The original Heap was formerly Baron Eric von Emmelman (his last name also sometimes spelled Emmelmann), a World War I German flying ace who was shot down in 1918 over a Polish swamp. Clinging to the smallest shred of life through sheer force of will (and, as it was later revealed, with the mystic help of the goddess Ceres, later to be referred to more generically in the series as Mother Nature), through the decades his body decayed and intermingled with the vegetation around him, becoming one with the marshland itself until at last a shaggy, shambling half-world creature neither animal nor man arose from the muck during the early years of World War II, a creature which would become known far and wide as The Heap.