Very good. I'm glad I discovered Arthur Machen. ( )

I read an edition of this book available legally and for free from Archive.org.

Machen's work is a fast read, with about half the volume as an introspective on the phenomena he touched off. He wrote a story about a British soldier in the trenches who called upon St. George, to be answered by an ethereal force of archers who slaughtered the encroaching German units. To the modern reader, it's a story with no real substance--it's fluff and optimism with no plot. However, following its publication during the War, the story went viral. People started saying they had a friend or cousin or a preacher who vouched the incident really happened, but the actual witnesses never managed to speak up.

This genuinely baffled the author of the original tale. As he observes, "... how is it that a nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything--save the truth."

The booklet includes two other stories of his as well which are likewise light on plot or much else but sentimental and optimistic in a way that would comfort worried readers during the War. ( )

I picked up this collection of short stories because the story "The Bowman" took on a life of its own and was considered by many to be true. As a curiosity, it is great. As something I would read, not so much. Let me state that I don't normally read this genre. The stories give me the same feeling as did the "House of Horror" comic books from my childhood. By the time I start to get into the story, it is over. The longest story seems to be about five pages, which is about half, maybe a quarter of what I need to care about a story. Maybe I will try to read it again down the road, but it is unlikely. ( )

Arthur Machen's short story "The Bowmen," was first published in a British newspaper in September 1914, not long after the start of The Great War/World War I. In the story, St. George and a band of angel archers, presumably shades of the archers of Agincourt, appear on the battlefield of Mons to defend desperate British soldiers under attack by Germans. Although a work of fiction, the tale was thought by many to be fact, particularly by clergymen who saw in the story evidence of divine intervention in a righteous cause. Before long the legend was being told by soldiers who had "witnessed" the apparitions, and by nurses and journalists who had heard it from wounded soldiers.

This slender volume, The Angels of Mons, is a reprint of Machen's original 1915 book of stories, which included "The Bowmen" and three other supernatural tales of the Great War. Also included is Machen's introduction to the 1915 book, in which he relates how his fictional tale became a legend. In addition, a postscript written by Machen discusses the phenomenon in light of a contemporary article called "The Angelic Leaders," and offers his views of how an entirely fictional tale came to be accepted as truth.

The other three ghostly tales in the book, "The Soldier's Rest," "The Monstrance," and "The Dazzling Light," are also well worth reading. Both "The Soldier's Rest" and "The Monstrance" relate tales of wartime horror, combined with the rather less horrifying presence of the supernatural, to focus on the moral challenges that soldiers face. "The Dazzling Light" is a story of supernatural foreshadowing.

Taken together, Machen's Great War ghost stories, which I find especially remarkable because they were published during the war, are a powerful and thought-provoking legacy of “the war to end all wars.”