The archers in the newspaper
On 29 September 1914, Arthur Machen published The Bowmen in The Evening News. The story imagined English archers from Agincourt appearing to help British soldiers at Mons. Machen later made the origin clear: the tale was invented.
A few days after publication, he was asked about its factual basis. He answered that it had none. When a parish magazine asked for sources before reprinting the story, he said he had no sources either.
The reader supplies the miracle
The reply did not close the story. A priest suggested that Machen might be mistaken and that the events must have happened anyway. As the account travelled, the archers became luminous figures, then angels. The literary origin moved into the background while the supernatural report became the part people remembered.
Machen called this his “involuntary art of deceiving”. The phrase is unsettling because the deception was not hidden in the original text. It was produced by the distance between a writer’s intention and a reader’s need for the story to be true.
Tracing a legend to its first sentence
The Angels of Mons are therefore best approached as a history of belief, not as a confirmed battlefield event. The Australian War Memorial records the legend while Machen’s own introduction preserves the author’s explanation of how it grew.
That distinction is still useful. Before sharing an extraordinary image or testimony, it is worth asking where the account began, what its first form was and what changed as it moved from one person to the next.
