Years passed, and Henry Tandey returned to England as the most decorated private of the First World War, a true national hero. In 1923, an artist named Fortunino Matania painted a famous scene of Tandey carrying a wounded comrade at the Menin Crossroads. This painting became a symbol of British bravery, and copies were hung in galleries and offices across the United Kingdom. Unknown to Tandey, a copy of this very painting was ordered by a rising German politician who lived in the mountains. This politician was the same wounded soldier Tandey had spared in the mud of Marcoing, a man named Adolf Hitler. Hitler was obsessed with the painting, seeing it as a sign of his own destiny and his “miraculous” survival on the battlefield. He kept the image in his study at the Berghof, pointing it out to visitors as proof that the British were a noble race. When the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, visited Germany in 1938 to try and prevent another world war, he saw the painting. Hitler pointed directly at the figure of Henry Tandey and told Chamberlain that the man had nearly killed him twenty years ago. Chamberlain was stunned, realizing that the fate of Europe had once rested on the tip of a single British soldier’s finger. He promised to relay Hitler’s “best wishes and gratitude” to Tandey when he returned to the streets of London. The irony was suffocating; a gesture of humanity was being used to justify the rise of a man who lacked it entirely. Tandey, living a quiet life in Coventry, had no idea that his face was hanging on the wall of a monster.
