Executed at Dawn (6 page)

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The Army Acts, the
Manual of Military Law
and the King's Regulations are very detailed documents, but they have surprisingly little to say where the death sentence is concerned once the regulations for the conduct of court martial have been dealt with. The document that could be considered the closest thing to a standard operating procedure are the notes given to the Anglican chaplain Edward Guilford, and yet so far it has not been possible to establish their origins or how widely they were disseminated.

It has sometimes seemed within the published material concerning executions that the fact that 90 per cent of sentences were commuted was seen as something to be proud of, as a demonstration that somehow the system worked – yet really the opposite is true, even allowing for the fact that some of those sentenced were in fact serial offenders. If the British Army and the politicians were convinced of the need for the death penalty on active service then the sentence should have been mandatory with a right to an appeal. The British Army's apparent lack of transparency and honest conviction about the death sentence is also of concern, as evidenced by the practice of ‘weeding out', or what is now known as redacting, to ‘defeat the inquisitive', and the next chapter will deal with this aspect in more depth.

After the war, Mr H.V. Clarke (Corns and Hughes-Wilson, 2001), who stated that he had worked at General Headquarters (GHQ), the overall headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, made what seems to be an extraordinary claim. He said that during his time at GHQ he had extracted data from the routine orders relating to executions which showed that the number of actual executions exceeded the official figures, and he wrote to newspapers stating that in his view the true number of executions was in fact 37,905.

Although no newspaper published his extraordinary claim, it came to the attention of the authorities, leading Clarke to state that he had, as a result, destroyed his evidence. Subsequently no evidence has ever been found to substantiate Clarke's claim and it is hard to believe (or maybe it's a case of not wanting to believe) that his claim of 37,905 executed men was accurate. After all, the figure he claimed was nearly twice the number killed on the first day of the Somme in July 1916, or the equivalent of thirty-seven wartime battalions – executions on that scale would have been hard to conceal from the soldiers, the public and the politicians. It was not something that the death-penalty abolitionist, Ernest Thurtle, ever raised during his long campaign. Also, an attrition rate at that level would have caused a shortage of men that the generals would have been keen to avoid, even allowing for their support of the death penalty. This would have broken one of the underlying tenets of the death penalty – that it should not contribute to a shortage of men.

But a final, and perhaps uncomfortable, thought before leaving this point, is the possible connection between Clarke's claim and the army's practice of weeding out problematic documentation. In 1917, the Under Secretary of State for War was asked in Parliament to discontinue the practice of naming soldiers who had been executed in routine orders, but he refused on the grounds that this would remove the deterrent nature of the sentence. These routine orders are notable for their absence from the official documents held today at The National Archives.

Army discipline was based on the ideas of intimidation and fear, but if these were not regulated then it should not be a surprise to see this leading to abuse. Military law is quite explicit about what could and could not be done where field punishment was concerned, and yet this chapter has outlined instances of abuse, and more will be discussed over the coming chapters. Is it really too big a step to say that if the regulations for field punishments were abused, then it should not be a surprise to find that the ultimate sanction, the sentence of being shot at dawn, was equally open to abuse in the way that it was organised?

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We will now move beyond the discussion of the legal and organisational aspects of the executions to consider the individuals who found themselves cast as players in these very human dramas, and what their experiences can add to our understanding of this aspect of the First World War.

In the First World War men joined the army for many reasons, such as patriotism, thirst for adventure and wanting to do their bit with their mates. Even those who were conscripted would, to some extent, have shared those feelings, even in the face of increasing casualty lists and a growing awareness of what this war actually entailed. Somewhere in that mixture of feelings would have been an acceptance that war involved killing your enemy, but none would have thought as they headed for the Western Front that they might one day be called upon to kill one of their own.

To give this issue some perspective, a look at the figures involved shows that, given the number of men who were executed, the number of those involved in a firing squad or in some other role at an execution, would in turn have been small bearing in mind the fact that over 5 million British and Commonwealth soldiers served on the Western Front at some point in the First World War.

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According to the notes given to Guilford, the firing squad was to ‘consist of an Officer, 1 Sergeant and 10 men of the prisoner's unit'. Contrary to what the notes suggest, however, the firing squad was not always drawn from the condemned man's own unit, or indeed comprised the number of men specified.

The order to form a firing party produced different responses from the officers concerned. Some were sensitive enough to realise that being a member of a firing squad was not a universally popular duty. Those officers would therefore first of all ask for volunteers, possibly even offering bribes in the form of extra pay, leave or rum rations. If bribery did not work, then an officer might turn to those men who had been convicted of committing minor offences and yet still remained with the unit.

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Ernest Thurtle, MP, was a leading member of the abolitionist movement seeking to end the death penalty in the military in the years after the First World War. In a general debate in the House of Commons in 1926 that sought the abolition of the death penalty, he made a specific attack on sentencing soldiers to death for sleeping at their posts. He maintained that sleeping at one's post was not a real, wilful act, adding that after the Commons had been sitting for sixteen hours, ‘members all around fell asleep. If the House was kept up for ninety-six hours without any sleep at all he would guarantee that 75 or 80 per cent of the members would be falling into deep slumbers.'

Although the War Office denied Ernest Thurtle (amongst others) access to the records of those executed, he did manage to gather some evidence from those who had been involved in military executions in the First World War. A number of individuals wrote letters to Thurtle with their experiences; when these were published, he withheld the names of both the authors and of those shot. Subsequently, however, as more information has entered the public domain, it is now possible to reinsert some of the names concerned.

Thurtle (2013) included an extract from a previously published article written by a soldier by the name of Private Albert Rochester, who had been sentenced to field punishment No.2 for an undisclosed offence. He had found himself taken by a military police corporal to a Royal Engineers depot where he was issued with three posts, three ropes and a spade, which he had to carry to a secluded spot. He was ordered to dig three holes, a specified distance apart, for the stakes, while all the time becoming more aware of their purpose.

The preparations were for the executions of three men from the 19th Durham Light Infantry on 18 January 1917. Lance-Sergeant Joseph Stones had been sentenced for ‘casting away his arms', while Lance-Corporals Peter Goggins and John McDonald had been sentenced for quitting their post.

An article in the
Guardian
newspaper on 16 August 2006 carried a description by Private Albert Rochester of what he had witnessed:

A motor ambulance arrives carrying the doomed men. Manacled and blindfolded, they are helped out and tied up to the stakes. Over each man's heart is placed an envelope. At the sign of command, the firing parties, 12 for each, align their rifles on the envelopes. The officer in charge holds his stick aloft and, as it falls, 36 bullets usher the souls of three of Kitchener's men to the great unknown.

Rochester went on to say:

As a military prisoner, I helped clear the traces … I helped carry those bodies towards their last resting place. I took the belongings from the dead men's tunics … A few letters, a pipe, a photo. I could tell you of the silence of the military police after reading a letter from a little girl to ‘Dear Daddy', of the blood-stained snow that horrified the French peasants, of the chaplain's confession that braver men he had never met than those three men he prayed with just before the fatal dawn. I could take you to the graves of the murdered.

On this occasion each of the condemned men was assigned a firing squad of twelve men. When the condemned men had been killed, Rochester was ordered to clear away all traces of what had taken place, collecting the blood-soaked straw from the foot of the posts and burning it,
and removing the posts. All this, when his greatest fear that morning when summoned by the military police corporal, was that he was about to experience his first session of full pack drill!

This would then heap an extra level of punishment that would be out of all proportion to the original offences committed, as can be seen in a further letter discussed below, written to Ernest Thurtle, MP.

In letter No.4, its author, a sergeant in the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, described being ordered to choose ‘the two worst characters' in his platoon to form part of the firing squad for the execution of Lance-Corporal Alfred Atkinson, also of the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, on 2 March 1915, for the offence of desertion. When the two men, who were acknowledged by the author to be tough men, returned, he wrote that they were sick, suffered from nightmares, and could not keep their food down. They said: ‘The sight was horrible, made more so by the fact that we had shot one of our own men.'

A week later the same sergeant recalled how he was sergeant of the regimental guard, with thirty-two prisoners whom he described as ‘mostly twenty-eight day men', when the execution of Private Ernest Kirk, 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, was ordered to take place on 6 March 1915. Some of the prisoners had been part of the previous firing squad and the order that the sergeant received made clear that: ‘You must warn a party of twelve men from the prisoners you have (those who shot Lance-Corporal Alfred Atkinson must not be included).'

In his letter the sergeant went on to write about his experience of putting together that firing squad:

I witnessed a scene I shall never forget. Men I had known for years as clean, decent, self-respecting soldiers, whose only offence was an occasional military ‘drunk' screamed out, begging not to be made into murderers. They offered me all they had if I would not take them for the job, and finally when twelve of them found themselves outside selected for the dreaded firing party, they called me all the names that they could lay their tongues to. I remained with the guard for three days, and I leave you to guess what I had to put up with. I am poor with eight children, I would not go through three more such sights for £1000.

The experience of these men is interesting because it would appear from King's Regulations (K.R. 482) that:

An offender in arrest or confinement is not to be required to perform any duty beyond handing over any cash, stores, or accounts for which he may be responsible, or fatigue orders on board ship, and he is not to bear arms except by order of his Commanding Officer, in an emergency or on the line of march.

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Private William Holmes of the 12th Battalion, London Regiment, recalled an execution in 1917 of two soldiers where the condemned were to be executed by members of their own company and the composition of the firing squad was decided by the drawing of lots:

Those that were drawn out – four of them – knew what they had to do at 8 o'clock the next morning. They felt as I would have done; terrified, almost sick with the whole thought of it. They were going to go and shoot their own mates. But there you are, we had to have discipline.

There were occasions when the condemned man was viewed by his peers as deserving to be shot and in this situation individuals may have been more willing to take part. Although there might be personal sympathy for the man concerned, as was the case with Private Holmes, such feelings were tempered on occasions by the view that there could be no excuse, as every soldier knew that they were going to fight and what the likely consequences of committing certain offences could be.

The majority, however, like Corporal Alan Bray (Arthur, 2002), had strong feelings that Englishmen should not be shooting other Englishmen, as they were in France to fight Germans. Bray wrote that in this instance he knew that the condemned man had lost his nerve to the extent that he could not have returned to the front line. In these cases personal sympathy was based upon shared service and experiences, friendship, and an understanding of the particular circumstances and issues faced by the individual concerned, leading them to conclude that the sentence was just not justified.

Private Stephen Graham (2009) has given an eye-witness account of the execution of Private Isaac Reid, of the 2nd Scots Guards on 9 April 1915. On this occasion, volunteers from the regiment had been asked to form the firing squad but none had been forthcoming, and so the battalion snipers were ordered to do it. Graham makes the comment that the lack of volunteers reflected the fact that nobody actually believed that Private Reid had disgraced the regiment.

Thurtle, in his letter No.5, includes an extract from an ex-private of the East Kent Regiment, who expressed his view that he should not have been part of the firing squad at the execution of a man whom he referred to as ‘a chum of mine'.