Angel of Mons, the second in Iain Landles’ controversial War Trilogy, is a dark, stylistic piece inspired by two famous myths of the First World War.
 
The play centres on a group of soldiers under constant artillery attack with an overbearing sergeant and an inept Captain. Into the chaos falls the Angel Gabriel, but his message of hope is lost amidst the slaughter-strewn battlefields of The Great War. In the face of this attempt at salvation, a hardened, more cynical Jesus arrives to view Man’s progress and is forced to take an eye for an eye.
 
The first myth that inspired the play was that of the appearance of The Angel of Mons above the retreating British Expeditionary Force that scared the advancing Germans into halting a seemingly decisive attack.  Whilst it later emerged that a journalist had propagated this myth, the Germans (according to their own reports) did stop fighting for no apparent reason. The second myth concerns a Canadian soldier who was allegedly found crucified with bayonets in a German trench on the Somme in 1915.