American propaganda poster from the Philippines depicting the crucified soldier
"The Crucified Soldier" was a widespread story or myth among the allies of World War 1, describing German soldiers supposedly crucifying an Allied soldier to a barn door or tree somewhere on the Western Front. The victim is typically described as a still-living sergeant of the Canadian Corps, though the details of the crime, including the origin, rank, and amount of the victim(s), vary between tellings. Eyewitnesses claim they saw an unidentified crucified Canadian soldier near the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium, on or around 24 April 1915, but accounts were contradictory, no crucified body was recovered and the identity of the alleged crucified soldier was not discovered at the time. A dramatized depiction titled Canada's Golgotha was the subject of a formal complaint by the German government during peace negotiations in 1919, forcing Canada to retract claims as to the event's veracity upon being unable to provide the Germans with proof. After the war the story was dismissed as an urban legend or work of atrocity propaganda akin to the German Corpse Factory, however a 21st-century investigation claimed to uncover evidence of a genuine incident involving a Canadian soldier.
On 10 May 1915 The Times printed a short item titled "Torture of a Canadian Officer" as coming from its Paris correspondent. According to the piece, Canadian soldiers wounded at Ypres had told how one of their officers had been crucified to a wall "by bayonets thrust through his hands and feet" before having another bayonet driven through his throat and, finally, "riddled with bullets". The soldiers said that it had been seen by the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and that they had heard the Fusiliers' officers talking about it.[1]
Two days later, on 12 May, in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Robert Houston asked Harold Tennant, the Under-Secretary of State for War, "whether he has 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?" Tennant replied that no information as to such an atrocity having been perpetrated had yet reached the War Office. Houston then asked if Tennant was aware that Canadian officers and Canadian soldiers who were eyewitnesses of the incidents had made affidavits, and whether the officer in command at Boulogne had not called the attention of the War Office to them. It was then stated that inquiries would be made.[2]
On 15 May The Times published a letter from a member of the army, according to which the crucified soldier was in fact a sergeant, and he had been found transfixed to the wooden fence of a farm building. The letter added that he had been repeatedly stabbed with bayonets and that there were many puncture wounds in his body. The unidentified correspondent had not heard that the crucifixion had been witnessed by any Allied forces and commented that there was room to suppose that the man had been dead when he was crucified.[1]
On 19 May Robert Houston returned to the subject in the House of Commons, asking Harold Tennant:
whether he has any official information showing that during the recent fighting, when the Canadians were temporarily driven back, they were compelled to leave about forty of their wounded comrades in a barn and that on recapturing the position they 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 to the cross; and whether he is aware that the crucifixion of our soldiers is becoming a practice of the Germans?
Tennant replied that the military authorities in France had standing instructions to send details of any authenticated atrocities committed against British troops, and that no official information had been received. He added that inquiries were being made, and were not yet complete.[3]
Colonel Ernest J. Chambers, the Canadian chief censor, began investigating the story soon after it surfaced. He searched for eyewitnesses, and found a private who swore under affidavit that he had seen three Canadian soldiers bayonetted to a barn door three miles from St. Julien.[4] However, the sworn testimony from the two English soldiers, who claimed to have seen "the corpse of a Canadian soldier fastened with bayonets to a barn door", was subsequently debunked when it was discovered that the part of the front involved had never been occupied by Germans.[5]
The story often varied, though the most common version told how the Germans had captured a Canadian soldier and crucified him with bayonets on a wooden cross, while Maple Copse, near Sanctuary Wood in the Ypres sector, was the favoured setting. The victim was not always Canadian: Ian Hay, who dated the incident to spring 1915, maintained that the victim was British, and that he was crucified on a tree by German cavalrymen. A version which appeared in the Los Angeles newspapers kept the Canadian nationality, but made it two soldiers.[8]
A Canadian soldier who allegedly helped take down the soldier's body suggested the crucified soldier appeared to be a sergeant from the medical service and was possibly from Brantford, and at some point the victim was identified as Sergeant Thomas Elliott, of Brantford. Elliott himself later wrote to his local pastor to report that he was not the man involved.[9]
According to Private George Barrie of the 13th Battalion, he saw a party of Germans in the village of St. Julien on 24 April 1915, which had been in the rear of the 1st Canadian Division until a gas attack on 22 April, when it became the front line. Barrie reported that he saw what appeared to be a man in British uniform who had been crucified to a post by eight bayonets.[10]
Depiction of the crucified soldier on the sculpture titled Canada's Golgotha, by Francis Derwent Wood (crafted in 1918). The exhibition of the piece has been the subject of controversy.
In 1918 British artist Francis Derwent Wood created a 32-inch-high (810mm) bronze sculpture entitled Canada's Golgotha which depicted a Canadian soldier crucified on a barn door and surrounded by jeering Germans. It was to be included in the exhibition of the Canadian War Memorial Fund collection, and was widely publicized before the exhibition opened.[11]
The exhibition, at Burlington House, London, was due to open in January 1919, just before the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty and Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden requested further investigation into the veracity of the story, while the German government formally requested that the Canadian government publicly acknowledge that the story of the crucified soldier was untrue, or else provide evidence. The official Canadian response to the Germans was that they had sufficient evidence to believe that the account was true, including that the victim was a "Sergeant Brant", but when the Germans demanded a part in the investigation, the sculpture was withdrawn from the exhibition and was not shown again until the 1990s.[11]
The sculpture was also displayed in 2000 at an exhibition entitled "Under the Sign of the Cross: Creative Expressions of Christianity in Canada" at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 2000, and again provoked controversy.[12]
Sergeant Harry Band
British documentary film maker Iain Overton investigated the story of the crucified soldier (as well as other myths of World War I) in his doctoral dissertation, and developed them into a television documentary which was transmitted in 2002 as part of UK Channel 4'sSecret History series.[11] Overton uncovered new historical evidence which he said identified the crucified soldier as Sergeant Harry Band of the Central Ontario Regiment of the Canadian Infantry, who was reported missing in action on 24 April 1915 near Ypres. Other soldiers in his unit wrote to Band's sister Elizabeth Petrie to express their condolences, and a year later, one of them wrote in a letter to her that her suspicions that her brother had been "the crucified soldier" were true. Band's body was never recovered, and he is commemorated on the Menin Gate memorial.[13][bettersourceneeded]
The evidence discovered by Overton included a typewritten note by a British nurse found in the Liddle Collection of war correspondence in Leeds University. The note related comments by a Lance Corporal C.M. Brown to his nurse, Miss Ursula Violet Chaloner, whom he told of a Sergeant Harry Band who was "crucified after a battle of Ypres on one of the doors of a barn with five bayonets in him."[14]
Some accounts[15] erroneously name the soldier identified in Overton's documentary as "Harry Banks", thus creating an apparent contradiction in that the only Canadian soldier of that name enlisted in the Overseas Expeditionary Force on 1 September 1915 in Victoria, British Columbia, some five months after the supposed crucifixion.
In popular culture
The story is mentioned frequently in Paul Gross' film Passchendaele, although the main character, Michael Dunne, claims that the incident stems from exaggeration and that artillery fire was responsible for appearing to pin the body of a soldier to a barn door.
A French zouave is crucified by German uhlans in Robert W. Service's 1916 poem "Jean Desprez" (published in Rhymes of a Red Cross Man).[16]
The story is referenced in Dalton Trumbo's 1938 novel Johnny Got His Gun; the main character mentions that he read it in the news.
↑ Evans, Suzanne (2007). Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief. McGill-Queen's Press. p.53. ISBN978-0-7735-3188-8.
Crucifixion is a method of capital punishment in which the condemned is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross, beam or stake and left to hang until eventual death. It was used as a punishment by the Persians, Carthaginians, and Romans, among others. Crucifixion has been used in some countries as recently as the 21st century.
"In Flanders Fields" is a war poem in the form of a rondeau, written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. He was inspired to write it on May 3, 1915, after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. According to legend, fellow soldiers retrieved the poem after McCrae, initially dissatisfied with his work, discarded it. "In Flanders Fields" was first published on December 8 of that year in the London magazine Punch. Flanders Fields is a common English name of the World War I battlefields in Belgium and France.
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the six divisions the British Army sent to the Western Front during the First World War. Planning for a British Expeditionary Force began with the 1906–1912 Haldane Reforms of the British Army carried out by the Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane following the Second Boer War (1899–1902).
The Menin Gate, officially the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, is a war memorial in Ypres, Belgium, dedicated to the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are unknown. The memorial is located at the eastern exit of the town and marks the starting point for one of the main roads that led Allied soldiers to the front line.
During the First World War, the Second Battle of Ypres was fought from 22 April – 25 May 1915 for control of the tactically important high ground to the east and south of the Flemish town of Ypres in western Belgium. The First Battle of Ypres had been fought the previous autumn. The Second Battle of Ypres was the first mass use by Germany of poison gas on the Western Front.
Lionel Beaumaurice Clarke was a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.
Frederick William Hall, was a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.
Issy Smith was a British-Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to eligible forces of the Commonwealth and United Kingdom. In recognition of his VC, he was also awarded the French Croix de Guerre and Russian Cross of St. George by the respective governments.
William Merrifield VC, MM was an English-born Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. A soldier with Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War, he was awarded the VC for his actions on 1 October 1918, during the Battle of the Canal du Nord. Earlier in the war he had been awarded the Military Medal.
The Gardelegen massacre was a massacre perpetrated by the locals of the northern German town of Gardelegen, with direction from the SS, near the end of World War II. On April 13, 1945, on the Isenschnibbe estate near the town, the troops forced over 1,000 slave laborers who were part of a transport train evacuated from the Mittelbau-Dora and Hannover-Stöcken concentration camps into a large barn, which was then set on fire.
Iain Overton is a British investigative journalist and the author of The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern World and Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun.
The Rape of Belgium was a series of systematic war crimes, especially mass murder and deportation, by German troops against Belgian civilians during the invasion and occupation of Belgium during World War I.
The Nemmersdorf massacre was a civilian massacre perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in the late stages of World War II. Nemmersdorf was one of the first prewar ethnic German settlements to fall to the advancing Red Army during the war. On 21 October 1944, Soviet soldiers killed many German civilians as well as French and Belgian POWs.
Passchendaele is a 2008 Canadian war film, written, co-produced, directed by, and starring Paul Gross. The film, which was shot in Calgary, Alberta, Fort Macleod, Alberta, and in Belgium, focuses on the experiences of a Canadian soldier, Michael Dunne, at the Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, inspired by stories that Gross heard from his grandfather, a First World War soldier.
Private Peaceful is a novel for older children by British author Michael Morpurgo first published in 2003. It is about a fictional young soldier called Thomas "Tommo" Peaceful, who is looking back on his life so far and his going to war. The story focuses on the harsh realities of English rural life and warfare, and highlights the British Army's practice of executing its own soldiers during the First World War. Morpurgo was inspired to write the novel after learning about the around 300 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were shot for crimes like desertion and cowardice. The novel helped further the campaign to grant posthumous pardons to the men, which were agreed and implemented by the UK Government in 2006.
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The 10th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force was a unit of the First World War Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), specifically in the 1st Canadian Division from 1914 to 1919. The battalion participated in every major Canadian battle of the First World War, and set a record for the most decorations earned by a Canadian unit in a single battle at Hill 70. The unit was known to its contemporaries simply as The Fighting Tenth.
Canada's Golgotha is a 32-inch-high (810 mm) bronze sculpture by the British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, produced in 1918. It illustrates the story of the Crucified Soldier from the First World War and depicts a Canadian soldier crucified on a barn door and surrounded by jeering Germans. It is now on show at the Canadian War Museum.
The Muse in Arms is an anthology of British war poetry published in November 1917 during World War I. It consists of 131 poems by 52 contributors, with the poems divided into fourteen thematic sections. The poets were from all three branches of the armed services, land, sea and air, from a range of ranks and from many parts of the UK. Twenty of the poets who contributed to this volume died during the war. The editor was the journalist and author Edward Bolland Osborn (1867–1938), and the book was printed in London by the publishers John Murray. This anthology was one of several collections of war poetry published in the UK during the war. It "achieved large sales", and was reprinted in February 1918. It has been referenced in several analyses of First World War poetry and has been described as "the most celebrated collection of the war years".
Atrocity propaganda is the spreading of information about the crimes committed by an enemy, which can be factual, but often includes or features deliberate fabrications or exaggerations. This can involve photographs, videos, illustrations, interviews, and other forms of information presentation or reporting.
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