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PART 1:
Pawn En Passant

1

THE INCIDENT OCCURRED ON AUGUST 16, 1917, DURING THE BATTLE of Third Ypres. The following day, Brig.-Gen. Stringer instituted an informal board of inquiry, consisting of Capt. K. J. Purvis, the medical officer of 26th (Midland Scottish) Battalion, and Capt. J. J. O'Brien, the brigade padre. This procedure was highly improper. The choice of Father O'Brien implies that rumors of a miracle were circulating already.

Apprehension of a suspected spy should certainly have been reported at once to division headquarters, and from there it should have been relayed to Corps and Army, and eventually GHQ. In this case there is considerable doubt that the news ever reached higher than brigade level. Published dispatches and official histories contain no mention of the bizarre affair. Apart from a few cryptic comments in some of the diaries and letters of the period, the only documentary evidence resides in the Stringer family archives.

The four witnesses were examined separately. All four were privates in C Company of the Royal Birmingham Fusiliers, which officially had been held out of the battle on the sixteenth. All four were either eighteen or nineteen years old, and all from the Midlands. Stretcher-bearing duty, to which the four had been assigned, was little less hazardous than combat. They had been on their fourth mission of the day and had been under fire almost continuously. Without question, they were all physically exhausted. Their mental and emotional condition should be borne in mind when evaluating their evidence.

Of the four accounts, that of Chisholm is the most detailed and seems the most convincing. He was the eldest by a few months; he had been a printer's apprentice and had benefitted from two more years' education than the others, Pvts. W. J. Clark, P. T. White, and J. Goss, who had all left school at fourteen.

Considering the danger, the inhuman conditions, and the extreme fatigue under which they had been laboring, the witnesses' evidence is remarkably uniform. They disagree on a few minor details, but—as the board observed in its report—completely identical accounts would be cause for suspicion.

They had paused for a rest in the lee of a fragment of masonry wall, probably the remains of a church which the maps showed in approximately that location. Over the roar of the heavy guns they could hear the repeated ping of bullets and shrapnel striking the stones; from time to time a shell would come close enough to spray mud at them. They lay in pairs, two men on either side of a flooded shell hole.

Chisholm later claimed that he had risen to his knees and called on the party to start moving again. None of the other three mentioned this, but in the racket and their own fatigue, they might not have heard or noticed. The important point is that Chisholm was apparently looking toward the rear at the crucial moment, and he insisted that the newcomer did not come from that direction.

The men were unanimous in stating that the fifth man fell into the shell hole between them with considerable force, as if he had dropped "out of the sky." No amount of questioning could shake their testimony on this point. They all claimed to have been splashed by the water thrown up. Three of them insisted that he could not have jumped or fallen down from the top of the wall. The fourth, Pvt. Clark, considered that he might have done, but did not think it likely.

The newcomer floundered and struggled, apparently unable to stand. Clark and Goss waded into the water and hauled him out, choking and still struggling, and completely coated in mud. It was only then that they realized just how remarkable the mysterious newcomer was.

"I saw the man had no tin hat," Pvt. Clark related in the sort of bloodless prose that has obviously been clerically improved. "But the rest of him was just mud. I reached for his arm and at first it slipped through my fingers. I realized he had no coat on. When we got him out, we saw that he had no clothes on at all."

The witnesses agreed that the stranger was having some sort of fit. His limbs thrashed and he seemed to be in considerable pain. He was incapable of answering questions, and they were unable to make sense of what he was saying.

Each of them was asked to report whatever he could remember of the man's words. There the testimonies diverge. Chisholm thought he heard mention of July, railways, and bed socks. White opted for cabbage and ladders and Armentières. The other two had similar unlikely lists, and we can only assume that they were equally mistaken. They all agreed that some of the talk was in English, some of it was not.

They did all agree on a few words: spy, traitor, betrayed, treason.

They had come to rescue wounded soldiers. This man had no visible wounds except some minor bleeding scratches caused by his convulsions. He was apparently incapable of standing, let alone walking, even had he been suitably clothed.

That he was a British soldier must have seemed extremely improbable to them, even then. That he was a German soldier was even less likely. Under questioning, they admitted discussing the possibility that he was a spy. Any man apprehending a spy automatically received leave in England, and they did not deny that they were aware of that regulation, although they all claimed that it had not influenced their decision.

Whatever their motives, they loaded the stranger on their stretcher, tying him down securely. They covered him with muddy greatcoats taken from corpses, and waded off through the bog to deliver him to the regimental aid post. It is difficult to see what else they could have done.

 

The report wastes little time discussing the conditions on the battlefield, which were only too familiar to the examining officers.

Those conditions can be reconstructed from other sources, although at this distance in time the reader's reaction is mostly incredulity. Superlatives pile up in a mental logjam, and the reader is left wondering if any words could ever be adequate. Even the photographs fail to convince. The mind recoils, refusing to believe that men actually fought over such terrain or that any of them could have come out alive to tell of it.

By the summer of 1917, the Belgian plain had been contested for almost three years, and yet the front line had scarcely changed position. The trenches, like insatiable bloody mouths, had subducted the youth of Europe. For three years men had marched in from east and west with intent to kill each other. On both sides they had succeeded. On both sides they had died in hundreds of thousands, yet still they came. Since 1914 the introduction of aircraft and poison gas had improved the technology of death tremendously, but repeated campaigns had barely changed the maps. At the opening of the battle of the Somme, in the previous year, the British Army alone lost over 57,000 men—killed, wounded, or missing—in one day. (This is numerically equal to the death toll suffered by the United States in the whole of the Vietnam War, half a century later.)

The battle of Third Ypres lasted for months and much of it was fought in torrential rain. The monotonously flat ground was completely water-logged, repeatedly churned up by shells. Nothing of the original countryside remained. Nothing at all remained except mud, often thigh deep and in some places capable of sucking men and mules down to their death. It was laced throughout with broken timbers and old barbed wire, with rotting bodies of men, mules, and horses. There was no cover, for every hollow was filled with slime and water, commonly scummed with blood and fragments of flesh. Old corpses thrown up by the explosions lay amid the dying.

Over all this watery desolation hung the reek of death and decay, the garlic odor of mustard gas, the stench of the mud itself. Even a minor wound could cause a man to drown, and in those days there were no antibiotics to combat the frightful infections. The soil was poisoned by gas and virulent microbes. The roar of artillery never ceased. The ground shook as if Earth itself were suffering. Mule trains struggled forward with ammunition; the walking wounded staggered toward the rear. The British Army was attempting to advance across the desolation, while the Germans tried to mow it down with howitzers, machine guns, shrapnel, and poison gas. The field was swept by unrelenting fire and unrelenting rain.

Through this maelstrom of death went stretcher parties looking for wounded. Four men to a stretcher was a bare minimum. Often eight or ten were required, and even then it was not uncommon for the whole party to stumble and tip the wounded man to the ground. After a journey back to the field dressing station—which might take hours—the stretcher-bearers would go back for another. The work had to be done in daylight, for at night there were no landmarks.

 

Peculiar as the incident itself was, the subsequent behavior of the Army command structure was even stranger.

Suspicion must be directed at the brigade commander, Brig.-Gen. J. G. Stringer, although in all other respects his reputation is unclouded. The son of an Army of India officer, Brig.-Gen. (later Major-Gen.) Stringer had a distinguished career as a professional soldier. Born in India in 1882, he was educated in England at Fallow and Sandhurst. He was a noted athlete, playing cricket for Hampshire and serving as master of the Dilby Hunt. When war broke out in August 1914, he held the rank of major in the Royal Fusiliers, which formed part of the British Expeditionary Force dispatched to France. His subsequent rise was dramatic. He was well-thought-of by both his superiors and his subordinates. He was to die tragically in a motor accident in 1918, shortly before the end of the war.

 

One man did not testify at the inquiry—the mysterious stranger himself.

Even when the stretcher party had set off with their mysterious patient, their troubles were not over. The British began bringing up reinforcements. The Germans laid down a barrage to stop them. The stretcher-bearers had to run the gauntlet of high-explosives, shrapnel and, at one point, poison gas shells. They took a gas helmet from a corpse for their patient, but some of his exposed skin was blistered.

Their estimates of the time this journey took varied from two and a half to three and a half hours. By the time they arrived at the dressing station, the unknown man was unconscious and incapable of explaining anything.

 

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Framed