hoped to exploit the story, and Charles Masterman, director of the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, was asked to prepare a short pamphlet. This was never published, however. Masterman and his mentor, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, never took the story seriously. An undated anonymous pamphlet entitled A 'corpse-conversion' Factory: A Peep Behind the German Lines was published by Darling & Son, probably around this time in 1917. A month later, The Times revived the rumour by publishing a captured German Army order that made reference to a factory. It was issued by the , which The Times interpreted as ("instructions department"). The , however, insisted that it stood for (veterinary station). The Foreign Office agreed that order could only be referring to "the carcasses of horses." Paul Fussell has also suggested that this may have been a deliberate British mistranslation of the phrase on a captured German order that all available animal remains be sent to an installation to be reduced to tallow. Postwar claims Charteris' speech On 20 October 1925, the New York Times reported on a speech given by Brigadier General John Charteris at the National Arts Club the previous evening. Charteris was then a Conservative MP for Glasgow, but had served as Chief of Army Intelligence for part of the war. According to the Times, the brigadier told his audience that he had invented the cadaver-factory story as a way of turning the Chinese against the Germans, and he had transposed the captions of two photographs that came into his possession, one showing dead soldiers being removed by train for funerals, the second showing a train car bearing horses to be processed for fertiliser. A subordinate had suggested forging a diary of a German soldier to verify the accusation, but Charteris vetoed the idea. On his return to the UK, Charteris unequivocally denied the New York Times report in a statement to The Times, saying that he was only repeating speculation that had already been published in the 1924 book These Eventful Years: The Twentieth Century In The Making. This referred to an essay by Bertrand Russell, in which Russell asserted that, Charteris stated that he had merely repeated Russell's speculations, adding the extra information about the proposed fake diary: The question was once again raised in Parliament, and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans said that the story that the Germans had set up a factory for