Myths and Legends of the Second World War (11 page)

The night fell, and soon I heard a step, but quiet and firm, as if neither darkness nor death could check those untroubled feet. So little did I guess what was coming that, even when I saw the gleam of white in the darkness, I thought it was a peasant in a white smock, or perhaps a woman deranged. Suddenly, with a little shiver of joy or fear, I don't know which, I guessed that it was the Comrade in White. And at that very moment the German rifles began to shoot. The bullets could scarcely miss such a target, for he flung his arms out as though in entreaty, and then drew them back till he stood like one of those wayside crosses that we saw so often as we marched through France.

And he spoke. The word sounded familiar, but all I remember was the beginning, ‘If thou hadst known,' and the ending, ‘but now they are hid from thine eyes.' And then he stopped and ushered me into his arms – me, the biggest man in the regiment – and carried me as if I had been a child. I must have fainted, for I woke to consciousness in a little cave by the stream, and the Comrade in White was washing my wounds and binding them up. It seems foolish to say it, for I was in terrible pain, but I was happier at that moment than ever I remember to have been in all my life before … And while he swiftly removed every trace of blood or mire, I felt as if my whole nature was being washed, as if all the grime and soil of sin were going, and as if I were once more a little child.

I suppose I slept, for when I awoke this feeling was gone, I was a man, and I wanted to know what I could do for my friend to help him or to serve him. He was looking towards the stream, and his hands were clasped in prayer: and then I saw that he, too, had been wounded. I could see, as it were, a shot-wound in his hand, and as he prayed a drop of blood gathered and fell to the ground. I cried out. I could not help it, for that wound of his seemed to be a more awful thing than any that bitter war had shown me. ‘You are wounded, too,' I said faintly. Perhaps he heard me, perhaps it was the look on my face, but he answered me gently ‘This is an old wound, but it has troubled me of late.'

And then I noticed sorrowfully that the same cruel mark was on his feet. You will wonder that I did not know sooner. I wonder myself. But it was only when I saw his feet that I knew him.

Several other contemporary accounts may be found in David Clarke's excellent study,
The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians
. Ultimately the Comrade in White seems always to have been identified with Jesus Christ, a fact reflected in contemporary illustrations such as the painting by G. Hillyard Swinstead (Plate 12). The basic concept has something in common with the more modern conception of near-death experience, which is perhaps explicable by medical science, although the white helper legend is heavily, if attractively, embroidered. The elements of deliverance and moral truth are particularly clear from the inference that Christ's wounds had lately opened, no doubt as a result of Hun bullets and frightfulness. It is interesting, too, that like the resurgent angels in 1915 the story seems to have spread first from the vicinity of Bath and Bristol, rather than the front line, although this may be purely coincidental.

A new twist on the legend of the white helper was published in the American magazine
Fate
in 1968. The author, an American clergyman from Massachusetts, claimed to have been told the story some 12 years earlier by an English engineer, who had been in the line at Ypres in August 1915 during one of the early German poison gas attacks:

They looked out over No Man's Land and saw a strange grey cloud rolling towards them. When it struck, pandemonium broke out. Men dropped all around him and the trench was in an uproar. Then, he said, a strange thing happened. Out of the mist, walking across No Man's Land, came a figure. He seemed to be without special protection and he wore the uniform of the Royal [Army] Medical Corps (RAMC). The engineer remembered that the stranger spoke English with what seemed to be a French accent.

On his belt the stranger from the poison cloud had a series of small hooks on which were suspended tin cups. In his hand he carried a bucket of what looked like water. As he slid down into the trench he began removing the cups, dipping them into the bucket and passing them out to the soldiers, telling them to drink quickly. The engineer was among those who received the potion. He said it was extremely salty, almost too salty to swallow. But all of the soldiers who were given the liquid did drink it, and not one of them suffered lasting effects from the gas.

When the gas cloud had blown over and things calmed down the unusual visitor was not to be found. No explanation for his visit could be given by the Royal Medical Corps – but the fact remained that thousands of soldiers died or suffered lasting effects from that grim attack, but not a single soldier who took the cup from the stranger was among the casualties.

The story has few, if any, elements in common with the contemporary reports of the Comrade in White from 1915, and although more scientific in tone is scarcely more credible. Certainly there is no evidence that the story of a miraculous French RAMC orderly with a bucket of brine was in circulation on the Western Front at the time, or indeed reported at all during the war years.

Several accounts which followed in the wake of the legend of bowmen and angels at Mons made reference to remarkable clouds, sometimes glowing, which concealed and delivered British troops from the enemy. Far more notorious, however, is the oft-told legend of the Vanished Battalion, in which mysterious clouds took on a more malevolent aspect. The most well-known version of the tale is set against the background of the ill-starred Gallipoli campaign, and in particular the bitter fighting around Hill 60, near Suvla Bay, in August 1915. According to a report first published in 1965, on August 21st a group of New Zealand sappers watching from trenches on a spur overlooking Hill 60 noted:

Perhaps six or eight ‘loaf of bread' shaped clouds – all shaped exactly alike, which were hovering over Hill 60. It was noticed that in spite of a four or five mile an hour breeze from the south, these clouds did not alter their position … Also stationary and resting on the ground right underneath this group of clouds was a similar cloud in shape, measuring about 800 feet in length, 220 feet in height, and 200 feet in width. This cloud was absolutely dense, solid-looking in structure, and positioned about 14 to 18 chains from the fighting in British-held territory … Its colour was light grey, as was the colour of the other clouds.

The account goes on to relate that a British unit, stated to be the 1st/4th Norfolk Regiment, comprising several hundred men, was noticed marching up a sunken road or creek towards Hill 60:

However when they arrived at this cloud they marched straight into it, with no hesitation, but no-one ever came back out to deploy and fight at Hill 60. About an hour later, after the last of the file had disappeared into it, this cloud very unobtrusively lifted off the ground and … rose slowly until it joined the other similar clouds … As soon as the singular cloud had risen to their level they all moved away northwards, i.e. towards Thrance [Bulgaria]. In a matter of about three-quarters of an hour they had all disappeared from view.

The written statement was signed by Frederick Reichardt, who served throughout the Gallipoli campaign as a Sapper with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and was supported by two other ANZAC veterans named Newnes and Newman. Reichardt's fantastical story was first printed in April 1965 in
Spaceview
, a New Zealand journal, and in March of the following year reached a wider audience courtesy of the American UFO magazine
Flying Saucers
. Since then the myth of the Vanished Battalion has been repeated in countless books and magazines, usually bracketed with supernormal phenomena such as the Bermuda Triangle and unsolved disappearances. Some later re-tellings held that the cloud took the form of a giant cross, although it seems unlikely that divine intervention can be inferred. New heights of silliness were scaled by French writer Jacques Vallée in his book
Passport to Magonia
, which offered the theory that the unit had marched into a cloud which concealed a UFO. A similar theory was advanced by the British ufologist Brinsley le Poer Trench (the Earl of Clancarty) in his book
The Eternal Subject
, published in 1973.

The truth of the matter is less sensational. On August 12th, rather than the 21st, several hundred men of the 1/5th (Territorial) Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment were ordered to clear a valley on the Anafarta Plain of Turkish snipers and machine gun posts, in anticipation of a major British assault scheduled for the following day. The Norfolks were lead by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp and were flanked by the 8th Hampshires and the 5th Suffolks. For reasons which remain unclear, the Norfolks turned half right as they advanced, thereby opening up a dangerous gap between them and the rest of the attacking force. While still some way short of the Turkish line, the already exhausted Norfolks fixed bayonets and charged towards Kavak Tepe ridge. The attack faltered on difficult, unfamiliar terrain, and over the next few hours the battalion was decimated by sniper, machine gun and artillery fire. Amidst this unfolding disaster, Colonel Proctor-Beauchamp continued to advance at the head of a party comprising approximately 250 officers and men, only to meet with almost complete annihilation after being cut off at an isolated farm.

In the space of some six hours the strength of the 1/5th Norfolks had been halved to less than 400 men. The disaster was almost certainly due to a combination of poor planning and leadership, and the foolhardy bravery of an untested Territorial battalion determined to prove its worth in combat after just two days ashore. The Norfolks attacked in broad daylight across largely open ground which had not been reconnoitred, against an ill-defined objective, without the aid of adequate maps. The defending Turks were well prepared and dug in, and after surrounding Proctor-Beauchamp's exposed force simply cut them to pieces. The survivors were despatched on the spot in cold blood, with only fourteen taken into captivity.

Why, then, did an enduring legend arise around the 1/5th Norfolks? Following the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915, comparable stories circulated that whole battalions disappeared without trace in the Bois de Biez, but these quickly faded from memory. Yet long before wild claims of loaf-shaped clouds and extra-terrestrial abduction entered into circulation, the disappearance of the 1/5th Norfolks at Gallipoli had earned an entirely unwarranted degree of infamy. This was principally because the missing men from the 5th Battalion included a company recruited exclusively from the extensive royal estate at Sandringham, made up of gardeners, gamekeepers, farm labourers and household servants, and led by the King's Agent, Captain Frank Beck. The involvement of the Sandringham Company added considerable weight to a tragedy already given a gloss of mystery by Sir Ian Hamilton, the oft-vilified British Commander-in-Chief at Gallipoli, who had written of the incident in a dispatch to Lord Kitchener:

In the course of the fight there happened a very mysterious thing… . The Colonel, with 16 officers and 250 men, still kept pushing on, driving the enemy before him … Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any of them. They charged into the forest, and were lost to sight or sound. Not one of them ever came back.

King George V also telegraphed Hamilton about the fate of the Sandringham Company, and following the Armistice there should have been little genuine mystery. As early as the autumn of 1919 a Graves Registration Unit discovered a mass grave on the Anafarta Plain which contained the remains of about 180 British soldiers, no fewer than 122 of them men from the 1/5th Norfolks. The remains of Colonel Proctor-Beauchamp, identifiable by virtue of his distinctive silver insignia, were found to be among them. The spot was about a mile beyond the British front line, and half a mile behind the Turkish line. Controversy lingers as to whether the men had been shot through the head, and therefore massacred after being taken prisoner rather than killed in action, but even this theory is far removed from the general misapprehension that the entire battalion had vanished into thin air.

Whether Sapper Reichardt was guilty of deliberate fabrication is open to question. In his carefully researched account of the loss of the Sandringham Company,
All the King's Men
, author Nigel McCrery charitably suggests that the New Zealander was simply confused. Although on August 21st 1915 there was indeed a major British attack against the Turkish positions on Hill 60, the 5th Norfolks took no part in it, due largely to the heavy losses suffered by the battalion on the 12th. Over the course of the next week more than 3,000 troops were thrown into the attack on the enemy redoubt, including the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry under Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Peniston Milbank VC. Prior to their murderous assault the Colonel is said to have remarked to one of his officers:

We are to take a redoubt but I don't know where it is, and I don't think anyone else does either; but in any case we are to go ahead and attack the Turks in any event.

The attack by the Sherwood Rangers, which took place at the time and date identified by Reichardt, was a confused and futile disaster, it being reported that the unit quickly became lost to sight in a thick, unseasonable mist, from which few emerged alive. It was perhaps the destruction of this unit which Reichardt observed, although even this is open to question. Certainly Reichardt cannot have observed the attack of the Norfolks across the Anafarta Plain, which was made over four miles from his vantage point on Rhododendron Spur, and took place on the 12th not the 21st, and was carried out by the 5th Battalion rather than the 4th.

4

The Rape of Belgium

On the morning of August 4th 1914, when the Kaiser's army marched across the Belgian frontier, it did so within living memory of the Franco–Prussian War of 1870. For Germany this short campaign had ended in spectacular victory. Napoleon III was defeated by von Moltke (the elder) within a matter of weeks, and surrendered his field army at Sedan. Yet the battle was far from over. At the instigation of a hastily convened Government of National Defence, some 58,000 French irregulars were organized into so-called
corps-francs
, the purpose of which was to harass the enemy communication lines and attack isolated pockets of German troops. Many of the irregulars wore no uniforms, and were given no quarter when captured. Seventy years later, during the Second World War, their descendants would be feted as the resistance movement. In 1870–71, however, the
corps-francs
were demonized by the Germans as villainous murderers, or
franc-tireurs
.