Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  Tennant replied that no such story had been confirmed, although enquiries were not yet complete. These included an investigation by the Canadian Judge Advocate General’s office, as reported by Canon Frederick Scott, the well-known Canadian army chaplain, in his 1922 memoir The Great War as I Saw It. Recording a meeting with the Deputy Judge Advocate General at Bailleul in late May or early June 1915:

  He . . . told me of his business. There had been a report that one of our Highlanders had been crucified on the door of a barn. The Roman Catholic chaplain of the 3rd Brigade and myself had tried to trace the story to its origin. We found that the nearest we could get to it was, someone had told somebody else about it. One day I managed to discover a Canadian soldier who said he had seen the crucifixion himself. I at once took some paper out of my pocket and a New Testament and told him, ‘I want you to make that statement on oath and put your signature to it.’ He said, ‘It is not necessary.’ But he had been talking so much about the matter to the men around him that he could not escape.

  I had kept his sworn testimony in my pocket and it was to obtain this that the Deputy Judge Advocate General had called upon me. I gave it to him and told him that in spite of the oath, I thought the man was not telling the truth. Weeks afterwards I got a letter from the Deputy Judge telling me that he had found the man, who, when confronted by a Staff officer, weakened, and said he was mistaken in swearing that he had seen the crucifixion, he had only been told about it by somebody else.

  We have no right to charge the Germans with the crime. They have done so many things equally bad, that we do not need to bring charges against them of which we are not quite sure.

  One sergeant? Two sergeants? Six? Nailed to a tree, a door, a fence or a cross? Inevitably the story was never verified by an official source, although in his memoir At GHQ Brigadier-General Charteris offers his own unreliable slant:

  The story . . . began in a report sent by a sergeant that he had seen Germans sitting round a lighted fire, and what looked like a crucified man. He worked his way closer to them, and found that it was only shadows cast by some crossed sticks on other objects. The report was transmitted back without this explanation.

  The legend of the crucified soldier never quite faded, and found its way into several celebrated memoirs, including Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929) and Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933), as well as a poem, ‘Jean Desprez’, by the popular Scots/Canadian poet Robert Service, published in 1916. Another poet, Rudyard Kipling, was also convinced of the truth of the story. The myth was also tailored for different Allied uniforms in different locations. In 1915 Ian Hay had written that the victim was a wounded British soldier, crucified on a tree by Uhlans. In October of the same year, the Reverend Clark recorded another visit from his acquaintance James Caldwell, who was evidently preoccupied with the story:

  He told me that the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had found two of their men crucified, nailed to a tree. Since then they have naturally been in a fury, and it has been bayonet not quarter for the Germans. Their wrath is well known among the other regiments who amuse themselves by inventing grim stories to set it forth.

  A lurid American propaganda film from 1918, The Prussian Cur, written and directed by Raoul Walsh, recreated the crucifixion scene in graphic detail, together with the sinking of the Lusitania. A later American variation on the basic crucifixion story printed in the Pittsburgh Sunday Post in February 1919 proved equally fictitious. By this account, a detachment of the Fifth Marines entering the village of Suippes the previous October found a naked girl nailed to a barn door, and half the coffins in the churchyard ‘torn from the graves’ and opened, apparently with the idea of despoiling corpses. Yet despite prompt denials both from Washington and from a Catholic clergyman in Suippes, the story was later adapted as the basis of a war propaganda drama by Francis Nielson, titled Duty to Civilization.

  The myth of the Crucified Canadian lived on in Canada’s Golgotha (Plate 26), a bas-relief frieze sculpted in bronze by a British artist, Francis Derwent Wood (1871–1926), whose other works include the Machine Gun Corps memorial at Hyde Park Corner. The piece showed mocking German soldiers beneath the crucifix, taunting the dying man’s agony, and was first exhibited as part of the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition in London in January 1919. The German government immediately protested that the accusation of crucifixion by its army amounted to libel, and demanded the production of evidence. By April, two sworn statements had been obtained from Allied soldiers who claimed to provide eyewitness accounts. Leonard Vivian, a former bandsman and stretcher-bearer with the Middlesex Regiment, gave the location as a barn between the front line and his dressing station just outside the village of St Julien, north-east of Ypres, and the date as April 23rd 1915:

  I saw on the right hand side of the road on a barn door what appeared to me to be a Canadian sergeant crucified to the door. There was a bayonet through each hand and his head was hanging forward as though he were dead or unconscious . . . I learned from Canadians the same day that this sergeant was a Canadian and had been crucified for protecting an old woman . . . This sergeant did not wear kilts, or if he did, he had an overcoat over them.

  The second deposition was provided by William Metcalfe, a Canadian corporal who had been transferred to ‘No 2 platoon of the 16th Canadian Battalion’ on or about April 21st. At the time his statement was sworn, Metcalfe – a recipient of both the Victoria Cross and the Military Medal – was a patient at the Cooden Hospital in Sussex. By his account:

  My platoon was proceeding along the St Jean road when I noticed a soldier pinned to a barn door with bayonets. The barn door was on the left hand side of the road going up. There was a bayonet through each wrist. His head hung forward on his breast as though he were dead. I could not see any bullet wound but did notice Maple Leaf badges on his collar. We were told later that this man belonged to the 16th Battalion but I saw no badges other than those I have mentioned to vouchsafe this. He had no headdress on when I saw him. The platoon sergeant, whose name I cannot remember, examined the body and we moved on.

  St Julien and St Jean are neighbouring villages, and in April 1915 were the scene of fierce fighting, during which the opposing lines fluctuated, and which resulted in the capture of St Julien by the Germans on April 24th. It is impossible to test the reliability of either statement. Both seem to have been hurriedly obtained, and relate to locations some two miles apart. Moreover, these descriptions of the crucified man seem remarkably close to the sculpture by Derwent Wood. Even in the midst of the fierce and fluid battle, it seems odd that the corpse was left nailed to the door, despite the fact that a large number of troops passed by, and had time to inspect it. Nevertheless, the evidence was sufficient for the Colonial Office in London, who informed Berlin via a Swiss mediator:

  Included in the evidence so far in the possession of the Canadian government are sworn statements by soldiers of the best character serving both with the Canadian and Imperial Forces who were unknown to one another, and between whom there was no possibility of collusion.

  But in Canada a greater degree of scepticism prevailed. In 1919 a paper called the Nation published a letter from Private Loader of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment, who claimed to have seen the crucified man with his own eyes. However, in a subsequent letter the paper was informed by Captain E.N. Bennett that no such private had ever served with the regiment, and that the 2nd Battalion had been in India throughout the conflict. Nor would it seem that the version given by Harold Peat, alleging the crucifixion of three Canadian sergeants near St Julien, was treated seriously.

  Meanwhile several senior establishment figures in Canada denounced the story as false. Ernest Chambers, the wartime press censor, concluded that the story had been invented in America with the object of boosting recruitment. Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie, the commander of the Canadian Corps on the Western Front from 1917 onwards, also found it was a fabrication. Following German protests over the exhi
bition of the Wood sculpture in 1919, a Canadian officer named Richardson was dispatched to Europe in an attempt to authenticate the outrage, but the only first-hand statement obtained cast a very different light on the incident. According to Major G.C. Carvell, formerly of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the victim had been killed by Belgian farmers:

  The ‘crucifixion’ was not one IN FACT. [He] had been tied up by wire attached to his wrists and feet, while a strand, which held his head in position against the wall, accounted for his semi-strangulation.

  According to Carvell, the incident had taken place ‘on an afternoon in April 1915’ at least 11,000 yards away from the nearest German troops. By this stage, August 1919, the whole affair had become a political embarrassment between Ottawa, London and Berlin, and the investigation did not proceed further. In June 1920 the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition withdrew the controversial sculpture, with the result that Canada’s Golgotha was lost to public view until 1988.

  As with the celebrated ‘man who never was’ who later served the Allies so well in 1943, periodic attempts have been made to identify the Crucified Canadian. In April 2001 the Sunday Express published an article by journalist Iain Overton which claimed that a Canadian sergeant was crucified near Ypres on April 24th 1915, and identified the man as Harry Band of the 48th Canadian Highlanders. According to research by Overton, in April 1915:

  A Canadian soldier called George Barrie was detached from his regiment and had sought refuge from a gas attack in the village of St Julien, in Belgium. He lay rigid in a ditch as a group of German soldiers milled around a shed 50 yards away. When they left under cover of darkness, Barrie made his way over to where they had been.

  Through the gloom, he saw a man in a British uniform, apparently leaning against a door. He called out and, when there was no reply, he edged closer. The sight that greeted his eyes was horrifying. A young sergeant was suspended 18 inches from the ground, pinned by eight bayonets which had been thrust through his limbs and torso. He had been crucified.

  Band, a Scot born in Montrose in 1885, is said to have been reported missing, presumed dead, on April 24th. He has no known grave, although his descendants in British Columbia spoke of dark hints given when news of his death reached home. The honour roll of the Ontario Temperance Society, of which Band was a member, lists him as having ‘met death by crucifixion while in the hands of the enemy’, but this roll was not prepared until the 1930s. A note associated with the Wood sculpture suggests Band was the soldier in question, but again is a later addition. At first glance, the date and location tally loosely with the account published in The Times on May 15th, and with the sworn statements provided by Metcalfe and Vivien in 1919, but problems remain. The records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission indicate that the only Canadian soldier named Band who died in 1915 was a private in the 16th Battalion, not the 48th Highlanders. Although this Private Band was indeed killed on April 24th, while serving in the same battalion as William Metcalfe and fighting in the same action, these several inconsistencies go a long way towards explaining why the fate of a named soldier was not exploited with more precision in 1915, or indeed why a string of official enquiries over the next four years were unable to substantiate the story.

  The legend of the German corpse rendering factory remains the most notorious atrocity myth of the conflict, and fully deserves its appraisal by George Viereck as ‘the master hoax’ of the First World War. Indeed the story proved so durable that it would not finally be exposed as a fiction until 1925. The central premise of this ghoulish tale, first circulated in its popular form in April 1917, was that close behind their front line the Germans had established a facility for boiling down the corpses of dead soldiers, the by-products being used in the production of munitions, soap, fertiliser and pig food. For the Allied propaganda machine, the story played as a near-perfect conjunction of German science and Hunnish barbarity. Today, credit for the deliberate creation of the myth is usually given to British intelligence agencies, and in particular the omnipresent General Charteris. Yet this is itself a falsehood, for rumours of the existence of a German corpse factory were noted long before April 1917. For example, in a unique diary entry for June 16th 1915 the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law, Cynthia Asquith, records a flippant discussion on the subject:

  Quite a pleasant dinner. We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap. I suggested that Haldane should offer his vast body as raw material to Lloyd George. We played poker after dinner. I played in a syndicate with Papa [Herbert Asquith], which is always unsatisfactory. The syndicate lost about a pound.

  Almost a century later it is impossible to say how the story first originated. Official British sources have repeatedly claimed that the story first appeared in the pages of an obscure Belgian newspaper printed in France, Indépendence Belge, on April 10th, which was itself extracted from an earlier edition of the journal La Belgique, published at Leyden in Holland. This, too, is untrue, as we shall see. Nevertheless, the original report from April 1917, which reads like a nightmarish parody of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, merits quotation at length, for it was diligently constructed by its author, with particular attention paid to precise scientific and technological detail:

  We have known for long that the Germans stripped their dead behind the firing line, fastened them into bundles of three or four bodies with iron wire, and then dispatched these grisly bundles to the rear. Until recently the trains laden with the dead were sent to Seraing, near Liège, and to a point north of Brussels, where there were refuse consumers. Much surprise was caused by the fact that of late this traffic has proceeded in the direction of Gerolstein, and it is noted that on each wagon was written DAVG.

  German science is responsible for the ghoulish idea of the formation of the German Offal Utilization Company Limited (DAVG), a dividend-earning company with a capital of £250,000, the chief factory of which has been constructed 1,000 yards from the railway connecting St Vith, near the Belgian frontier, with Gerolstein, in the lonely, little-frequented Eifel district, south-west of Coblenz. The factory deals specially with the dead from the West Front. If the results are as good as the company hopes, another will be established to deal with corpses on the East Front.

  The factory is invisible from the railway. It is placed deep in forest country, with a specially thick growth of trees about it. Live wires surround it. A special double track leads up to it. The works are about 700 feet long and 110 feet broad, and the railway runs completely round them. In the north-west corner of the works the discharge of the trains takes place.

  The trains arrive full of bare bodies, which are unloaded by the workers who live at the works. The men wear oilskin overalls and masks with mica eyepieces. They are equipped with long hooked poles, and push the bundles of bodies to an endless chain, which picks them with big hooks, attached at intervals of two feet. The bodies are transported on this endless chain into a long, narrow compartment, where they pass through a bath which disinfects them. They then go through a drying chamber, and finally are automatically carried into a digester or great cauldron, in which they are dropped by an apparatus which detaches them from the chain. In the digester they remain for six to eight hours, and are treated by steam, which breaks them up while they are slowly stirred by machinery.

  From this treatment result several products. The fats are broken up into stearine, a form of tallow, and oils, which require to be re-distilled before they can be used. The process of distillation is carried out by boiling the oil with carbonate of soda, and some part of the by-products resulting from this is used by German soap makers. The oil distillery and refinery lie in the south-eastern corner of the works. The refined oil is sent out in small casks like those used for petroleum, and is of a yellowish brown colour.

  The fumes are exhausted from the buildings by electric fans, and are sucked through a great pipe to the north-eastern corner, where they are condense
d and the refuse resulting is discharged into a sewer. There is no high chimney, as the boiler furnaces are supplied with air by electric fans. There is a laboratory and in charge of the works is a chief chemist with two assistants and 78 men. All the employees are soldiers and are attached to the 8th Army Corps. There is a sanatorium by the works, and under no pretext is any man permitted to leave them. They are guarded as prisoners at their appalling work.

  Within days other fragments were revealed. On the 16th The Times ran a short piece translated from the a Berlin newspaper, the Lokalanzeiger, written by Karl Rosner, its special correspondent on the Western Front. This too had originally appeared on April 10th:

  We pass through Everingcourt. There is a dull smell in the air, as if lime were being burnt. We are passing the great Corpse Exploitation Establishment (Kadaververwertungsanstalt) of this Army Group. The fat that is won here is turned into lubricating oils, and everything else is ground down in the bones mill into a powder, which is used for mixing with pigs’ food and as manure. Nothing can be permitted to go to waste.

  The Times added, by way of corroboration:

  It will be remembered that one of the American Consuls, on leaving Germany in February, stated in Switzerland that the Germans were distilling glycerine for nitro-glycerine from the bodies of their dead, and thus were obtaining some part of their explosives.

  The following day The Times ran the longer descriptive piece said to have appeared in the Indépendence Belge, albeit ‘omitting some of the most repulsive details’, and from this point on the story snowballed rapidly. One reader suggested the story should be spread in neutral countries and the east, where it would be likely to horrify Buddhists, Hindus and Mohammedans. Other correspondents questioned the translation of the German word Kadaver, suggesting that it was not applicable to human corpses. The Lancet published an article in which certain technical aspects of the process were considered, it being calculated that 1,000 bodies at an average weight of 10 stones might yield about two tons of fat (on an average of 3 per cent basis of fat per body weight), which in turn could be converted into a tenth of this weight in glycerine. Elsewhere both the Chinese Ambassador and the Maharajah of Bikanir issued public expressions of horror at German treatment of the dead, the latter promising that if the bodies of Indian soldiers were exploited in like fashion, such an atrocity would never be forgotten or forgiven in India.