Myths and Legends of the Second World War (19 page)

Probably the strangest twist in an already tangled tale came in 1925, when Brigadier-General John Charteris paid a visit to the United States. Charteris, by then the Conservative member for Dumfriesshire, gave a speech at a private dinner function at the National Arts Club, during the course of which he claimed responsibility for originating the canard of the corpse factory.

One day there came to the desk of General Charteris a mass of material taken from German prisoners and dead soldiers. In it were two pictures, one showing a train taking dead horses to the rear so that fat and other things needed for fertiliser and munitions might be obtained from them, and the other showing a train taking dead Germans to the rear for burial. On the picture showing the horses was the word ‘cadaver' … General Charteris had the caption telling of ‘cadaver' being sent back to the fat factory transposed to the picture showing the German dead, and had the photograph sent to a Chinese newspaper in Shanghai.

Like Pollard, Charteris was said to have selected an oriental outlet in full knowledge of the reverence in which the Chinese held their ancestors, and against a background of uncertainty of Chinese opinion towards the Germans. China had severed relations with Germany on March 13th 1917, but did not declare war until August. The ruse was undertaken in full expectation that the story would filter back to Europe and America. The report of his speech continued:

The controversy raged until all England thought it must be true, and the German newspapers printed indignant denials. The matter came up in the House of Commons and an interrogation was made which was referred to General Charteris, who answered that from what he knew of the German mentality, he was prepared for anything. It was the only time, he said, during the war when he actually dodged the truth.

The matter might have gone even further, for an ingenious person in his office offered to write a diary of a German soldier, telling of his transfer from the front after two years of fighting to an easy berth in a factory, and of his horror at finding that he was to assist there in boiling down his brother soldiers. He obtained a transfer to the front and was killed.

It was planned to place this forged diary in the clothing of a dead German soldier and have it discovered by a war correspondent who had a passion for German diaries. General Charteris decided that the deception had gone far enough and that there might be an error in the diary which would have led to the exposure of the falsity. Such a result would have imperilled all the British propaganda, he said, and he did not think it worth while, but the diary is now in the war museum in London.

The
New York Times
went on to report that Charteris entertained his audience with many stories of spies, and closed with an appeal to Americans to give England their sympathy during the then-current economic crisis. However these disclosures appear to have landed Charteris in hot water back in London, for on his return from the States at the beginning of November the former Chief of Intelligence was summoned to Whitehall by Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, the Secretary of State for War. Precisely what passed between the two men is unrecorded, although it seems likely that Charteris was reprimanded for revealing that the story was a deliberate falsehood. It is interesting to note that Charteris made no mention at all of the corpse factory in his memoir
At GHQ
, published in 1932, despite the fact that within it Charteris chose to pass comment (though seldom helpfully) on just about every other wartime myth and legend.

Charteris met the minister at the War Office on November 3rd, and left for Scotland later in the day. According to
The Times
on the 4th, upon his arrival in Glasgow Charteris issued the following statement:

On arrival in Scotland I was surprised to find that, in spite of the repudiation issued by me at New York through Reuter's Agency, some public interest was still excited in the entirely incorrect report of my remarks at a private dinner in New York. I feel it, therefore, necessary to give again a categorical denial to the statement attributed to me. Certain suggestions and speculations as regards the origin of the Kadaver story which have already been published in
Those Eventful Years
and elsewhere, which I repeated, are, doubtless unintentionally, but nevertheless unfortunately, turned into definite statements of fact and attributed to me.

Lest there should still be any doubt, let me say that I neither invented the Kadaver story, nor did I alter the captions in any photograph, nor did I use any faked material for propaganda purposes. The allegations that I did so are not only incorrect, but absurd; as propaganda was in no way under GHQ France, where I had charge of the intelligence services. I should be as interested as the general public to know what was the true origin of the Kadaver story. GHQ France only came in when the fictitious diary supporting the Kadaver story was submitted. When this diary was discovered to be fictitious it was at once rejected.

I have seen the Secretary of State [for War] this morning, and have explained the whole circumstances to him, and have his authority to say that he is perfectly satisfied.

It was also noted that the War Office now regarded the incident as closed, and that no further inquiry would be held. Therefore it will probably never be known whether the account given by Charteris in New York was truthful, but swiftly censored by London as too revealing, or whether the former intelligence chief had simply concocted an entertaining after-dinner story, not expecting that it would excite the interest of the press. Prior to his return from the States, Charteris told an American newsman that he had no intention of challenging the report in The
New York Times
, since any errors it might contain were only of minor importance – a statement which flatly contradicts what he later said in Glasgow. Indeed it is not even possible to confirm whether or not the forged diary was ever deposited at the Imperial War Museum. Researching the matter in 1975, author Phillip Knightley was able to establish only that the museum believed the diary was probably among a number of boxes of papers lodged there by military intelligence after the end of the war, but recalled soon afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, the hasty and inadequate denial issued by Charteris was not generally accepted. According to comment in
The Times
on the same day:

This paper makes the significant observation that in the course of his denial he offered no comment on his reported admission that he avoided telling the truth when questioned about the matter in the House of Commons, or on his own description of a scheme to support the Corpse Factory story by ‘planting' a forged diary in the clothing of a dead German prisoner – a proposal which he only abandoned lest the deception might be discovered.

The matter was again raised in the House of Commons on November 24th 1925, this time by a Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy. After Worthington-Evans rehearsed the reports carried by the
Lokalanzeiger
,
Indépendence Belge
and
La Belgique
on April 10th 1917, and re-stated that German dictionaries and anatomical works appeared to confirm that the word
Kadaver
could be used to mean human bodies, he confirmed that on the basis of the information available to the War Office in 1917, it had had no reason to doubt the truth of the story. But Kenworthy pressed on:

KENWORTHY: Does the Right Honourable Gentleman think it desirable, even now, to finally admit the inaccuracy of the original story, in view of Locarno and other things?

WORTHINGTON-EVANS: It is not a question of whether it was accurate or inaccurate. What I was concerned with was the information upon which the War Office acted at the time. Of course, the fact that there has been no corroboration since necessarily alters the complexion of the case, but I was dealing with the information in the possession of the authorities at the time.

None of which amounted to an unambiguous denial, which came finally from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on December 2nd, in response to a question by Arthur Henderson, the Labour member for Burnley:

SIR AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN: My Right Honourable Friend the Secretary of State for War told the House last week how the story reached His Majesty's Government in 1917. The Chancellor of the German Reich had authorised me to say, on the authority of the German government, that there was never any foundation for it. I need scarcely add that on behalf of His Majesty's Government I accept this denial, and I trust that this false report will not again be revived.

Perhaps the most telling comment on the whole inglorious episode was offered by an American editorial, from
The Times-Dispatch
of Richmond, Virginia for December 6th:

A few years ago the story of how the Kaiser was reducing human corpses to fat aroused the citizens of this and other enlightened nations to a fury of hatred. Normally sane men doubled their fists and rushed off to the nearest recruiting sergeant. Now they are being told, in effect, that they were dupes and fools; that their own officers deliberately goaded them to the desired boiling-point, using an infamous lie to arouse them, just as a grown bully whispers to one little boy that another little boy said he could lick him.

The encouraging sign found in this revolting admission of how modern war is waged is the natural inference that the modern man is not over-eager to throw himself at his brother's throat at the simple word of command. His passions must be played upon, so the propaganda bureau has taken its place as one of the chief weapons. In the next war, the propaganda must be more subtle and clever than the best the World War produced. These frank admissions of wholesale lying on the part of trusted Governments in the last war will not soon be forgotten.

C.E. Montague, a former infantry officer and the author of
Disenchantment
, had already expressed similar sentiments in 1922. His account of the discovery of a reputed
Kadaveranstalt
during the closing stages of the war reveals something of the extent to which trench myths such as the corpse factory and the Crucified Canadian were accepted as fact by many fighting troops:

Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the ‘corpse factory' story. German troops, it was written in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just taken, in 1918.

At Bellicourt the St Quentin Canal goes into a long tunnel. Some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel's brick wall, on the tow-path side of the canal. The doorway led to the foot of a narrow staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a room about 20 feet long. It, too, was subterranean, but now its darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above.

Loaves, bits of meat, and articles of German equipment lay scattered about, and two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung over two heaps of cold charcoal. Eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell, nearly covered half the floor. They showed the usual effects of shell-fire. Another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay across one of the dixies and mixed with a puddle of coffee that it contained. A quite simple case. Shells had gone into cook-houses of ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.

An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs too. He had heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections.

‘Can't believe a word you read, sir, can you?' he said with some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. The press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had cracked up once more. ‘Can't believe a word you read' had long been becoming a kind of catch-phrase in the army. And now another good man had been duly confirmed in the faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyfull of east wind.

Montague overstates his case, perhaps, but the point is well made. Sadly, the lasting infamy of the corpse factory fiction of 1917 would have a detrimental effect on the way in which the Ministry of Information steered British reporting of Nazi atrocities against the Jewish population in Europe. However, whether aerial bombing of death factories such as Auschwitz would have hindered the Holocaust, and saved lives, remains a moot point.

6

Lions, Donkeys and Ironclads

In modern memory, the enduring popular stereotype of British infantry tactics in the First World War offers extended lines of hopelessly exposed troops floundering in a sea of mud, while attempting to cross No Man's Land beneath a hail of machine gun bullets, obstructed by barbed wire, and hindered rather than helped by the supporting artillery barrage. Their commanders, from ‘Butcher' Haig downward, are portrayed as aloof, callous and incompetent figures, billeted in luxurious chêteaux far behind the trenches in the front line, of which they knew nothing and cared less. General Ludendorff derided his enemy for pursuing strategic aims with little regard for tactical difficulties, and is said to have appraised the British army as ‘lions led by donkeys'. In truth, this memorable phrase was applied to the British generals not by the German Deputy Chief of Staff, but by the historian Alan Clark in 1961, who in falsifying history in the interests of newsworthy copy did much to perpetuate the most facile yet damaging myth of the entire war.