Firearms advocates fight state restrictions on the most popular rifle in the U.S.
A showdown over America’s bestselling rifle is heading to the Supreme Court this fall: Gun-rights groups are asking the court to consider whether the AR-15 and other rifles described as assault weapons are deserving of constitutional protection.
Should the conservative Supreme Court take up the case in its new term, it could put some of the gun-control movement’s biggest victories in jeopardy.
Nine Democratic states and Washington, D.C., have restrictions on the purchase or possession of AR-15 rifles and other firearms labeled assault weapons, with many enacted after a 20-year-old gunman used an AR-15-style rifle to kill more than two dozen first-graders and faculty at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
The high court in a landmark 2008 opinion said law-abiding Americans have a right under the Second Amendment to protect themselves with handguns.
But justices have never said if that right extends to the AR-15.
A makeshift memorial for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/AP
“The court has yet to weigh in squarely on what kinds of guns can be prohibited,” said Joseph Blocher, a law professor at Duke University and co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. “These cases are a lot harder than either side makes them out to be,” he said.
The court in its 2008 opinion said an individual’s right to bear arms is limited to weapons used for self-defense and other lawful purposes, and suggested that dangerous and unusual weapons designed for military use—such as the fully automatic military M16 rifle—fall outside Second Amendment protections.
The ‘perfect vehicle’
An August federal appeals court ruling upholding Maryland’s AR-15 ban offers the Supreme Court a prime chance to enter the fray.
The 10-5 decision by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the most substantial pronouncement from lower courts on the right to own an AR-15 since the Supreme Court expanded Second Amendment protections two years ago in a decision that said gun regulations are valid only if they are consistent with historical precedent.
The Fourth Circuit’s entire roster of active judges heard the case. Two-thirds of the bench agreed that the AR-15 was a combat weapon too destructive and ill-suited for self-defense to be treated like handguns.
The majority opinion by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said the AR-15’s fearsome firepower makes it “ill-suited for the vast majority of self-defense situations in which civilians find themselves.”
He described it as a military-style weapon best suited for “wreaking death and destruction,” quoting a trauma surgeon who likened getting struck in the liver with an AR-15 to a watermelon exploding onto concrete.
“Compared to a handgun, the AR-15 is heavier, longer, harder to maneuver in tight quarters, less readily accessible in an emergency, and more difficult to operate with one hand,” he wrote.
A person wears an NRA hat in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.Photo: stefani reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
Students fire AR-15s during a shooting course at Boondocks Firearms Academy in Jackson, Miss.Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
Five judges signed onto a lengthy dissent that accused the majority of disparaging the weapon and its millions of law-abiding owners.
Judge Julius Richardson, a President Donald Trump appointee who wrote the dissent, wrote that AR-15 rounds are more likely to fragment and wobble passing through walls compared with handguns, diminishing the risk to bystanders. He said the rifle’s accuracy only enhances its suitability for self-defense.
“For these reasons, law enforcement has long found the AR-15 to be an effective weapon for urban building raids and hostage situations,” he wrote. He also cited a 2021 survey of AR-15-style rifle owners about their reasons for purchasing the weapon. More than 60% said home defense was a reason.
The gun-rights groups that brought suit against Maryland have asked the Supreme Court to review the Fourth Circuit decision. They submitted a petition to the court last week that said the case was the “perfect vehicle” to resolve questions over the right to own AR-15s.
In July, the Supreme Court declined to review a similar case on Illinois’s AR-15 ban. Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, urged the court to clarify what makes a weapon dangerous and unusual.
But legal observers say the Supreme Court is more likely to take up the case out of Maryland. The lower-court litigation, unlike in the Illinois case, is completed with a final judgment against the plaintiffs and amassed a more extensive evidentiary record. The Fourth Circuit ruling also carries more weight coming from the full bench instead of a typical three-judge panel.
Other appeals courts are currently weighing AR-15 restrictions enacted in New Jersey, California and Connecticut.
A notorious gun
No other firearm has so divided Americans. Gun owners swear by them. The weapons fire rounds with smooth ease at ferocious speeds. They are lightweight, highly customizable, reliable and built to last—costing about as much as a laptop computer. U.S. civilians own approximately 20 million AR-15s, according to industry estimates.
The ubiquity of the rifles and owner survey data are helpful evidence for gun-rights plaintiffs, said Dave Kopel, a Second Amendment scholar who has argued that AR-15s should be protected. But enough justices have to be convinced that the rifles aren’t super-dangerous compared with smaller firearms, said Kopel.
While handguns have been used more often in mass shootings, AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles were used in four of the five deadliest mass shootings in American history, according to data from Hamline University’s Violence Prevention Project.
A body is covered with a sheet after a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017.Photo: Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun/AP
In the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, a single man perched in a hotel suite rained more than 1,000 rounds onto a country music festival, killing 60 and wounding hundreds. It was also the weapon of choice for the gunman who attempted to assassinate Trump.
Proponents of AR-15 bans question how often the rifles have saved lives.
“I’ve never seen a single case where it was at all clear that having an AR-15 as opposed to a handgun led to a better defensive outcome,” said Stanford law professor John Donohue, a gun-policy researcher.
COUGAR ATTACKS ARE RARE BUT IT’S
BEST TO BE PREPARED ANYWAY
WRITTEN BY DAVE WORKMAN
Dave knows mountain lion attacks are very rare events, but he
thinks 3 pounds of caution, in this case a Ruger in .45 Colt,
are worth an emergency room cure.
As this was being written, authorities in Jefferson County, Washington, on the north side of the Olympics National Park, were looking for a mountain lion that had attacked an 8-year-old girl, fortunately inflicting only minor injuries.
They were hoping to kill it (“euthanize” seems to be a politically correct term meant to spare the sensitivities of people who are always looking to be offended) and make sure the cougar didn’t attack anyone else.
The attack made national news and served as a reminder to those of us living in the West to be prepared. When they happen, wild animal attacks are sudden and swift, something cougars are very good at.
The July attack could have been much worse. Thankfully, this little girl has a courageous mom who was able to frighten the big cat away. Screaming and yelling can scare a predator away, but it’s good to have a backup plan.
Longtime readers will recall my past references to a guy who was killed by a cougar only a few miles from my front door back in May 2018. Anyone questioning why people carry sidearms whenever they step off the pavement just “ain’t from around here,” or they have a serious misunderstanding of just how “wild” wildlife can be.
On his woodcutting forays, Dave usually carries a S&W Model 19 in
.357 Magnum. Earlier in the spring about 200 yards from where he’s
standing in this photo, he found a cougar track which had been
rained on pretty hard a few days before.
Mountain lions have killed at least five people in California and one person in Oregon. Wolves have killed people in Alaska and Canada, and anyone who has read Alaska Bear Tales by Larry Kaniut knows about people on the losing end of bear attacks.
Last summer, the Forest Service closed a popular campground near my place when too many careless campers left food on their picnic tables and black bears invited themselves to breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Gun are Handy Tools
Longtime pal and former Washington state legislator Brian Blake sent me a message two days after the cougar attack. He lives at the south end of the Olympic Peninsula. He’s a shooter and hunter and has the outdoor savvy one would expect of anyone growing up in that region.
His one-sentence observation about the incident said it all: “At this point, folks need to be armed and prepared.”
Blake is no alarmist. He would never advocate shoot-on-sight predator control. He frequently hikes with his search hounds, and I know for certain on most occasions, he’s armed, because his handgun often shows up in his social media photos.
In the wilderness, a gun is a piece of emergency survival equipment. For more than 10 years, ever since then-President Barack Obama signed the legislation, it has been legal to carry a defensive firearm in national parks, so long as doing so complies with local laws and regulations. It has always been legal to carry guns in national forests.
However, a message from the National Park Service notes, “In areas administered by the National Park Service, an individual can possess a firearm if that individual is not otherwise prohibited by law from possessing the firearm and if the possession of the firearm complies with the laws of the state where the park area is located … Visitors should not consider firearms as protection from wildlife.”
I’m not sure why the NPS felt the need to say that because if ever there was a good reason for self-defense in the wilds, being mauled belongs at the top of the list.
There is a back story, of course. In 1996, thanks to an emotion-laden campaign, Washington voters banned hound hunting for bears and cougars. Over the past 27 years, the mountain lion population has gradually expanded. More people have moved to, or at least vacation in, the Evergreen State. Human-animal interaction is inevitable.
The Kitty Gritty
Let’s cut to the chase. If you’re going to pack hardware in predator country, it needs to be capable of stopping something literally in its tracks, and you must be competent with it. Somebody’s .380 pocket gun just won’t cut it.
Chest rigs are popular with hikers who carry guns. This one holds a 10mm Glock.
Carry in a holster, which makes the gun accessible instantaneously. Chest rigs, including the old GI shoulder holster, are practical for this endeavor. With a chest rig, the handgun is right there, unimpeded by the shoulder straps or the waist strap of a backpack, and it’s secure.
Despite reports that people have used 9mm pistols to stop Alaska grizzly bears, it wouldn’t be my first choice. I’d opt for any revolver chambered in a serious caliber, and the minimum I recommend is the .357 Magnum, stoked with 158-grain full house loads. There are so many gun choices, they’re too numerous to mention, but pick one from Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Taurus or Colt, and you will be well-equipped.
Moving up the scale, such offerings as the 10mm Auto, .41 Magnum, .44 Special, .44 Magnum, .45 ACP or .45 Colt all make sense. Then, there are the really big bores in .480 Ruger, .460 and .500 Smith & Wesson, and let’s not forget the .454 Casull. The common denominator with these handguns/calibers is energy and a large frontal mass.
Let’s briefly talk about energy, which is the fight-stopping part of the equation. I did a little homework and perused some online ballistics for comparison purposes.
From left, loads in .45 Colt, .41 Magnum and .357 Magnum. All are proven predator poison.
A 158-grain .357 Magnum can clock 1,240 fps at the muzzle with 539 foot-pounds of energy, while there’s a 180-grainer capable of 1,400 fps with 783 ft-lb. of energy. Not bad.
I found a 10mm Auto load pushing a 180-grain FMJ bullet at 1,300 fps with 708 ft-lb. of energy. That’s going to get something’s attention.
The .41 Magnum, loaded with one of my favorite pills, a 210-grain JHP, can leave the muzzle at 1,560 fps with 1,135 ft-lb. of energy, while a .44 Magnum pushing the popular 240-grain JHP can generate 1,475 fps at the muzzle with 1,160 ft-lb. of energy, and those numbers translate to terminal performance.
By comparison, I found one .44 Special load launching a 200-grain SWC HP at 870 fps that delivers 336 ft-lb. of energy, and a .45 ACP load with a 230-grain FMJ will leave the muzzle at 835 fps with only 356 ft-lb. of energy. Not the best, but still capable.
Then comes a .45 Colt offering pushing a typical 250-grain JHP at 900 fps with a reported 450 ft-lb. of energy. That’s definitely going to smart!
Bumping things up considerably, there’s a 260-grain .460 S&W Magnum load traveling at 2,000 fps from the muzzle with a reported 2,309 ft-lb. of energy, while a .480 Ruger offering pushing a 325-grain JHP moves at a reported 1,350 fps and delivers 1,315 ft-lb. of energy. We’re talking down for the count.
Step up to the .454 Casull — a cartridge I find to be brutal in some guns — has one load launching a 240-grain JHP at 1,900 fps with 1,923 ft-lb. of energy, and lastly, I found a .500 S&W Magnum offering with a 300-grain projectile listed at 2,075 fps and an awesome 2,868 ft-lb. of energy. My cousin uses a term which applies: “Splatto!”
However (comma)
Now we enter the realm of practicality. Unless you’re a great big muscular person, lugging around a .460, 480, .454 or .500 around on the trail will be exhausting and most folks will shun the idea.
This stainless Mountain Gun in .44 Magnum is
a good choice in predator country.
S&W has offered an N-frame Mountain Gun and a couple of other lightweight offerings, and one can find other choices at gun shops, pawn shops or gun shows, often for decent prices.
Having killed deer with handguns, I can attest big bores do the job. The key factor here is having the gun at the time of an attack. I never tramp the woods anymore without a firearm, and I’ve had some interesting encounters where the presence of a gun was definitely reassuring.
I have actually seen mountain lions in the wild; brief glimpses of course because they are elusive and cunning. As once was explained to me by a biologist, a predator spends all of its waking hours looking for its next meal, and some people evidently look like food.
Last Resort
Nobody I know, or know of, wants to kill an attacking animal in self-defense. Of course, none of my acquaintances want to be the main course at dinnertime, either.
Nobody wants to dispatch a wild animal in self-defense, but if an
emergency arises, it’s best to have a tool at hand. Dave used this .41
Magnum to dispatch a heavy mule deer buck, so he’s confident
it will perform if necessary.
What’s the “worst-case” scenario? Look up the name Timothy Treadwell. Known widely as a self-styled conservationist and environmentalist, Treadwell spent years in Alaska bear country, filming, doing his version of research, and occasionally annoying some people. He did care about big Alaska brown bears. However, he and a companion were killed — devoured by a big bruin. He didn’t have a gun because apparently didn’t like them, and the wrong animal strolled into the neighborhood.
The fellow killed near my community was done in by a healthy cougar. The animal that attacked the little girl was apparently in good health as well. As reported by NBC News and its Seattle affiliate KING, a spokesman in the Olympic National Park acknowledged the attack in his region was “a sign of very, very unusual behavior.” He’s right, of course. Mountain lion attacks don’t happen often, but when they do, someone gets hurt.
If you head West for vacation or to live, grow some common sense fast. The outdoors is an unforgiving place, beautiful and magnificent in its grandeur, but with the capacity to be suddenly ugly, unfriendly and downright deadly.
If you absolutely have to shoot, make it count. This is not catch-and-release.
As I noted right up front, mountain lion attacks are very rare, but they only need to happen once to someone to leave a lasting impression.
Some Tommies swore it had been St. George, the warrior saint of England. Others said the “Angels of Mons” might have been St. Michael, since he carried a gleaming sword. A few said they couldn’t tell, but it had definitely been an angel, maybe more than one. Some men were sure they had seen three wonderful, tall figures towering above the smoke and dust of the battlefield. For others it had been a brilliant light, a golden aura against a brilliant sky, or a cloud in which indistinct but heroic figures had come and gone, aided by phantom archers from the olden days of the English warrior-kings. Whatever it was, the soldiers agreed, it had saved their lives. No amount of civilian scoffing would ever change that.
Skeptics back in England and America did scoff, but that was to be expected. Well-meaning clergymen and physicians made wise and condescending remarks about hysteria, battle fatigue, and fear. Others shook their heads knowingly and tut-tutted about superstition and overactive imaginations. Perhaps that was what had caused these “visions,” as the newspapers called them. But the naysayers and doubters hadn’t been there. They hadn’t fought against enormous odds, with comrades dying next to them, baked by a remorseless sun and drenched with rain. And they hadn’t walked the dreadful road west from Mons itself.
It was 1914 when the Angels of Mons were first reported by World War I soldiers. Europe flamed and thundered with the red ruin of war. The roads of France and Belgium swarmed with endless columns of dusty infantry, miles of horse-drawn guns and wagons, and miserable hordes of Belgian civilians trying to move what remained of their lives in carts. Over the miles, from the Swiss frontier to the Belgian fortress of Liege, the armies clashed and the casualties mounted. In those terrible days of August heat, the powerful German right wing swung like a great fist west and southwest from the Belgian frontier and struck deep into France.
The German Offensive Kept the British and French Guessing
While the French threw away much of the flower of their army in head-on assaults against the German forces, the great right hook of the German offensive struck the Allied left, falling on a segment of the French army and the small but doughty British Expeditionary Force. The BEF comprised much of Britain’s tiny regular army, a minuscule force of four infantry divisions and five cavalry brigades when compared to the multitude of German army corps advancing on Paris.
The BEF moved east toward the advancing Germans, marching across storied ground past Malplaquet, where Marlborough had whipped the French two centuries before. Up ahead was the field called Waterloo. Nobody was quite sure where the Germans’ main stroke would fall.
The first heavy fighting swirled around the Belgian city of Mons, a dreary industrial area studded with gray villages, dismal slag heaps, and shabby factory buildings. There, on Sunday, August 23, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps took on the German juggernaut along the Conde Canal. The slimy, stinking 60-foot waterway was not much of an obstacle, but it would slow down the Germans and make them optimum targets.
Smith-Dorrien’s two divisions, stretched thin over 21 miles, found themselves attacked by two German corps, with another closely approaching and still another on the way. Although the British were badly outnumbered, their massed fire stopped the Germans cold.
In the morning, its right flank now uncovered by the French retreat, the BEF retreated, tramping down the long, hot road toward the west. Back they went in the heat and dust, occasionally turning to bloody the German corps pursuing them. Again and again the BEF’s murderous musketry reached through the shimmering heat of the French fields to drop graycoated German infantry in heaps hundreds of yards away. But there were simply too many enemy infantrymen and too much artillery. The BEF fell back from Mons step by grudging step, leaving behind them more graves, more old friends buried far from England.
The worst of the fighting was around Le Cateau, fought on the anniversary of Edward III’s great victory over the French at Crecy. It was not a place the II Corps commander would have chosen to fight, but Smith-Dorrien wisely elected to make a stand rather than try to disengage and withdraw in the face of overwhelming numbers. His men were tired, time was short, and the roads were clogged with transport columns and hordes of refugees.
As a soldier reloads his weapon over a wounded comrade, the Angels of Mons shield him from harm.
The odds were 4-to-1 against the BEF in infantry, plus the usual German superiority in guns. All through the morning of August 26 and into the afternoon, Smith-Dorrien’s troops held up the German steamroller with their deadly riflefire. With the enemy lapping about his flanks, Smith-Dorrien passed the order for a fighting withdrawal.
“The Germans May be Able to Kill Them, but by God They Can’t Beat Them”
That night the BEF fell back in darkness and driving rain. Many of the men had reached the end of their endurance; some had not eaten in 24 hours. Still they slogged on. A British division commander, tears in his eyes, paid them the ultimate compliment: “The Germans may be able to kill them, but by God they can’t beat them.” But the Germans were coming on in such overwhelming numbers that rifles and courage could not hold them any longer. It was then, in a time of deadly crisis, that the Angels of Mons, of wonderful tales of heavenly help, began to appear.
In one action during the long retreat, an understrength British battalion, about to be overrun by masses of German infantry, became aware of a shadowy army fighting beside them, an army of bowmen of the days of Agincourt, five centuries gone. These phantom men-at-arms cried aloud to St. George, and their swift arrows darkened the sky. A great voice was heard to thunder over the din of battle, “Array, Array!” German prisoners taken in the action said they were bewildered that their British opponents had reverted to wearing armor and shooting arrows.
In the night of the 26th, the third day of the retreat west through Belgium, weary British soldiers saw tall, unearthly figures materialize in the gloom above the German lines. They were winged like angels, and as they hovered in the gathering darkness, the Germans inexplicably halted and the British slipped away to safety.
During the retreat, some soldiers swore that they had seen the face of the patron saint of England. A wounded Lancashire Fusilier asked a nurse for a picture or medal of Saint George because, he said, he had seen the saint leading the British troops at Vitry-le-Francois.
A wounded gunner confirmed his story. He described the saint the same way the fusilier had—a tall, yellow-haired man on a white horse, wearing golden armor and wielding a sword. Other soldiers agreed that he looked just like his image on the gold sovereigns of the day.
A story appeared in the North American Review in August 1915 about a soldier who had memorized the motto inscribed on the plates in a London restaurant. Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius it read, “May St. George be a present help to England.” Later, in Belgium, the soldier prayed for the saint’s help against the waves of German attackers and was rewarded by a host of shining bowmen, who charged the Germans with shouts of “Harrow! Harrow! Monseigneur St. George, Knight of Heaven, Sweet Saint, succor us!” The arrows of the phantom archers cut down the enemy en masse, and the German General Staff, finding the bodies of hundreds of their men lying on the battlefield with no discernible wounds, came to the conclusion that the British had used poisonous gas.
Saved by a The Angels of Mons: a Miracle of God
Three soldiers were interviewed separately by the vicar of a church near Keswick, in the north of England. All agreed that a miracle had saved them from a massive German force about to overrun their unit. As the hard-pressed British troops prepared to fight to the end, the Germans suddenly recoiled. German prisoners explained that the attack was aborted because they saw strong British reinforcements coming up. In fact, the ground behind the British unit was empty. The men interviewed had no doubt who authored their salvation: “It was God did it,” they said.
One lance-corporal told his nurse of the appearance of angels during the Mons retreat. He could see, he said, “quite plainly in mid-air a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon nor were there any clouds. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the center having what looked like outspread wings. The other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the center one. They were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour. All the men with me saw them. I have a record of fifteen years’ good service, and I should be very sorry to make fool of myself by telling a story merely to please anyone.”
The soldier also told his story to another woman, a Red Cross hospital superintendent who interviewed the man and believed him implicitly. So did Harold Begbie, a writer on the supernatural, who related this tale in his 1916 book, On the Side of the Angels. Begbie was impressed with the soldier’s transparent honesty. Begbie also interviewed another soldier who spoke of a “bright light in the sky.” Still another told Begbie that he had heard men in France talking about the celestial apparitions. “He was,” Begbie wrote, “definitely conscious of a supernatural presence.” The soldier in question was a Grenadier Guards NCO, hardly a type given to hysteria and delusion.
British infantry stand in awe as the Bowmen of Mons wreak ghostly havoc on the enemy.
Another tale was told of a Coldstream Guards unit lost in the gloom of early morning. One man saw a glow in the darkness, a glow that became the figure of a female angel, dressed in white, with a gold band around her hair. Gesturing to the tired guardsmen, she led them through the night to a sunken road, a way out of danger that Coldstream patrols had not been able to find—and afterwards could not find again on any map.
An Englishwoman nursing in France wrote of a wounded Lancashire Fusilier who asked her for a religious medal. Was he Catholic, she asked? No, he said, he was a Methodist, but he had seen St. George mounted on a white horse, leading the British into action against overwhelming odds. “The next minute,” he said, “comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears off there’s a tall man with yellow hair, in golden armor on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he was saying, ‘Come on, boys! I’ll put the kibosh on the devils.’ Then, before you could say ‘knife,’ the Germans had turned, and we were after them, fighting like ninety.”
Accounts of heavenly aid abounded in Britain. The magazine Light ran a story entitled “The Invisible Allies” in October 1914, and followed up another column the next April reporting that during the retreat from Mons several officers and men had seen a cloud appear between them and the Germans.
The Catholic paper The Universe reported an account from a Catholic officer in which an isolated British party decided to charge the enemy head-on. Running into the open, somebody yelled, “St. George for England in the good old style,” and all around the British appeared a spectral company of archers. The British carried the German trench, and a German prisoner later asked the officer who the “officer on a great white horse” had been, for the German riflemen had not been able to hit him.
Were the Angels of Mons an Angelic Army, or Mass Hysteria?
The parish magazine of All Saints, Clifton, reported that two officers had seen a troop of angels between their men and the enemy. The same magazine told the story of another soldier who had seen the same troop of angels standing between him and onrushing German cavalry. The Germans’ horses had panicked and run uncontrollably, allowing the British soldiers to reach safety. A soldier of the Cheshire Regiment saw the angels too, and watched the German cavalry horses panic and bolt before their terrifying presence.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1915 more stories surfaced. The “luminous cloud” between Germans and British appeared again, and the Bath Society Paper quoted an extract from an officer’s letter: “I myself saw the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans during the retreat from Mons. We heard the German cavalry tearing after us and ran for a place where we thought a stand could be made. We saw between us and the enemy a whole troop of Angels.”
A soldier of the West Riding Regiment told a group of Canadians that he had actually seen the angel, and a wounded soldier described to a young woman the same thing: an angel, wings spread, standing between his unit and the Germans. The woman, unconvinced, repeated the story later, and a British colonel told her simply: “Young lady, the thing happened. You need not be incredulous. I saw it myself.”
Captain Hayward, an intelligence officer with British I Corps, referred to the Angels of Mons as “four or five wonderful beings,” robed in white, who faced the German lines in brilliant sunlight with hands upraised to halt the advancing enemy. He referred to another occasion on which “the sky opened with a bright shining light and figures of luminous beings appeared.”
A Weymouth clergyman read a letter from a soldier who had slogged through the Mons retreat. The man said he and his comrades had been trapped in a quarry by German cavalry, when suddenly angels lined the edge of the quarry and the Germans broke into panicked flight.
Those who scoffed at tales of St. George, angels, and phantom bowmen were quick to point out that it was difficult to obtain firsthand, authenticated evidence, which was certainly true.
So what inspired the stories of angels, spectral archers, the mighty figure of St. George? Was it hysteria, fatigue, fear, wishful thinking? Perhaps. But it is worth remembering that the men who told these stories, however exhausted, were tough, experienced soldiers used to such hardships. And a great many of them saw identical sights at different times and in different places. Maybe some of the stories were invented. Maybe all those who said they saw a miracle were simply hallucinating, as the scoffers said. Maybe it was, after all, merely mass hysteria.
