The Killing of the Iron Twelve
This talk by Hedley Malloch was delivered 'live' to an online audience. In this presentation Hedley will detail how, on 25 February 1915, the Germans shot eleven British soldiers and one Frenchman, who had been lost during the retreat to the Marne. They were executed in Guise Chateau after first being made to dig their own graves.
This is the soldiers’ story, of the French people who helped them, and of the Germans who killed them. It tells of their life on the run, of the two betrayals in the village of Iron, which delivered them to the Germans.
Their executions were part of a larger pattern of such killings of British soldiers committed by the Germans in their rear-zone known as Etappe no.2 based in Saint-Quentin.
A mystery surrounding the tragedy relates to a twelfth soldier who may have escaped at the last minute. Who was he and what was his fate? The talk will also consider why, after the war, the British government did nothing about these breaches of The Hague Conventions.
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