Executed at Dawn (2 page)

I have not set out to be judgemental about the individuals that have been identified because they were largely behaving according to the standards of the time. I approached this book from a neutral position, allowing the theory or narrative to emerge from the research, and what I started to find was that there is still much to be debated about the conduct and behaviour of the British Army and politicians, not just in the war years but in the subsequent decades too.

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Whilst writing, a number of times I have experienced the feeling of reaching a plateau in my work. I have been in this position enough times to know that something is needed to push my work onto the next level, and fortunately something always seems to come along that provides that necessary impetus. In this case it happened at a time when my work, while not exactly stalled, could be said to be progressing slowly, and my thoughts by way of self-distraction turned to whom I could ask to write the foreword. Eventually, through researching the Shot at Dawn campaign, I made contact with Mac Macdonald of the organisation FLOW (Forces Literary Organisation Worldwide), which has as its mission:

To help anyone who has suffered from the effects of war, including the suffering shared by family members and friends too.

The organisation believes, based on research that proves its therapeutic value, that the writing of a poem or a piece of prose provides an opportunity to release deep emotions in a safe environment, and that reading what others have written helps individuals to take comfort from the thought that others have been through similar experiences. The website is well worth a visit:
www.flowforall.org
.

FLOW's website includes some material from the Shot at Dawn campaign and, with the help of Mac Macdonald, I was able to contact Mr A.R. (David) Lewis who was very supportive of my work on this subject and as a result gave me his generous permission to use his poems in this book. I am also very grateful to Mac Macdonald for passing on to me a file of documents relating to the Shot at Dawn campaign.

Many other people have generously helped me, and thanks and acknowledgements are due to the following:

John Hughes-Wilson, David Blake (Museum of Army Chaplaincy), Richard Callaghan (Royal Military Police Museum), Julian Putkowski, Scott Flaving (Yorkshire Regiment), Shaun Barrington, Jo de Vries and Rebecca Newton (The History Press), Mainstream Publishing for permission to quote from
To War with God
by Peter Fiennes, Colin Williams and Neil Cobbett at The National Archives, the staff at the National Army Museum, and last but not least my wife Val.

I have made all reasonable efforts to ensure that all quotations within this book have been included with the full consent of the copyright holders. In the event that copyright holders had not responded prior to publication, then should they so wish, they are invited to contact the publishers so that any necessary corrections may be made in any future editions of this book.

I believe that all research must inevitably raise more questions than it answers, and I hope that others may be motivated to debate and further research the issues raised in this book, and to come forward with any additional evidence that will either confirm or disprove my analysis.

David Johnson

The condemned man had spent his last night on this earth in a small room that was barely furnished with a table, two chairs and a straw bed. By the light of a guttering candle he had written his final, painful letters to his family and friends, and laid out his few personal possessions on the table. The small room was further diminished in size by the presence of two guards, who stood with bayonets fixed by the door and the single window to prevent his escape.

Occasionally through the night, the chaplain came to spend time with him, but otherwise he sat alone with his thoughts. With his letters written, he decided that he would spend his last hours awake and, so, moving his chair so that he could watch for the approach of dawn through the window, he started on the bottle of rum that had been left on the table. Inevitably, he fell asleep, only to be roused by the sound of footsteps and voices outside the door.

It was just before dawn and the sky was starting to get light as a small group of men was marched into an unused quarry. They were then left to stand around smoking and looking anywhere but at each other, not wanting to catch another's eye, the smoke from their cigarettes and pipes drifting upwards to add to the slight mistiness of the morning. Some stared at the ground, some examined their hands, and some stared into the middle distance. Most definitely, nobody wanted to speak, as they all knew what they were there to do.

A short distance away stood the lonely figure of the young lieutenant in charge of the firing party, his face pale from the knowledge of what was to come. He smoked ferociously and stamped his feet in an effort to keep warm while he nervously checked and re-checked his service revolver, worried that this morning of all mornings it might jam.

Two companies of the condemned man's regiment then marched silently into the quarry and took up position across its open end, and, in response to a shouted order, stood at ease.

Soon, too soon for some, they heard the approach of a vehicle, and a motor ambulance appeared at the edge of the quarry. The members of the firing squad were then called to attention, facing away from the stake that none of them had been able to look at, with their rifles placed on a tarpaulin on the ground behind them.

The condemned man, thankfully very drunk and therefore apparently senseless as to what was about to happen, was all but carried from the back of the ambulance by two military policemen, accompanied by an army chaplain. The man was so drunk that his arms did not need to be tied behind his back or his legs bound at his ankles as he made the short, stumbling walk to the stake supported by the military policemen. On arrival at the stake, and held between the two beefy redcaps, his arms were momentarily released before being tied behind it, but being drunk, he could not feel the rough surface against the skin of his wrists and hands. A further binding held his ankles to the stake. As the man drunkenly muttered to himself, a blindfold was placed over his eyes and the medical officer stepped forward to pin a small, white square of fabric over his heart.

Meanwhile, the lieutenant had loaded a single round of ammunition into each rifle with the help of an assistant provost marshal, and then mixed them up. As was usually the case, one of the rounds was a blank. When the rifles were ready, the lieutenant took up his position and signalled to the chaplain to begin saying the condemned man's final prayer. The assistant provost marshal, by a pre-arranged and silent signal, ordered the firing squad to turn, pick up their rifles, and prepare to fire as each worked the bolts of their rifles with trembling hands. At the same time the watching companies of men were brought to attention. When the rifles were ready, the lieutenant took up his position and signalled to the chaplain to finish the condemned man's final prayer.

The chaplain solemnly intoned ‘Amen' and turned and walked away with his head bowed. The lieutenant then unsheathed his sword and raised it in the air. Fingers tightened on triggers and when the sword was lowered a thunderous volley rang out. Some bullets, whether deliberately or as a result of incompetence, missed the staked figure completely and threw up spurts of dust from the quarry wall behind. Some found their target and the condemned man sagged forward, at which point the medical officer approached him to determine whether life had been extinguished. With a look of disgust he signalled to the lieutenant that the man was still alive. The lieutenant, with a trembling hand, then stepped forward to finish him off with a revolver shot through the side of the head.

The watching companies were swiftly marched out of the quarry, with their sergeants silently defying them from looking anywhere but straight ahead. The firing squad was then brought to attention and marched back to its breakfast, also without a sideways glance at the dead man, followed by the lieutenant, the assistant provost marshal, the military policemen and the medical officer. They left two ambulance bearers to take down the body, which was then wrapped in a cape ready for burial, and to clear away the bloodied straw from around the stake. When they were finished, they placed the body on a stretcher and carried it to the burial site, where the chaplain presided over a short funeral service.

What you have just read is my fictional account of a British Army execution on the Western Front. It contains all the elements that you would expect, but how were these executions really organised and regulated?

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It is unlikely that those who went off to the Western Front could ever have imagined the horrors they would have to face, whatever their rank or experience. The men of the British Expeditionary Force, and those who volunteered in August 1914, were naively convinced as they cheerfully marched off to war that it would be over by Christmas, while the generals, equally naively, thought that the cavalry would prevail – indeed, right up until the final days of the war, Sir Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief, was still looking for ways to unleash his cavalry on the Germans. Nobody foresaw that this would be a more static war of trenches, mud, machine guns, barbed wire and artillery barrages.

Soldiers going to the Western Front and to the other theatres of the First World War would have been trained in the very many ways to kill the enemy using their rifles, bayonets, grenades, machine guns and artillery, yet nothing could really have prepared those men for the actual sights, sounds and conditions that they would encounter. Despite their training, throughout the war many British soldiers still could not bring themselves to shoot wounded, unarmed and retreating German soldiers, so how could that training help if they were unlucky enough to be involved as a member of a firing squad, brought together to execute one of their own? What would that have felt like? Thankfully, very few people will ever have such an experience and so we will have to use our imagination to try to understand and gain insight into that situation.

When the state decides to take the life of one of its own citizens, in what can be described as an act of judicial murder, it is a momentous judgement for all concerned. Who decided how that execution should be conducted and who should be present – or was it simply left to the individual whims and preferences of the assistant provost marshal or the commanding officers?

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Those who volunteered for the army in August 1914, and those who joined afterwards, either as volunteers or as conscripts, left the civilian world behind them and found themselves in an alien environment, subject to what now seems, 100 years later, harsh military law which governed all aspects of the lives of the officers and soldiers in peace and in war, at home or overseas.

As a result of the outbreak of war, in September 1914 the normal system of military court martial was replaced by a system of summary court martial. Offences that carried the death penalty were then to be dealt with by a field general court martial presided over by a minimum of three officers, one of whom had to hold at least the rank of captain in order to act as president. All three had to be in agreement on any sentence passed. The recommended sentence was then passed up the chain of command, together with any mitigating circumstances and pleas for clemency.

The changes made in September 1914 are important because they allowed for the sentence, passed by the field general court martial, to be carried out within twenty-four hours – with no right of appeal. The reality for those sentenced to death was that the passage of time from sentence to its promulgation or announcement could be weeks if not months, whereas the time between promulgation and the actual execution was normally just a matter of a few hours.

On 8 September 1914, for example, Private Thomas Highgate at the age of 17 became the first British soldier to be executed on the Western Front for desertion, just two days after sentence had been passed, proving that the process could be quick. In fact, the time between Private Highgate being informed of the confirmation of his sentence and his execution was just forty-five minutes (David, 2013).

Driver Thomas Moore of the 24th Division Train (Army Service Corps, 4th Company) was executed on 26 February 1916, having been sentenced for murder, with his court martial having taken place on 18 February. The death sentence was only promulgated at 4.03 a.m., the company was paraded at 5.30 a.m., and just ten minutes later he was dead, which gave little time for any army chaplain to help him prepare for his end: Moore only had eighty-seven minutes from announcement to execution.