Executed at Dawn (15 page)

This is not in any way a denigration of the officer class per se, because there is ample evidence of mutual respect between some men and their officers, nor is it a ‘bash the generals' or a reprise of the ‘lions led by donkeys' argument. It is simply making the point that the lack of equality in treatment of all combatants is striking and undeniable.

The class system was therefore as much an actuality in the British Army as it was in British society in general, and this would not begin to change until after the war ended. The casualty rate among the upper and middle classes was one factor in this change, as, for example, the Oxbridge colleges suffered twice the national average of deaths, and ducal families suffered more violent deaths in the period 1880–1930 than during 1330–1479; a period that covered the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses (Marr, 2009).

Perhaps of more concern is that up to late 1916 no officer had been shot for a disciplinary offence, while in the same period some 154 other ranks were executed (Moore, 1999). By the end of the war only three officers had been executed, and one of those was for murder. The officers executed were Lieutenant Eric S. Poole of the 11th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, executed on 10 December 1916 (desertion), Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett of the Nelson Battalion, Royal Naval Division, executed on 5 January 1917 (desertion), and Second Lieutenant John Paterson, 3rd Essex Regiment (attached to the 1st), executed on 24 September 1918. Paterson was executed for the murder of a military policeman who challenged him when he was found with his French girlfriend.

The grave of Second Lieutenant E.S. Poole of the West Yorkshire Regiment, one of the few officers to be executed. Eric Poole was born in Nova Scotia. Wounded and shell-shocked on 7 July, he was only declared fit for duty again on 1 September. On 5 October, as his platoon moved up towards the front line at Flers on the Somme, he wandered off. He was found two days later. At his count martial, the man who had passed him fit for duty in September, Lieutenant-Colonel Martin RAMC, was head of the examining medical board. They found that Poole was ‘of sound mind' but that ‘his mental powers are less than average'. (Courtesy of Paul Kendall)

Officers were only human and so must have shared the same emotional and physical response to warfare as the men they commanded, so why did the army only feel it necessary to execute such a small number? In fact, it could have executed many more, as those officers found wanting were either sent home or transferred away from the front, while a private soldier would have been placed on a charge. This was despite Sir Douglas Haig commenting in his diary on 6 December 1916, following his confirmation of the death sentence on Lieutenant Eric S. Poole, that desertion by an officer should be treated more severely than with the other ranks. He went on to write that the other ranks needed to know that officers were subject to the same law as them. It is not possible to say whether Sir Douglas Haig would have known the extent to which problematic officers were finessed out of the front line by those further up the chain of command, and although no such scandal ever entered the public domain, this could have been a further factor in the army's coyness over its use of the death penalty.

A further example of this inequality concerns the execution of Private Thomas Highgate, the first soldier to be executed. Highgate had deserted during the retreat from Mons in September 1914, and yet two officers who had tried to surrender their respective battalions during that same retreat were cashiered out of the army. The officers concerned were Lieutenant-Colonel Ellington (Royal Warwickshire Regiment) and Lieutenant-Colonel Mainwaring (2nd Dublin Fusiliers); in fact, some years after the war Mainwaring was restored to his former rank by George V.

Class can also be seen as a factor when some of the comments written in support of confirmation of the death sentence, as the paperwork made its way to the commander-in-chief, were along the lines of ‘I consider him to be an insubordinate man of low class'.
The Irish Government Report (2004) gives a number of other examples, including: ‘The accused is a determined shirker during a time of war and unworthy of being a soldier or Englishman' and ‘this man's value as a fighting soldier is NIL'.

As a further example of the inequality of approach, it was also the case that King George V retrospectively pardoned those in the higher ranks, both during and after the war, following petitions and appeals signed by military personnel who had friends who could, it must be assumed, exert significant influence. The Irish government's report in 2004 gave a number of examples of this, including Lieutenant G.D.C. Tracey of the 1/7th Gordon Highlanders who was court-martialled on 11 June 1915 on a charge of cowardice. He was sentenced to be cashiered (which was not an alternative sentence for the lower ranks) but the king granted him an unconditional pardon on 5 December 1923.

This was to be something that those seeking pardons for the men executed would later use to argue that the king had set a precedent, and as the Irish government's report in 2004 stated, ‘A military system of law that provides one form of justice to the lower ranked troops on the front line, and another to the officers and upper echelons, cannot be deemed to be just and must be seen for what it evidently was: biased.'

Today we can see the injustice in this, but even allowing for the prevailing standards and norms of the times, this should not have been acceptable then.

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When war broke out in August 1914, Britain had a small but highly trained army and it was those men who made up the British Expeditionary Force, numbering 100,000, that was sent to the Western Front. Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum became Secretary of State for War in August 1914, and he realised that the successful prosecution of the war would require large numbers of men to join the army. So he launched a number of appeals in an effort to raise an additional 500,000 men, leading to the production of the ‘Your Country Needs You' and other iconic posters from that period. The men were to be raised in tranches of 100,000 and, to facilitate this, recruitment offices were opened across the country.

The men who enlisted had to be a minimum of 19 years of age, yet despite this many underaged youths were still able to join the colours by lying about their age. In addition, they had to pass a medical, accept the King's Shilling and swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown for the duration of the war.

It was this period that saw the clever introduction of the ‘pals' battalions', where groups of men from the same town, business or industry were encouraged to join up together. This initiative drew on the romantic notion of friends and colleagues going off to war together, although the romance turned to horror for the communities concerned when so many of the pals' battalions were decimated in July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.

Despite these efforts, and those of the unofficial recruitment officers – the young ladies who gave out their white feathers indiscriminately to anyone not in uniform – the numbers joining up started to decline. The government's response was the National Registration Act in July 1915, which compelled all men between the ages of 15 and 65 to register. By that autumn a further 5 million men of military age had been identified, of whom about 3 million were technically eligible, the difference reflecting those in reserved occupations who had not yet volunteered. In 1916, the Military Services Act introduced conscription: initially for all single men between the ages of 18 and 41, only exempting those in reserved occupations, the disabled, those who could prove that they were the only means of support for dependants, or conscientious objectors – and it would be these men who would go on to form the bulk of the army thereafter. A few months later this was expanded to include married men as well.

There were some 16,000 conscientious objectors in the First World War who refused to fight. Men became conscientious objectors for a variety of reasons, with some viewing themselves as out-and-out pacifists who were against war in general. Some men objected on political grounds, refusing to accept that Germany was their enemy, while others objected on religious grounds; for some it might have been a combination of these reasons. Britain, unlike other countries, had a long tradition of allowing exemption on grounds of conscience, and such men therefore had an opportunity to argue for exemption.

These men had to present themselves before what would inevitably be a hostile tribunal to state their case. This represented a considerable act of bravery in itself on their part, given that the tribunal's starting premise was that they were nothing more than shirkers.

One man who was resolutely opposed to war was Morgan Jones, from Gelligaer in the Rhymney Valley in Wales, who received his call-up papers in early 1916, and stated he was (Hansard, 7 November 2013) ‘resolutely opposed to all warfare'. He argued that the war was the result of wrong-headed diplomacy. However, perhaps predictably, the local tribunal concluded that he would not be excluded from military service. He therefore appealed to the tribunal in Cardiff, but his appeal failed. At the same time, action was being taken against the ‘No Conscription Fellowship' of which he was a member, and he was found guilty in that regard as well and sent to prison, where he suffered both mental and physical hardship. He was released at the end of the war and stood for Parliament in 1921, becoming the first conscientious objector to be elected as a Member of Parliament.

Some men who came before the tribunals were known as Absolutists, numbering about 1,200 in all, who not only opposed war but also conscription itself, believing that any alternative service that supported the war effort, in effect supported the immoral practice of conscription as well. The tribunals had the power to give these men complete and unconditional exemption.

The conscientious objectors were dealt with in a variety of ways, with about a third being sent to prison. There was one instance in May 1916 (Paxman, 2013) when a number of conscientious objectors were taken to France to be humiliated in front of a battalion of soldiers. Others were sentenced to death with the sentence later commuted to a term in prison.

The government also came up with a number of projects for ‘work of national importance', involving forestry or farming, that men were sent to work on. Some conscientious objectors were prepared to serve on the front as members of the Royal Army Medical Corps where they displayed a willingness to work under appalling conditions, and some displayed a level of bravery that was subsequently honoured. Over the course of the war, some 3,000 conscientious objectors served in the Non-combatants Corps (known to the soldiers as the ‘No Courage Corps'), where they carried out manual work behind the lines.

It is possible to argue that widespread knowledge on the Home Front of the military executions taking place would not have helped recruitment and would have swelled the numbers seeking exemption, and thereby hindered the fulfilment of the ‘basic tenet of military law in that the penalty did nothing to precipitate a manpower shortage'.
This could have been a further reason for the lack of transparency on this matter, at least until after conscription was introduced in 1916, which may, in turn, have eased the government's thinking on how families were to be told about their loved ones being executed.

In November 1917 the War Cabinet decided that, as from that moment, the families of those executed were to be informed that their loved ones had died on active service, which had, in any case, been the informal procedure on the part of some commanding officers, despite considerable opposition from the higher echelons of the army. As an example, the service record of Private Highgate, the first man to be executed in 1914, states that he had ‘died of wounds', although his medal card states that his medals were ‘forfeited for desertion'.

Up until 1917 the Army Record Office, which was dependent on information from the front, had simply and bluntly informed families that their loved one ‘was sentenced after trial by court martial to be shot for desertion … and the sentence was duly carried out on …'

The families of the men executed were left devastated, in many cases ashamed, and sometimes ostracised within their communities. The effect on the family of Lance-Corporal Peter Goggins was clearly devastating, as his mother had a breakdown and his wife of six months simply disappeared. The wife of another executed man went to her local post office in 1916 and was met with, ‘We don't give pensions to the widows of cowards.' As a result she was left destitute, with a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old child to feed.

The family of Private Bertie McCubbin, of the 17th Sherwood Foresters, was understandably upset to be informed that he had been killed by a ‘gunshot'. Unbeknown to the family, he had in fact been executed on 30 July 1916, having been sentenced for cowardice, a fact his mother only discovered after one of his friends returned from the front line and told her the truth. As his niece, Mrs Doris Sloan, recalled, ‘she went insane with grief. She never received his medals and never received a pension because he was shot as a coward.'