Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  The first, from August 1914, was that the BEF had suffered extinction-level casualties in France. The story spread almost as soon as British troops started to disembark in France on the 8th, and rapidly gained currency on the Home Front to include fearful losses and packed hospital ships, as well as German victories and insurrection in Paris. On August 14th, London diarist Michael McDonagh noted that ‘the most disquieting stories’ had been circulating for several days, including the secret nocturnal return of ‘thousands’ of British casualties to hospitals in London, where the staff had been sworn to ‘keep their mouths shut’. Also current were stories of a great naval battle off the coast of Holland, said by some to have resulted in catastrophic losses for the Royal Navy and the death of Admiral Jellicoe. The dockyards at Portsmouth and Chatham were said to be crowded with disabled war vessels. None of this was true, but on August 15th the Press Bureau felt obliged to circulate a statement:

  The public are warned against placing the slightest reliance on the many rumours that are current daily regarding alleged victories and defeats, and the arrival of wounded men or disabled ships in this country. They are without exception baseless.

  But still the rumours grew. The Reverend Andrew Clark recorded a variant at the end of the month:

  August 31st: The morning postman recorded a great scare in Chelmsford on Sunday. An Ichabod telegram had been received there (founded on the reports with which The Times Sunday issue had been hoaxed, as I judged) telling that the British army had perished and that France was beaten. The ‘wire’ was so full of despair that Chelmsford people could not take their tea.

  On September 1st the Daily News reported on a ‘riot of rumours’ from France, including ‘weird’ reports from a returning British holiday-maker named Angell:

  Among the English troops there were rumours just as weird. A very widespread one was that the defence of the Liège forts was not made by Belgians at all, but by English soldiers dressed in Belgian uniforms who had been sent over some months ago.

  Some rumours were witty, such as that which held that the British Government paid rent to the French for the use of their trenches, and that the men of the Machine Gun Corps routinely fired off belts of ammunition to boil water in the cooling jacket of the Vickers gun for making tea. The Reverend Clark notes another unlikely tale in 1914, this time regarding glistening silk ties worn by officers:

  November 9th: The Colonel told Mrs Gale that the reason why so many officers were picked off by the Germans is because of their silk ties. These officers, to prevent them being conspicuous objects, were forbidden to wear belts in action. But while the mens’ tunics were buttoned close up under the chin, the tunics of the officers had a slight collar opening at the neck, and behind that opening a silk tie. Although this tie was khaki-colour, the glistening of the silk stuff was noticeable, even at a distance.

  More sinister was the legend of the elusive German officer-spy, said to appear in British trenches shortly before an attack was launched. The figure was often described as being dressed in the uniform of a major, but tended to arouse suspicion on account of some small but significant sartorial faux pas. From where he came, or to where he returned, was never established, and in some respects this mythic figure can be seen as an opposite to the benign Comrade in White, examined in Chapter Three. Edmund Blunden, in Undertones of War, recalled the following encounter:

  A stranger in a soft cap and a trench coat approached, and asked me the way to the German lines. This visitor facing the east was white-faced as a ghost, and I liked neither his soft cap nor the mackintosh nor the right hand concealed under his coat. I, too, felt myself grow pale, and I thought it was as well to direct him down the communication trench . . . at that juncture deserted; he scanned me, deliberately, and quickly went on. Who he was, I have never explained to myself; but in two minutes the barrage was due, and his chances of doing us harm (I thought he must be a spy) were all gone.

  A dubious major was encountered by machine gunner George Coppard during the Battle of Loos in 1915:

  I remember during the Loos battle seeing a very military-looking major complete with a monocle, and wearing a white collar. He asked me the way to Hay Alley and spoke good English. I never suspected that anything was wrong, through I was puzzled about his collar, as all our officers were then wearing khaki collars. Shortly after there was a scare, and officers dashed about trying to find the gallant major, but he had vanished.

  Some of these ‘officer spies’ may well have been official war artists, whose general service insignia and propensity to sketch regularly landed them in trouble with fighting troops. Yet another suspicious major is retailed by Reginald Grant, a Canadian artillery sergeant, whose embroidered memoir SOS Stand To! was published in New York in 1918. As well as recording several tall spy stories, including the shooting of the station master at Poperinge for signalling to the German lines, and treachery by Belgian women with carrier pigeons, Grant tells of two officers who appeared at his battery position, some distance behind the front line:

  It was during the stay of my battery on the Lens-Arras road, during the Vimy Ridge preparation, that I again personally encountered Fritz in the form of his spy system. One night after the guns had been oiled and prepared for their next job, and we were all busy cleaning up the ammunition for the work in hand, I was accosted by a couple of British officers, a Captain and a Major . . . There was something that told me all was not well with these men . . .

  The very next morning after inspection, orders were read and in the instructions were explicit descriptions of two British officers who were German agents and who were making the rounds of the lines, picking up information wherever they could . . . The following night they were spotted in a French estaminet, by a bunch of sharp-eyed Tommies . . . Like a flash both men drew their revolvers, but before they had a chance to use them, the entire bunch was on top of them, and it was a somewhat mussed up Major and Captain that appeared before the OC at the headquarters of the Tommies who sleuthed them.

  Another trench myth concerned the supposed existence of bands of lawless deserters in No Man’s Land. According to Osbert Sitwell, the outlaws included French, Italian, German, Austrian, Australian, Canadian and English personnel:

  During four long years, furthermore, the sole internationalism – if it existed – had been that of deserters from all the warring nations . . . Outlawed, these men lived – at least, they lived! – in caves and grottoes under certain parts of the front line . . . They would issue forth, it was said, from their secret lairs after each of the interminable check-mate battles, to rob the dying of their few possessions – treasures such as boots or iron-rations – and leave them dead. Were these bearded figures, shambling in rags and patched uniforms . . . a myth created by suffering among the wounded, as a result of pain, privation and exposure, or did they exist? It is difficult to tell. At any rate, the story was widely believed among the troops, who maintained that the General Staff could find no way of dealing with these bandits until the war was over, and that in the end they had to be gassed.

  A cavalry officer, Ardern Beaman, told a similar story in 1920 in his memoir The Squadroon. In ‘The Devastated Area’, a chapter dealing with a fruitless search for an escaped German prisoner in the spring of 1917, Beaman describes an encounter with an army salvage unit at work on the battlefields of the Somme:

  At Fresnes on the borders of this horrid desolation, we met a Salvage Company at work. They told us that we were the first people they had seen since they had been there, and they laughed at our mission. That warren of trenches and dugouts extended for untold miles, and we might as well look for a needle in a haystack. They warned us, if we insisted on going further in, not to let any man go singly, but only in strong parties, as the Golgotha was peopled with wild men, British, French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead, and who came out at nights to plunder and kill.

  In the night, an officer said, mingled with t
he snarling of the carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and rifle shots coming from that awful wilderness, as though the bestial denizens were fighting amongst themselves; and none of the Salvage Company ever ventured beyond the confines of their camp after the sun had set. Once they had put out, as a trap, a basket containing food, tobacco and a bottle of whisky. But the following morning they found the bait untouched, and a note in the basket: ‘Nothing doing!’ We proceeded on our way very much interested in this queer story.

  The myth of the wild deserters continued to strike a chord long after the end of the war, and in 1985 formed the basis of the novel No Man’s Land, by Reginald Hill. The theme was also woven into the fabric of the acclaimed Australian television war drama, Anzacs.

  The use of Golgotha as a metaphor for the searing brutality of war, and of the enemy, reached its apex in the myth of the Crucified Canadian. In the middle of May 1915, just weeks after the first use of poison gas by the Germans at Ypres, and coinciding neatly with the sinking of the Lusitania and the Bryce Report, the Allied press became briefly preoccupied with a gruesome atrocity story which had already gained wide currency at the Front. In a new twist to an existing myth concerning atrocities against Belgian civilians, it was said that in April a Canadian soldier had been found crucified near Ypres. The charge of crucifixion served to underline the ruthless actions of a Godless foe who would stop at nothing, not even the most painful form of killing devised in 2,000 years. The popularity of the Canadian story also coincided with the resurrection of The Bowmen at Mons as an angelic host, and the arrival of the Christlike Comrade in White on the battlefields of Flanders and France.

  In fact the allegation was not new. Suggestions that a British officer had been crucified and set alight near Le Cateau in September 1914 were already in circulation, while Ian Hay had offered a circumstantial description of the crucifixion of a wounded British soldier by Uhlans in the First Hundred Thousand, his popular but semi-fictionalized tribute to Kitchener’s New Armies. Neither story made much headway, however, and both were probably disbelieved, or else lost in the deluge of similar atrocity stories which flooded back across the Channel during the first months of the war. The fact that the alleged crucifixion of a Canadian soldier in April 1915 immediately became headline news around the world stands as compelling evidence that it was actively promoted – and probably invented – by official sources as a military counterpart to the Lusitania tragedy. The first report to appear in the British press was run by The Times on May 10th:

  Last week a large number of Canadian soldiers wounded in the fighting round Ypres arrived at the base hospital at Versailles. They all told the story of how one of their officers had been crucified by the Germans. He had been pinned to a wall by bayonets thrust through his hands and feet, another bayonet had then been driven through his throat, and, finally, he was riddled with bullets. The wounded Canadians said that the Dublin Fusiliers had seen this done with their own eyes, and that they had heard the officers of the Dublin Fusiliers talking about it.

  The following day the Toronto Star published a front page report beneath the byline Windermere, which told of a Canadian sergeant clamped to a tree by his arms and legs, and bayoneted 60 times. The story, said to have provoked a ‘great, sullen anger’ amongst the soldiery, came second-hand from a witness who had died in the arms of a Red Cross volunteer:

  C.J.C. Clayton, a New Zealander, who is serving with the British Red Cross and is now wounded, brings a message from Captain R.A.S. Allen of the fifth Canadian Battalion, who comes from Vancouver, and who died of wounds in a hospital in Boulogne May 2, confirming the horrible story of the crucifixion of a Canadian sergeant by the Germans. Clayton says . . .

  ‘Allen went on to declare that he and a medical officer, major, and others all signed a sworn statement attesting the truth of a detailed record of the crucifixion. A Canadian sergeant was tied up by the arms and legs to a tree and pierced sixty times by German bayonets.’

  Clayton says the sergeant’s name was given him by Allen, but in the confusion of wounding he cannot now find it . . .

  The same Star dispatch also carried a paragraph from the Paris correspondent of the Morning Post, which reported a rumour current among Canadian soldiers about a sergeant who had been crucified with bayonets, this time to a door:

  Wounded Canadians here are all certain that the enemy is particularly vindictive towards them, as the Germans have been furious that the Canadians did not stay in Canada instead of coming over to help England. The Canadians are all firmly of the belief that a Canadian soldier was crucified. They assert they heard it from officers in the Dublin Fusiliers who actually came across the body nailed to a door with hands and feet pierced with bayonets. The body was riddled with bullets.

  The same correspondent says Canadians who now come to Paris hospitals after the Ypres fighting are extremely taciturn about their share in it.

  This latest atrocity story prompted yet another public outcry, replete with minor rioting in London, and several questions in the Commons. On May 12th an MP called Houston asked the long-suffering Under Secretary of State for War, Harold Tennant, whether he had:

  Any information regarding the crucifixion of three Canadian soldiers recently captured by the Germans, who nailed them with bayonets to the side of a wooden structure.

  By way of reply, Houston was informed that no eyewitness reports had been received, but that inquiries would be made. Meanwhile the story grew quickly in the telling. On the same day, May 12th, the Reverend Clark recorded in his rural parish of Great Leighs in Essex:

  James Caldwell said he had just come from London and has seen there personally an invalided officer of the Canadians. This officer told him that the report about the ‘crucifying’ of Canadians was true. He had himself seen one of his men who was nailed by bayonets on to wooden boards. Of 2,000 men, only 220 in his division were now fully fit for duty owing to the poisoned gas . . .

  Mr Caldwell said that there were this afternoon great tumults in the East End of London. The people are stung to fury partly by the Lusitania murders, but still more by the torture of the Canadians. Everywhere they have been attacking Germans and German shops. One result of the Lusitanian and Canadian sufferings has been a tremendous rush of recruits.

  That the tale of the Crucified Canadian provided a boost both to recruitment and the Allied cause generally is borne out by the American writer Dalton Trumbo, who recorded:

  The Los Angeles newspapers carried a story of two young Canadian soldiers who had been crucified by the Germans in full view of their comrades across No Man’s Land. That made the Germans nothing better than animals, and naturally you got interested and wanted Germany to get the tar kicked out of her.

  A flurry of letters were said to have been received in Canada from the Front. On the 14th a Canadian private wrote home to his wife that not one but six of his comrades had been crucified, and their bodies adorned with a notice warning all other Canadians ‘to stop in Canada’. Another private was told that after a section of Allied trench had been retaken, a Canadian soldier was found with large nails driven through the palms of his hands. The next time this particular unit was in combat, so it was said, the officers ordered that no German prisoners should be taken. Some versions claimed that the unit concerned was a battalion from Toronto area; others that the location was St Julien, north-east of Ypres, or else Maple Copse near Sanctuary Wood, to the south.

  Further details also appeared in the papers, with both the tree and the door now replaced by a fence. On May 15th a Times correspondent in France reported on what was now described as an ‘insensate act of hate’:

  The story . . . of the crucifixion of a Canadian officer during the fighting at Ypres on April 22–23 is in substance true. The story was current here at the time, but, in the absence of direct evidence and absolute proof, men were unwilling to believe that a civilized foe could be guilty of an act so cruel and savage. Now, I have reason to believe, written depositions testifying to th
e fact of the discovery of the body are in possession of the British Headquarter Staff.

  The unfortunate victim was a sergeant. As the story was told to me, he was found transfixed to the wooden fence of a farm building. Bayonets were thrust through the palms of his hands and feet, pinning him to the fence. He had been repeatedly stabbed with bayonets, and there were many punctured wounds in his body.

  I have not heard that any of our men actually saw the crime committed. There is room for the supposition that the man was dead before he was pinned to the fence, and that the enemy in his insensate rage and hate of the English wreaked his vengeance on the lifeless body of his foe. That is the most charitable complexion that can be put upon the deed, ghastly as it is.

  There is not a man in the ranks of the Canadians who fought at Ypres who is not firmly convinced that this vile thing has been done. They know, too, that the enemy bayonetted their wounded and helpless comrades in the trenches.

  On the same day the Plymouth Evening Herald ran a report which claimed that one Trooper Needs of the 2nd Life Guards (machine gun section) had written home to a friend:

  The Canadians fought grandly, and completely routed the enemy, capturing all they had lost and more besides. As they advanced they found two of their comrades nailed to doors, quite dead. I wonder what Dr Lyttleton will think of that. I expect he will say ‘Be kind to the Germans.’ Yes, and like one of the Canadian officers said, I guess, sonny, we will.

  In the House of Commons on the 19th, Houston against asked whether Tennant had access to any official information:

  Showing that during the recent fighting, when the Canadians were temporarily driven back, they were compelled to leave about 40 of their wounded comrades in a barn, and then on recapturing their position found the Germans had bayoneted all the wounded with the exception of a sergeant, and that the Germans had removed the figure of Christ from the large village crucifix and fastened the sergeant while alive on the cross; and whether he is aware that the crucifixion of our soldiers is becoming a practice of the Germans?