“CAN’T BELIEVE A WORD YOU READ, SIR, CAN YOU?”
A gruesome incident from the final stages of WWI serves to illustrate how deeply ‘trench myths’ such as the Corpse Factory legend had become embedded in the psyches of war-weary soldiers. In the autumn of 1918 a carefully planned counter-attack by the Allies, reinforced by thousands of fresh American troops, broke through the German defences along the Hindenburg Line. In October, a team of Royal Engineers arrived at Bellicourt, where the St Quentin Canal runs underground for 6km (3.7 miles). The ‘boobytrappers’ were given the task of exploring every nook and cranny for landmines left behind by the retreating German army.
“It was at the Bellicourt end of the tunnel that we made the discovery,” said Corporal Arthur Beresford, a miner from County Durham. “About four yards inside the entrance of the tunnel there was an underground chamber… an officer went in, and in a few seconds came out spitting. We went in and saw a number of bodies of German soldiers, fully clothed, and tied up in bundles of about six each. We had found bodies tied up like that on the battlefield before and we took it that it was done for them to be carried away easily… The walls of the room were blackened with smoke and inside there was a big wooden block, scored on the top with the blows of an axe or cleaver. There was a set-pot, like a big round boiler… with the remains of a fire in a grate underneath. Parts of human bodies were in this boiler, and arms and legs were sticking out. About a dozen wooden buckets, like those used for lard, were full of yellow fat.”
Cpl Beresford came forward to tell his story in October 1925 after the press broke the story of General Charteris’s reported
1 confession. The soldier said he and Lance Cpl J Ibbitson had no doubt’ the bodies they saw “were boiled in the pot” and had been rendered down for their fat. But where Beresford and Ibbitson saw a ‘corpse factory’ others who visited the scene saw something else entirely. Writing to the Hull Daily Mail, Thomas Leggott said everything he and fellow officers examined in the chamber “was consistent with the place being a Bosch cook-house, the dead Germans evidently having been killed by a shell”. The underground chamber was also visited by the journalist Charles Edward Montague, who was an intelligence officer during the war. In Disenchantment, published in 1922, Montague says that “shells had gone into cook-houses of ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew. A quite simple case”. He describes how an Australian sergeant surveyed the “disappointing scene” of death and destruction, “then he broke the silence in which we had made our 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 propaganda myth about Germans had cracked up once more.”
NOTES 1 Leeds Mercury, 29 Oct 1925.