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A Fact, Not a Fiction?

In those dark days, Mons was also made famous by another, much darker legend. On a night in November, Captain Yeskes and four of his London Fusiliers went on a patrol in No Man’s Land. Several days later their corpses were found, with teeth marks at the throats. And in the British trenches a weird, blood-curldling howl was heard… the howl of the Hell Hound of Mons.

Afterwards, on the battlefields of the Marne and the Somme, near Verdun and Ypres, patrols that ventured out in the darkness between the trenches, were found with the same telltale marks at their throats, while the howl continued to roam through No Man’s Land. Sentries declared they saw a grey form flashing past the barbed wire. The giant Hound of Hell was running there, silently…

In August 1919, the Evening News of Oklahoma published a story of the Canadian veteran Captain F.J. Newhouse. The Terror of No Man’s Land that was stalking among the corpses and dragged soldiers down to their death, was no apparition of a fear-crazed mind, he said. It was no phantom, no hallucination, no fiction… but a gruesome reality of the Great War. 

Captain Newhouse stated that certain facts had been brought to light, as a result of the recent death of Dr Gottlieb Hochmuller in a Berlin riot. Secret documents were found in his house, which proved the Hell Hound of Mons really existed. The creature had come out of maybe the most repulsive scientific experiment the world had ever known, as a giant hound with the brain of a human madman.

Indeed, Dr Hochmuller had roamed the German hospitals until he found a man gone mad because of his hatred of England. With the sanction of his government, Hochmuller removed the brain of this man and inserted it in a giant Siberian wolfhound. The dog lived, grew rapidly stronger and after careful training was released in No Man’s Land.

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Only an Urban legend, and Nothing More?

Could there be any truth in this monstrous horror tale? The surgical procedure Captain Newhouse described, is quite impossible. And the story reminds us of other tales – what we would call now “urban legends” – of alleged atrocities committed by “the Hun”. Most of these World War One horror tales have been proven to be war propaganda and nothing more.

Theo Paijmans, who wrote for the Fortean Times an interesting article on The Hound of Mons, could find no traces of a Dr Gottlieb Hochmuller and his bizarre medical procedures that remind us of the very fictional experiments of Baron von Frankenstein. The sudden disappearance of the creature also has elements of the various legends concerning demon dogs and hounds from hell.

But, as Paijmans points out, perhaps a giant dog really did haunt the trenches, abandoned by his master, hungry prowling the battlefield. And maybe Agatha Christie had some good reason for choosing Belgium during World War One as the setting for one of her supernatural short stories, titled… The Hound of Death (1933).

Other Great War Articles:

A Poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen

In Flanders Fields

Phantoms of the Great War

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The Ghostly Cavalry

Together with a Corporal Barr he went picking up post and rations. They started back to the camp at about three-thirty. It was far from dark. On his right, Wentworth Day saw a fantastic wood of larch and birch, with thin trees, torn and twisted into grotesque shapes by shell blast: “It was a Hans Andersen wood of Arthur Rackham trees through whose sun-reddened trunks we could see cloud-masses lit with a Cuyp-like glow.”

Suddenly, as they splashed through the sunset pools of that deserted road, German cavalry swept out of that “spectral wood”. A dozen or more German Uhlans “in those queer high-topped hats which they had worn in the dead days of 1914″ charged and up the slope to meet them, Wentworth Day saw some French dragoons in their brass cuirasses, sabres upswung, plumes dancing from their helmets. They also charged to meet the Germans with their slender lances… but then the vision passed and there was no clash of mounted men, only the empty land and a thin wood of silver in the setting sun.

“Did you see anything?” Wentworth Day glanced at Corporal Barr, who looked white and uneasy.

“Aye… something mighty queer,” the Corporal said.

They reached camp, oddly shy of talking too much. The next day, at Neuve Eglise, “that skeleton of a village on the spine of the Ravelsberg”, Wentworth Day asked a peasant about the wood.

“Ah! M’sieu, that wood is a very sad wood, you know! It is on the frontier… a wood of dead men! In the wars of Napoleon, in the war of 1870, in this Great War… the cavalry of France and Germany have always met each other by that wood…”

And the man showed Wentworth Day the graves of the cavalry of all these wars in the tiny churchyard…

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The Spectres of Crécy

A Colonel Shepheard, who was a staff colonel during the First World War, told Wentworth Day another strange story. 

He was travelling in a car from Hazebrouck to Wimereux, together with a French captain as interpreter and aide. They dined and slept at Wimereux and the colonel dreamed he was riding the same road again, in the same car and trough the same villages. But this time, the car slowed down and stopped in one of these villages. And there, out of the earth on each side of the road, rose up the hooded, cloaked figures of silent men, thousands of them, and every man was staring fixedly at him – sadly, pitifully, endlessly… Their cloaks were grey, almost luminous, with a fine, silvery bloom on them like moths’ wings. When he touched one, it came off on his fingers in a soft dust…

Slowly, they all sank back into the ground… The next morning at breakfast, Colonel Shepheard told his French aide of his dream. The officer listened to him without saying a word.

“You know the name of that village near where your car stopped?” the French officer asked him when he finished his story. 

Colonel Shepheard described him the village he had seen twice: once in reality, once in his dream. And the French officer nodded: “Sure… It was Crécy indeed!… You have seen in your dream the archers who died on Crécy field in 1346, sir!”

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Back to Report

Wentworth Day also related the true story Major S.E.G. Ponder told him, the Oriental traveller and novelist. Ponder served in World War One as a Regular gunner in a Heavy Battery of the Royal Artillery under a Major Apultree.

On a night in autumn 1916, a Captain “A” and a Lieutenant “B” were ordered to go up the German trenches, so Captain A could show Lieutenant B the field of fire. The parapet and the parados were built mainly of the bodies of dead Germans. For some reason they dead didn’t to decompose there, on the Somme. It had something to do with the soil. They simply looked like alabaster.

The Boches put down a heavy barrage that night and neither A nor B showed up. Ponder wasn’t particularly worried about them as there were several deep dug-outs they could get into.

Next morning, about six – he was having a mug of tea in the mess – Apultree appeared in the door. He was dead white and shaking like a leaf. “I’ve seen B,” he muttered. “But he’s dead!…”

And then, Apultree told Ponder how B had suddenly appeared in the door of his dug-out. “Ah! You’re back to report?” Apultree asked.

“Yes, sir! But only to tell you I was killed last night, sir!”

And indeed, there was a shell splinter at the back of his ear and right trough his head. Apultree saw it clearly, no doubt about that… before B disappeared forever.

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More Great War Stories:

The Angels of Mons

In Flanders’ Fields

A Poet of the Great War: Wilfred Owen