THE ANGEL OF MONS AND ALL ...

With this week's Who Killed Round Robin? I snatched up the opportunity to follow myself again after poor Dave Taylor had to bow out at the last minute. Got to play around with the legend of the Angel of Mons, in which angels supposedly protected the British army during the Battle of Mons at the start of The Great War. Arthur Machen (an interesting chap - member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) had a hand in creating the legend when he wrote The Bowmen (published in the Evening News a month after the battle), inspired by accounts he'd heard from the front line. In the story phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt are summoned by a British soldier calling on the spirit of St. George.

The Battle of Agincourt again is of notable significance. It's incorrectly associated with 'flipping the bird', that most popular of obscene hand gestures. Apparently the French wanted to cut off the middle fingers of English bowmen so they could not use their bows (a cunning plan!). When the English won they displayed their middle fingers to show they still had them. Nonsense of course, but then so was the Angel of Mons. I thought it interesting though that bodkin point's (the arrows used by longbowmen at the Battle of Agincourt), were fired in sun blotting volleys at the French and yet St. George in Machen's story sent the very same bowmen to be allied with the French in order to defeat the Germans.