Post by Joanna on Sept 12, 2014 2:49:31 GMT -5
War brings with it horror. The battlefields of World War I were no exception and the trenches may as well have been meat grinders as they swallowed countless souls in an orgy of blood and death. However, the ever present threat of death from the enemy was not always the only horror that lied in wait within the labyrinthine ditches of war. From the fog of blood, brutality and violence of the Word War I trenches come the bizarre story of a mysterious and deadly creature that was said to prowl the danger-ridden no man’s land during fierce fighting during the Battle of Mons.
The Battle of Mons was so named for the small Belgian village of Mons, which was to become the scene of vicious fighting between British and German forces. In 1914, German troops had occupied Mons and the British, in what was their first foray into battle, valiantly marched in to try and liberate it. The British were heavily outnumbered and quickly sustained significant fatalities against the punishing German onslaught. The battle devolved into perilous trench warfare as the tenacious Brits dug in and continued the fight, with both sides ravaging the other with artillery fire, machine gun batteries, and constant, tedious shooting as well as barbarous hand-to-hand combat in the blood-soaked mud.
Between the trenches of the two enemy sides was what is referred to as “no man’s land.” This term was used to describe the disputed area lying between the enemies. No man’s lands were typically heavily defended and fortified on both sides and any movement into them typically resulted in a pulverizing barrage of weapon fire, thus ensuring these zones turned into barren wastelands where no one dared tread. The only time anyone ventured into no man’s land was during efforts to gain ground on the enemy, when retreating, or for the purpose of collecting wounded following an attack. These were horrific pathways through Hell itself that were often crisscrossed with snarled webs of barbed wire and dotted with rudimentary land mines and the mangled bodies of those not lucky enough to make it across. Michael Morpurgo described a typical no man’s land scene in his book War Horse thus:
“I stood in a wide corridor of mud, a wasted, shattered landscape, between two vast unending rolls of barbed wire that stretched away into the distance behind me and in front of me. I remembered I had been in such a place once before, that day when I had charged across it with Topthorn beside me. This was what the soldiers called ‘no-man’s land.’”
It was the no man’s land at the Battle of Mons that spawned the story of a mysterious beast that stalked the edges of barbed wire and did not hesitate to slaughter both British and German soldiers alike; an enormous hound that came to be known as the The Hound of Mons.
The tale of The Hound of Mons was originally brought to public attention in 1919 by a Canadian war veteran by the name of F. J. Newhouse, who brought back the gruesome tale from the battlefield. The story was first published in a 1919 edition of the Ada Evening News of Ada, Oklahoma, but was soon picked up by other publications. According to the account, the incident started when a Capt. Yeskes and four men of the London Fusiliers braved the perils of no man’s land in order to carry out a patrol of the area. The patrol never returned. This was not unusual in and of itself – remember this was a bloody battle. But when the bodies of the men were found several days later, it was learned that something had ripped out their throats and left gaping teeth marks on the corpses. One night a few days later, it was reported that soldiers of both sides heard an ear-piercing, monstrous howl emanating from the darkness of no man’s land. The bloodcurdling shriek was allegedly so terrifying that some soldiers who had braved battle day after day considered retreating at once.
During the ensuing days, additional patrols set out into no man’s land only to be found later in a similar mauled state, their throats ravaged by some unknown beast. The occasional anguished cries of terror from German soldiers seemed to indicate they were suffering similar attacks. The eerie nighttime roars increased in frequency and it was around this time that some of the soldiers on sentry duty along the edges of no man’s land reported seeing an enormous, grey hound skulking about out in the shadows of the war-torn chasm between the two factions. For two years the hound prowled the battlefield of Mons, gaining an ever-growing number of victims and instilling horror in the troops. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the hound was gone and the attacks ceased.
As bizarre as the story is already, it gets even weirder. Newhouse also claimed that not only was The Hound of Mons very real, but it had been the result of twisted German military experiments in biological warfare. According to Newhouse, a German scientist by the name of Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller had undertaken a ghastly experiment with the goal of inserting the mind of a deranged maniac into a hound. Newhouse said in an article from the August 1919 edition of the Oklahoman:
“The death of Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller in the recent Spartacan riots in Berlin has brought to light facts concerning the fiendish application of this German scientist’s skill that have astounded Europe. For the hound of Mons was not an accident, a phantom, or an hallucination – it was the deliberate result of one of the strangest and most repulsive scientific experiments the world has ever known.”
Newhouse’s account alleges that Hochmuller had searched insane asylums far and wide for a suitable subject who had gone insane from his hatred of England. The report claims that upon finding the perfect candidate, the doctor then had his brain removed and surgically implanted into the skull a huge Siberian wolfhound. The giant beast with the brain of a madman was trained, then transported to the battlefield and released into no man’s land to do its violent work. Accounts have variously claimed the hound had been somehow altered to become larger, that its capacity for hatred had been chemically enhanced, or its hide had somehow been rendered impervious to bullets. Newhouse claimed that papers had been found following Dr. Hochmuller’s death that fully outlined the experiment as well as the doctor’s wishes to unleash the beast on allied troops, fully proving the experiments were genuine. It is not explained whether the doctor had anticipated the maniacal hound would turn against its own side or why the living weapon suddenly ceased its rampage.
The entire tale certainly has its rather fantastical elements and a fair amount of doubt has been cast on the incident. It is hard to believe Germany, or any other nation for that matter, would have possessed the technology necessary to successfully implant a human brain into a dog. This is an impossible feat today, let alone in the early 1900s. In addition, there seems to be no available records to demonstrate that Dr. Hochmuler ever existed. Indeed, there is no record indicating there was ever a captain by the name of Yeskes either, which certainly brings the veracity of the report into question. These facts are reason enough to give one pause. Even at the time, there were many civilians who wrote off the story as the ravings and hallucinations of war-addled minds. It is quite possible that Newhouse completely fabricated the whole spooky story from scratch from his traumatized imagination, perhaps in an effort to spread propaganda against Germany.
So what was going on here? Was there really some surgically or even genetically enhanced hellhound stalking no man’s land? Was it pure fancy? If there is any grain of truth to it, then it seems perhaps more likely that wild or feral dogs had congregated at the battlefield to feed on the fallen dead. Battle-weary soldiers seeing a large dog eating a human being could have interpreted what they witnessed as the work of supernatural hounds of hell. This theory would also account for the spectral howls that were heard from the front lines. I do wonder if dogs would be compelled to remain with such a riotous cacophony of gunfire blazing around them, but it does offer a rational explanation and hunger drives animals, as well as humans, to act in an unusual manner.
Or perhaps the story derives from some combination of the rational and the imagination. War is an uproar of noise, confusion and terror punctuated by death. It is a waking nightmare. It is perhaps no wonder the bedraggled survivors of these horrors on occasion tell stories of carnage wrought not only by their human enemies, but the world of nightmares as well. Perhaps the Hound of Mons was one such an entity; a menacing apparition prowling the twilight land between reality and the netherworld that lies embedded deep within the human psyche. More than likely, we will never know the truth of what happened at Mons a century ago.
Source: Brent Swancer, MysteriousUniverse, September 10, 2014.
