The Crucified Soldier

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.

[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?"

[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.

[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.

[7] 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.

[10] In 1918 British artist Francis Derwent Wood created a 32-inch-high (810 mm) bronze sculpture entitled Canada's Golgotha which depicted a Canadian soldier crucified on a barn door and surrounded by jeering Germans.

[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.

[13][better source needed] The evidence discovered by Overton included a typewritten note by a British nurse found in the Liddle Collection of war correspondence in Leeds University.

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.