The Crucified Soldier
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The Crucified Soldier, refers to the widespread story of an Allied soldier serving in the Canadian Army who may have been crucified with bayonets on a barn door or a tree, while fighting on the Western Front during World War I. Three witnesses said they saw an unidentified crucified Canadian soldier near the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium on or around April 24, 1915, but there was no conclusive proof such a crucifixion actually occurred. The eyewitness accounts were somewhat contradictory, no crucified body was found, and no knowledge was uncovered at the time about the identity of the supposedly-crucified soldier.
Nevertheless, the story made headline news around the world and the Allies repeatedly used the supposed incident in their war propaganda, including an early propaganda film titled The Prussian Cur which included scenes of an Allied soldier's crucifixion. It bears relation to other propaganda of the time like the Rape of Belgium and the Angels of Mons, and the German corpse factory or Kadaververwertungsanstalt. A three-foot bronze sculpture by British artist Francis Derwent Wood of a crucified soldier titled Canada's Golgotha was included in an 1919 exhibition of wartime art in London, but the sculpture was withdrawn from the exhibit after protest. The sculpture was also displayed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 2000, again provoking some controversy. Even during World War I the German government protested the falseness of this atrocity story and after the end of the war they formally requested the Canadian government provide proof. With no knowledge of the identity of the soldier and having only a few eyewitness accounts, the crucifixion story was left unproven by a British inquiry after the War.
In a 2002 programme for Channel 4's Secret History, British documentary filmmaker Iain Overton claimed to have uncovered new historical evidence which identified the crucified soldier as Sergeant Harry Band of the Central Ontario Regiment of the Canadian Infantry, who was reported missing in action on April 24, 1915 near Ypres. Other soldiers in his unit wrote to Band's sister Elizabeth Petrie to express their condolences; a year later, one of them finally confirmed in a letter to her that her suspicions her brother had been "the crucified soldier" were true. Band's body was not recovered, and he is commemorated on the Menin Gate memorial.[1] Some accounts erroneously name the soldier identified in Overton's documentary as Harry Banks, thus creating an apparent contradiction in that the only Canadian soldier of that name enlisted into the Over-seas Expeditionary Force on September 1, 1915 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, some five months after the supposed crucifixion. In addition, Banks appears to have survived the War, as he is not commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the agency responsible for recording the deaths and grave or memorial sites for Commonwealth soldiers killed in the both World Wars. In fact, the surname of "Banks" is not mentioned in the Overton documentary at all.
The "crucifixion of the soldier" story resurfaced during the First Chechen War, according to which an unnamed Russian soldier was supposedly crucified during the Battle of Grozny in 1995.[2]
