scrapironflotilla:

tartapplesauce:

morepopcornplease:

quietblogoflurk:

I’ve seen some comments of Wonder Woman,
basically on the extent to which it is alternative history, if Wonder Woman’s
involvement in WW1 was hushed up, if it
could be hushed up, if the rumours of a superhuman warrior queen never
spread because the people she saved ended up dying, or if her involvement is
widely known, a historical fact, etc.

And it’s a cool question, and I hope people will
write the same quasi-historical, quasi-journalistic fics about her that they
wrote about Captain America.

At the same time, WW1 mythology was fucking
unbelievable. I’m not an expert, but I worked with someone who was, and I’m not
kidding, very bored but very scared people come up with some exceptionally
weird shit. Contemporary reporting of WW1 was already a mess of understatement
and overstatement. If you want to calm the panic on the home front, you’ll
write about how our soldiers laugh in the face of machine guns, and mustard gas
is just a minor inconvenience. If you want to motivate people, you’ll tell them
the enemy desecrates altars and murder babies for fun.  People were told conflicting things about the
confusing terror they experienced.

Partly as a result of this, partly as a result
of shock upon shock, people who were in the middle of it came up with the
weirdest shit, truly. There were tons of stories about stone statues on churches
who came to life, either to protect the inhabitants or to predict the end of
the war. Overall, very many things prophesied the end of the war: spontaneously
breaking glassware, blessed infants who spoke immediately after birth, all
sorts of dreams and visitations. A flying woman with a shield was not the
slightest bit out of place in the trenches. Catholics would probably assume she
was the Blessed Virgin Mary, some Brits would probably say she was Britannia
herself, and after the war was over, nobody would be quite sure if they really
did see her, or if they just really, really needed to see something to give
them the strength to walk out into No Man’s Land.

I am Catholic and I am HERE for SAINT DIANA. 

The Angels of Mons.

Started off as a fantasy story/propaganda piece, entitled “The Bowmen” by a writer named Arthur Machen who had written other fantasy/wartime propaganda stories.

This one, however, for whatever reason, took off big time.

People started swearing it was true; “friend of a friend” stories circulated (”My cousin told me that a nurse told her that a soldier invalided home from the trenches saw it all!”) and indeed Machen had a lot of trouble convincing people that no, it was only a story and no, it wasn’t based on any “true happening”.

So a battlefield story of a woman with a shield who couldn’t be killed by German bullets and fought for the British?  Completely in keeping with the temper of the times.

You’ve have those who said “This is only a story, just like the Angels of Mons” and those who said “Yes, you mean it’s real and is being hushed up by the government, just like the Angels”.

Myths & Legends of the First World War by James Hayward is a really good book on this topic. It covers the social context of the time, how and why rumours and myths like this spread and has a ton of other popular stories from the time like the Comrade in White (spoiler, it’s jesus), the Phantom Bowmen (which spawned the Angel of Mons) and the Crucified Canadian.

It also has stuff about the German Kadaververwertungsanstalt or Corpse Exploitation Establishment (which I really need to do a post about some time) and the rumours that it started.