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| History Sleuth and Real Life Detective Graeme Sheppard |
By James Patton
Graeme Sheppard is a retired investigator with the London Metropolitan Police who has taken up historical research. In 2021 he produced an engaging account of how a clever piece of misinformation arguably could have precipitated events that ended the First World War.
His premise is that there was a commonly held belief amongst ordinary Bulgarians that their agreement with Germany was for a three-year war and that ending date came on 10 September 1918. Thus, he argues that this canard caused the collapse of the Bulgarian army, which in turn led to the German High Command recommending that an armistice be sought.
While researching in the UK National Archives in Kew about an entirely different matter regarding China in the 1930s, Sheppard came across a 1931 Foreign Office file archived as Miscellaneous. It contained a memoir of a junior diplomat named D.J. Cowan explaining how he had witnessed something of great significance.
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| Lieutenants Howe and Cowan |
“The story [among Bulgarian folk]” he wrote, “was a very short and simple one. It was this: our contract with the Germans is for three years only [a mistaken belief that was based upon pure propaganda] … [and] that the men at the front definitely did not intend to carry on after the three-year limit had been reached ... from what I saw of the troops of the neighborhood where I was there seemed little doubt of the fact that they had simply left the front with the one object of returning home.”
Cowan went on to describe how this mass Bulgarian desertion in September 1918 coincided with the Allies’ great offensive.
In fact, there was no such clause, even a secret one, in Bulgaria’s agreement with the Central Powers. It was likely one of several schemes to undermine the ruling government, hatched by the banned opposition party, the Agrarian Union. Its leader, Alexander Stamboliyski (1879–1923), was imprisoned at the time due to his antiwar posture.
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| Alexander Stamboliyski |
Sheppard found much more information in the memoirs and letters of Cowan and Robert Howe, two British second lieutenants whose letters to home and other documents have been carefully preserved by relatives. Although they had starkly dissimilar backgrounds, Howe described the bond between himself and Cowan as closer than brothers.
Cowan was the only child in his well-to-do family, who lived on Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, an area now occupied by University College London. His father was a civil engineer, and the couple were artistic free-thinkers, who even took young David along on their foreign excursions. In 1914 he was a medical student at St Barts Hospital, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, about a mile from his home.
Howe was one of five born in Derby to a semi-literate railway worker. The family lived in a cramped terrace house with a privy. Howe’s path out of poverty was through a series of grants from the local council that even enabled him to study mathematics at Cambridge.
In August 1914, both men left their colleges and volunteered for Lord Kitchener’s New Army. Cowan was commissioned in an Irish unit, the 5th (Service) Connaught Rangers and Howe likewise in his local 9th (Service) Notts and Derby (Sherwood Foresters).
After some training, in July 1915 both battalions were sent to Gallipoli, among the first New Army units to go overseas. Once there, both Cowan and Howe were re-assigned to back-fill losses in the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 30th Brigade, 10th (Irish) Division, which then became the first unit sent to the Macedonian front.
In the mountains near Kosturino, Howe was defending an exposed ridge overlooking a strategically vital track. Pinned down by machine gun fire, he was shot through the chest and left for dead. After two days, enemy stretcher-bearers found him and loaded him into a bullock cart. At a makeshift field hospital, he was bedded down in a sheep-pen. Remarkably, he survived. Cowan had also been wounded and taken prisoner a day earlier than Howe.
They were both sent to a new prison camp near ancient Philippopolis (now called Plovdiv). There were no fences there–the Bulgarians couldn’t believe that anyone would want to go back to the fighting.
Not so with Cowan and Howe. As soon as they were fully recovered, they began to plan their escape. Sneaking out of the camp after dark was easy; hiking more than 100 miles to the Allied lines would not be easy.
On their first escape attempt, they walked south—crossing a mountain range, equipped with only a cheap compass, but were cornered by mastiff dogs only a few miles short of the front. Their boots had been ruined; nevertheless, they were sent barefoot back to Philippopolis.
Their second try saw them head east, following the Maritsa River valley to the Aegean Sea. Cowan believed that he had arranged a rendezvous with the Royal Navy, having sent a cryptic letter outlining the plan to a former colleague now at the Admiralty. Whether this scheme was well laid or not would never be known because, while resting during the day, they were flushed out by armed locals seeking the bounty.
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| British Prisoners Putting on a Show at Philippopolis Camp |
According to Howe, the prison commandant could never understand why they were escaping. At one point he asked them: “Were you not happy and comfortable here?” The camp conditions were far from posh, but the British officers received by far the best treatment of any there.
Howe explained that “The Bulgarians don’t seem to realize that they are at war with England.” Moreover, he recalled being warmly welcomed by cries of “Anglichanni!” Ordinary people frequently regarded them as special, often evoking their memory of “the good Gladstone”, [William Gladstone (1809–1898)] a figure widely admired for his outspoken support of Bulgarian independence from the Ottomans.
Even if the commandant couldn’t understand why, Cowan and Howe had to be punished. After their first escape attempt, they were sent to a camp otherwise reserved for Serbian prisoners. Here they met with arbitrary and sadistic violence, starvation, and rampant disease.
Howe estimated that 3,000 Serbs died of typhus while they were at the camp, including the only Serb doctor. The Brits had been taught to rub paraffin on their skin to drive away lice, while the Serbs had not. Eventually Cowan and Howe met with a Red Cross inspector who got them sent back to Philippopolis, where they proceeded to stage failed escape number three.
This time, the punishment meted out was entirely different. They were sent to an army barracks near Sevlievo, where the congenial commander offered them parole to live freely in the town.
Amazingly, the prisoner parcel system run by the Red Cross worked. Cowan sent his mother a long list of his requirements—everything from fruitcake and kippers to his favorite felt hat and some boxing gloves, Kipling anthologies, and French grammar books. A few months later, the sealed packages would arrive intact. Among these items were Cowan’s dental tools.
So they rented a house and set up a much-needed dental practice. Having no anaesthetics, Howe’s job was to immobilize the patient’s head while Cowan would perform the work, especially extractions.
Howe discovered that “In Sevlievo, I could write a cheque on any old piece of paper, address it to Messrs Cox & [Co.] in Whitehall [his regiment’s bankers], and the locals would cash it for me.” Such was the respect shown to a British officer.
Cowan and Howe both proved to be gifted linguists, and had quickly become fluent in Bulgarian. Crucial to the myth of the three-year contract, they were also able to mingle with ordinary Bulgarians—in the dental practice, cafes, barracks, shops and even on the streets—picking up bits of news and gossip.
In September 1918, upon hearing rumors that the front was collapsing, Cowan and Howe simply informed their captors that they were leaving for awhile, and no one stopped them. They spent several days traveling a hundred miles over roads and trains over-filled with rebellious soldiers going home. However, Cowan and Howe didn’t go toward the Allied forces. Instead they headed to the capitol, Sofia, which was awash in political turmoil—Tsar Ferdinand I had abdicated, Stamboliyski was freed, and a peasant revolt was heating up.
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| A Zeppelin over Sofia, 1915 |
Arriving at the chaotic rail station, they caught a horse-drawn cab to the nearly deserted Ministry of War, where, despite their less than spiffy uniforms, they brazenly announced that they were an advance party of British officers and were taking control in the name of His Majesty King George. No one raised an objection. A ministry car and driver were found to take the pair to the city’s Grand Hotel—the headquarters of the German mission—where they demanded and got the best rooms in the house. An hour later, having washed and shaved, they entered the hotel dining room, which was full of Germans. Undeterred, the pair informed the maître d' that they required the head table and would he tell the two gentlemen currently seated there to kindly move? At which request the senior German officers concerned rose wordlessly and left their seats. Then one of the Brits raised a champagne toast: “Long live England—vive les alliés,” while the Germans only glared. It was great fun, but they knew that it couldn’t last. Not too long after, they slipped away, returning to their captors in Sevlievo in order to avoid being listed as deserters when the British got there.
“It was a great moment,” remembered Howe. “One of the greatest moments of my life—perhaps never again one like it. One of those moments when you know there is nothing you cannot do, when no obstacles exist, when no one can touch you.”
After the war, both went on to have long careers with the Foreign Office. In retirement in the 1970’s, Howe wrote about his experiences in unpublished memoirs, including his account of an occasion shortly after the war, when as a junior diplomat in Belgrade [Britain didn’t have an Embassy in Sofia until 1939] he met the political architect behind the plot, even discussing the matter with him at a function in Bulgaria’s royal palace. Later, Cowan corresponded with Cyril Falls CBE (1888–1971), author of the official British history, History of the Great War, and he gave Cowan’s story a footnote.
According to Sheppard, the French and British had gathered intelligence that indicated poor morale in the Bulgarian Army before the Battle of Dobro Pole (15–18 September 1918), and indeed the depleted Bulgarian 2nd and 3rd Divisions were overcome by the French, Greek, and Serbian attackers. Sheppard has also found some mentions in Bulgarian histories and oblique references in both Ludendorff’s and Hindenburg's memoirs.
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| A Bulgarian Officer Surrenders His Unit at the End of September |
Sheppard argues that Cowan and Hope are strong witnesses for the veracity of the three-year contract. They both independently stated that the public believed that it was real and that it was a brainstorm of Alexander Stamboliyski. Although the Agrarian leader never acknowledged this, he also never lived to write his memoirs—he was assassinated in 1923.
Though unaware of the fact at the time, the two friends later believed that they had witnessed a momentous act of Balkan propaganda that had a profound effect not only on the Bulgarian soldiery but also on the increasingly fragile mindset at Germany’s high command and its head, the de facto dictator, Erich Ludendorff.
The story of Cowan and Hope’s adventure in Sofia could certainly make an entertaining screenplay.
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Sources: Aspects of History, Balkan Dave, History Is Now, Key Military, National World War One Museum, and The Salonika Campaign Society
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