The Alleyman

Начало книги

The British Official History of the Great War, Military Operations: France and Belgium, 1916 Volume II (1938) simply states that on the 1st November 1916, the nine hundred men of 13th Battalion of the Pennine Fusiliers went over the top at dawn to attack a German position in Harcourt Wood on the Somme. They advanced into a gas cloud and vanished, leaving a crater nearly half a mile wide and eighty feet deep. The official explanation was a mass explosion of German mines dug under the British positions using an experimental high explosive. This is still the official position.

And it would have remained that way, had not a chance find in a French field by a farmer, ten years later, sparked a controversy that exists to this day and led to the one of the greatest mysteries of the First World War.

Known as the Lefeuvre Find, it contained several rusted film canisters of undeveloped silver nitrate film, along with, amongst other things, journals, letters, keepsakes, notes and what purported to be the Battalion War Diary. When developed, the black and white silent film – believed to have been shot by Oliver Hepton, a War Office kinematographer who had been assigned to film the attack – showed the Pennines apparently alive and well and on an alien world.

Читать дальше →