This is the story of the largest execution of British soldiers by the Germans on the Western Front during the First World War. It was an atrocity which was largely forgotten for over 100 years.
By Hedley Malloch
ON THE COLD, dark morning of Feb. 25, 1915, ragged volleys of shots rang out over the rooftops of the town of Guise in northern France and 12 bodies – six Irishmen, five Englishmen and one Frenchman – tumbled into two communal graves. The unfortunate men had been forced to dig the holes in a courtyard of the town’s bleak, forbidding château, then being used as a HQ by the occupying German forces.
These men had surrendered in uniform and offered no resistance to their captors. They were entitled to quarter – but received none.
Their story began some five months earlier when their regiments, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers and 15th (The King’s) Hussars had been cut off from the main body of the British Expeditionary Force withdrawal from Mons to the Marne in the late summer of 1914.
Many of the soldiers went into hiding, hoping that the British withdrawal was only temporary and that they would soon be reunited with the army and re-join in the fight. A group of nine fugitives hid in the thickly-wooded Nouvion Forest. As the weather deteriorated over the autumn, they sought refuge in cellars in the village of Dorengt.
When the Germans stepped up their efforts to find them, they hid in a wooden hut in the fields between Dorengt and its neighbouring village, Iron. To discourage German patrols from getting too close, they covered their shelter with manure.
A man from Iron named Vincent Chalandre discovered the starving and ragged soldiers grubbing for root vegetables. Chalandre, a family man with a wife and five children, lived in a substantial house. Vincent worked for local mill owner Léonie Logez. He told her of the soldiers’ plight and both agreed to shelter the soldiers in Léonie’s mill and the attic of Vincent’s house.
There the men stayed for the next six weeks, playing cards to while away the time, and occasionally going out to meet another group of British soldiers hiding in a hole in the ground about four miles away. In early December, they were joined by two other soldiers whom Vincent’s son, Clovis, aged 16, had found hiding in the forests.
All was going well until mid-December when a neighbour with a grudge against Logez tipped off the Germans about the British soldiers’ presence at the mill. Forty armed military police turned up and began a search. But Léonie’s daughter, Jeanne, managed to warn the sleeping soldiers in the nick of time. All escaped out of an unguarded back-door and hid in a copse at the rear of the mill. Amazingly, the Germans didn’t spot them, nor did they notice some of the British soldiers paybooks that were left out on a table in the mill during their search.
After the raid, as a precaution, it was decided to move all 11 soldiers to the Chalandre house in the centre of the village. There they slept, but Léonie Logez still continued to feed them all.
Their undoing came about as a result of an affair Vincent’s son, Clovis, was having with a young married woman – 22-year old Blanche Griselin – whose husband was away fighting in the French army. Not only was Griselin seeing Clovis, she was also involved with a much older man, Louis Bachelet, a veteran of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War.
Bachelet was intensely jealous and one night in February 1915, he hid outside Blanche’s house until Clovis arrived and went inside. After a few minutes Bachelet crept into the house and found the young lovers in flagrante delicto. A fight ensued between the two suitors during which Clovis badly beat Bachelet.
The next day, February 22, 1915, a vanquished and enraged Bachelet went to Guise and told, the local German commander, Lt. Col. Richard Waechter, that he could find 11 enemy soldiers in the Chalandre house in Iron. Waechter was not surprised – he knew he had missed the soldiers when he raided the Logez mill the previous December. He joined a convoy of two lorries full of military police and sped to Iron.
When the Germans arrived at the Chalandre house they found the soldiers armed and in uniform. The British troops were preparing to make their way through Belgium to the border with neutral Holland, and then home. Once surrounded, they offered no resistance and surrendered quietly. They and the Chalandre family were all taken into custody.
The Germans beat the prisoners severely. Vincent Chalandre’s daughter Germaine, was forced to burn down the family home with all of its possessions — the standard punishment meted out to French and Belgians who had sheltered Allied soldiers.
The prisoners were taken to Guise for interrogation during which they were beaten again. As yet, Waechter had no evidence linking mill owner Léonie Logez to the enemy soldiers. The German officer knew she was implicated, however – the Chalandres simply did not have the resources to feed the soldiers – but there was no smoking gun. In fact, the British soldiers and the Chalandres had concocted a story to protect Logez: The fugitives had only been in the house for a week and had paid the Chalandres for all of their food.
Waechter knew this was a lie. He confronted Clovis and demanded to know the truth otherwise he would shoot his family along with Léonie Logez and her daughter Jeanne. At this, the 16-year-old Clovis cracked and told the German everything.
A troop of military police was despatched to the Logez mill to arrest the two Logez women and loot the mill before burning it to the ground.
On Feb. 24, 1915, the British soldiers were tried for brigandry, that is forming an armed band of robbers behind German lines. They were convicted and sentenced to be shot the following day. For his role in harbouring the fugitives, Vincent Chalandre would also face a firing squad.
The condemned would be dealt one final indignity – all would be forced to dig their own graves. Why this added cruelty? Waechter had been humiliated. His failure to find the soldiers in the first raid on the Logez mill exposed his own incompetence. He had been bested by French peasants, many of whom were women and children, and by a group of British soldiers who did not have an officer between them. It was an insufferable affront to his German officer pride.
The soldiers, along with Vincent, were savagely beaten the night before their execution. Then in the early hours of Feb. 25, the condemned were loaded onto a lorry and driven to a courtyard at the rear of the château. The men were shown some spades and picks and told to dig. When they had finished, the 12 were shot in the usual German military fashion: three riflemen to each victim; two kneeling firing at the heart and one standing aiming at the head. The British soldiers met their ends with courage and dignity.
The civilians were imprisoned in Germany for spells of up to four years. The three youngest Chalandre children were abandoned on the streets of Iron to fend for themselves. At the end of the war, Madame Chalandre returned to Iron, terminally ill with TB meningitis. Before she died in 1919, she infected her three youngest children. Their young bodies, weakened by years of neglect, could not hold the disease at bay and the all died in early adulthood.
After his release, Clovis was tormented by his role in the tragedy. He became an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1948, aged 50. At the end of the war, the Logez women resumed their lives in Iron, but the mill, like the Chalandre house, was never rebuilt.
The soldiers were reburied in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission plot in Guise Communal Cemetery where they lie today. Vincent Chalandre was re-interred near them, but his grave was lost until 2006 when it was rediscovered by the Iron Memorial Fund who marked it with a special plaque.
The German officers responsible for these killings, illegal under the Hague Conventions (1907), were never held to account.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hedley Malloch is the author of The Killing of the Iron Twelve: An Account of the Largest Execution of British Soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War. He is chair of the Iron Memorial Fund and an Honorary Life Member of the Royal Munster Fusiliers Association. He has taught management in business schools throughout Europe, latterly at the Catholic University of Lille. He holds a PhD awarded by the University of Glasgow. Now retired, he lives in Nottinghamshire.
The Iron Twelve is the subject of these two short video clips from Britain’s ITV Central as part of the 2019 Remembrance commemorations. Here they are…
What a terribly sad story!