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The experiences of an angelic presence seem to occur most often in moments of heightened awareness -- when everyday life has already been disrupted by some pressing fear or obstacle. Though often cast as rescuers, angels also seem to intervene to remove not the danger but the fear of it. Among the most memorable stories of World War I is the tale of the Angel of Mons. In August 1914 during one of the first battles of the war, British and French troops were retreating from a German assault. As Burnham tells the story, the wounded soldiers were taken to field hospitals where one, then another and another, told the nurses of seeing angels on the field. The French saw the Archangel Michael, riding a white horse. The British said it was St. George, "a tall man with yellow hair in golden armor, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open, crying 'Victory!' " The nurses reported a startling serenity in the dying men, as though they had nothing to fear.
Some soldiers later speculated that their exhaustion had brought on hallucinations. Others thought it was mass hysteria, the result of a battle that was supposed to be easily won by the allies but had turned into a rout. But later stories emerged from the German side of the same incident. The Kaiser's soldiers said they found themselves "absolutely powerless to proceed . . . and their horses turned around sharply and fled." The Germans said the allied position was held by thousands of troops -- though in fact there were only two regiments there.
The gift of comfort is a powerful theme in angel stories; whether on the battlefield, in the hospital wards, or at the bedside of the dying, angels are traditionally portrayed as bearing souls away to heaven. They reassure both the patients and those they love that whatever will come next is not to be * dreaded. "When Christians die," Graham writes, "an angel will be there to comfort us, to give us peace and joy even at that most critical hour."
Melissa Deal Forth, 40, a filmmaker in Atlanta, will never forget the day her husband Chris Deal died: it was exactly one year after he had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The last months had been gruesome: treatments that could not save him, nights when she could not sleep. But she was sleeping soundly at his hospital bedside on the morning of Jan. 4 when Chris managed, somehow, without being seen or heard, to maneuver himself and his portable IV pole around her, out of the room and past the nurse's station with its 360 degrees view of the ward. All Melissa remembers is being shaken awake at 3 a.m. by a frantic nurse who was saying something about not being able to find Chris.
Melissa hit the floor running. As she approached the elevator she happened to glance toward the chapel, where she glimpsed Chris sitting with a man she had never seen before. Frightened and furious, she burst through the door, firing off questions. "Where have you been? Are you okay?"