Content note: Repeats First World War atrocity stories, including invented ones, and their wording. This object is shown as it was published. Why
A 1928 book by the British politician Arthur Ponsonby cataloguing rumours and stories circulated in the First World War, among them the mutilated nurse, the corpse factory and the Belgian baby without hands. Ponsonby had opposed the war and wrote from that position; the archive's doctrine page on Ponsonby gives that context and the later scholarship. The text repeats the stories as he reported them, so it reproduces some of their wording.
Read the text
- Preface 84 words
- Introduction 2,527 words
- 1. The Commitment to France 3,800 words
- 2. Serbia and the Murder of the Archduke 1,842 words
- 3. Invasion of Belgium as Cause of War 2,058 words
- 4. Germany’s Sole Responsibility for the War 1,558 words
- 5. Passage of Russian Troops through Great Britain 878 words
- 6. The Mutilated Nurse 978 words
- 7. The Criminal Kaiser 1,801 words
- 8. The Belgian Baby without Hands 1,399 words
- 9. The Louvain Altar-Piece 147 words
- 10. The Contemptible Little Army 1,021 words
- 11. Deutschland über Alles 323 words
- 12. The Baby of Courbeck Loo 285 words
- 13. The Crucified Canadian 821 words
- 14. The Shooting of the Franzosling 761 words
- 15. Little Alf’s Stamp Collection 294 words
- 16. The Tattooed Man 799 words
- 17. The Corpse Factory 3,759 words
- 18. The Bishop of Zanzibar’s Letter 305 words
- 19. The German U-Boat Outrage 636 words
- 20. Constantinople 421 words
- 21. The “Lusitania” 1,290 words
- 22. Report of a Broken-up Meeting 443 words
- 23. Atrocity Stories 1,854 words
- 24. Faked Photographs 1,177 words
- 25. The Doctoring of Official Papers 1,427 words
- 26. Hypocritical Indignation 1,620 words
- 27. Other Lies 2,245 words
- 28. The Manufacture of News 164 words
- 29. War Aims 1,189 words
- 30. Foreign Lies 7,416 words
Download as plain text 45,322 words, with the provenance header above the text
Provenance and rights
- Edition
- Falsehood in War-Time: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928; scan of a later impression (Internet Archive item FalsehoodInWarTime1928)
- Text source
- Internet Archive, item FalsehoodInWarTime1928
- Text basis
- Machine-read (OCR) text of a scan, not proofread.
- Rights
- Published in the United Kingdom in 1928, more than 95 years ago, so in the public domain in the United States. Ponsonby died in 1946, so the text is also in the public domain in countries that count the author's life plus 70 years. Checked September 29, 2026.
- Changes made
- Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread: recognition errors (for example "tlie" for "the") are the scan's, not edits. Page numbers, running heads and library stamps removed, line-end hyphens resolved and line wraps rejoined; nothing else changed. Footnotes stay where the scan puts them, at the end of the page's text.
- Source file checksum
d9a589d53cdd8ae2…(SHA-256 of the download this text was made from)
Where it appears in the archive
- Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (1928)
- The German 'corpse factory': a false atrocity story and its long afterlife (1917-1925)
- Wellington House and the Bryce Report: atrocity evidence, confirmed and unconfirmed (1914-1915)