“I am told by an eminent chemist that six pounds of glycerine can be extracted from the corpse of a fairly well nourished Hun... These unfortunates, when alive, were driven ruthlessly to inevitable slaughter. They are sent as ruthlessly to the blast furnaces. One million dead men are resolved into six million pounds of glycerine." A later cartoon by Bruce Bairnsfather also referred to the rumour, depicting a German munitions worker looking at a can of glycerine and saying "Alas! My poor Brother!" (parodying a well-known advertisement for Bovril). By 1917 the British and their allies were hoping to bring China into the war against Germany. On 26 February 1917 the English-language North-China Daily News published a story that the Chinese President Feng Guozhang had been horrified by Admiral Paul von Hintze's attempts to impress him when the "Admiral triumphantly stated that they were extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers!". The story was picked up by other papers. In all these cases the story was told as rumour, or as something heard from people supposed to be 'in the know'. It was not presented as documented fact. The Corpse factory The first English language account of a real and locatable appeared in the 16 April 1917 issue of The Times of London. In a short piece at the foot of its "Through German Eyes" review of the German press, it quoted from a recent issue of the German newspaper a very brief story by reporter Karl Rosner of only 59 words in length, which described the bad smell coming from a "" rendering factory, making no reference to the corpses being human. The following day, 17 April 1917, the story was repeated more prominently in editions of The Times and The Daily Mail (both owned by Lord Northcliffe at the time), The Times running it under the title Germans and their Dead, in the context of a 500-plus word story which the editorial introduction stated came from the 10 April edition of the Belgian newspaper published in England, which in turn had received it from , another Belgian newspaper published in Leyden, The Netherlands. The Belgian account stated specifically that the bodies were those of soldiers and interpreted the word "" as a reference to human corpses. The story described how corpses arrived by rail at the factory, which was placed "deep in forest country" and surrounded by an electrified