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Background to claimed massacre

The book itself only hints at the possibility that a proportion of those who died were "executed" after being captured. The Reverend Pierrepoint Edwards, who discovered the mass grave, was reported to have revealed, much later, in a private conversation that the bodies he had found had been shot in the head. The veracity of that claim has remained unproven, the suggestion being made in the film that it was not revealed at the time to protect the feelings of the King and Queen, and relatives of the deceased. There is stronger evidence though in the form of the account of one survivor, Private Arthur Webber of the Yarmouth Company, taken prisoner during the battle. He was wounded to the head and claimed to have both heard other wounded being bayonetted and shot by Turkish soldiers, and to have been attacked in the same fashion himself, only being saved by a German officer. In addition, at least one British officer was seen being taken prisoner during the battle but was not heard from again. The book suggests that, based on evidence from the time, the Turkish soldiers struggled with the concept of taking prisoners as opposed to a deliberate execution policy.

The film does go beyond the book in the way it portrays a larger group of men taken prisoner being deliberately executed, in a confused and fast-moving scene. From the accounts of the time, as related in the original book, it would seem that far from being tamely slaughtered as prisoners, most of the men who died did so in heavy fighting, either being killed outright or dying from the wounds suffered. The unit had advanced beyond other British troops in the line and found themselves isolated some distance behind Turkish lines. Ultimately, a group of anything up to 200 men had been surrounded at a farm house and wiped out during the fighting. As to the fate of Captain Beck, who is shown among the prisoners being executed, the film makes assumptions as well. The last sighting of Beck was by one of the survivors, who saw him slumped under a tree some time before the end of the battle, with his head to one side. The survivor could not be sure that he was not already dead at that point.

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