stood the comrades of those who had been killed.

I stood at the grave site of the three, too, and was moved to tears the second time that day. Sadness and grief. Folly and waste. Loss and useless sacrifice. Of course, the war finally ended. So that was a good thing. But what was gained and what was lost?

Afterward, the war officially spoken of in terms of the old jingoism—bravery, courage, sacrifice, and so on. As Kurt Vonnegut writes in Slaughterhouse Five, “So it goes.”

The General by Sigfried Sassoon

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

There are many blogs I have written about characters and events in The Angel of Mons. I know you will enjoy reading them. You can get to all of them at my web site: jerredmetz.com.