Tommy
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Once a death sentence was confirmed by the commander in chief it was read out to the condemned man. Harry Ogle described such a soldier having his sentence read out in the middle of his brigade, drawn up in hollow square, in the autumn of 1916.
In the middle of the square was a small group of officers and drummers and one figure who was already little more than a ghost. A minute ago he had been a private soldier in a regiment of the line, wearing the regiment’s badges and buttons and all honourable military identity and was now under sentence of death. He was to be shot at dawn the next day… I was one of the many who sympathised but acquiesced, unable to think of an alternative. Now he was drummed out of the service and marched away to wait for the dawn.228
Sometimes the sentence was announced before representatives from each unit in the brigade, or perhaps, as with the case of James Crozier described below, it was a battalion parade. The moral effect of death sentences was magnified by their promulgation in routine orders, so that soldiers across the whole of the British Expeditionary Force were well aware of what might just happen to them too. Normally a condemned soldier was told of the confirmation of his sentence the day before it was put into effect. He was already detained, either by his own regimental police or by the military police, within a short walk of the scene of execution. A single execution was likely to be carried out under regimental arrangements, with the assistant provost marshal from division in attendance. Soldiers from the victim’s unit, under the command of an officer, constituted the firing party, and both the regimental sergeant major and provost sergeant would be on hand to ensure that the dreadful ritual went smoothly. A medical officer would pin an aiming mark – a piece of white cloth (rifle-cleaning four-by-two flannelette was convenient) – to the man’s tunic over his heart while the man was being tied to the post. Sometimes the firing party arrived to find rifles ready, one of them unloaded, but this gentle deception was rare, for a man would know that his rifle had not fired, or notice the absence of a live round’s sharp kick if it had been replaced by a blank. It was important that the firing party should be sober and as steady as possible, and above all to know that they would be doing their comrade no favours if they fired wide. Stage management was all, and one provost sergeant reported, with no hint of malice, that things had ‘gone off champion’.
On his last night before execution the victim would be offered the consolation of a chaplain, and given a good feed if he wanted it. Sometimes he was encouraged to drink himself into oblivion. Frank Crozier wrote of one of his soldiers, Rifleman James Crozier (no relation), who ‘was brave. He showed no malice. He was cheerful almost to the end – but not quite to the bitter end. I made him drunk some hours before the execution, to ease his living misery.’ Crozier then carefully briefed ‘a certain junior officer…’:
‘You will be in charge of the firing party… the men will be cold, nervous and excited. They may miss their mark. You are to have your revolver ready, loaded and cocked; if the medical officer tells you that life is not extinct you are to walk up to the victim, place the muzzle of the revolver to his heart and press the trigger. Do you understand?’ ‘Yes Sir,’ came the quick reply. ‘Right,’ I add, ‘dine with me in my mess to-night.’!
I wanted to keep this young fellow engaged under my own supervision until late at night, to minimize the chance of his flying to the bottle for support.
In this case the victim was carried to the stake, too drunk to walk, and tied on ‘like dead meat in a butcher’s shop’. The men of the firing party came up to the aim on a silent signal, and fired when the officer dropped his handkerchief. It was ‘a nervous ragged volley, yet a volley’, but the doctor signed that life was not extinct, so the subaltern stepped forward steadily to administer the coup de grâce. Afterwards Crozier had the battalion formed up just outside the little garden where the execution had taken place, and then: ‘We march back to breakfast, while the men of a certain company pay the last tribute at the graveside of an unfortunate comrade.’229
The Reverend Julian Bickersteth, who helped two men through their last hours on earth, wrote how one of them, who had joined underage in 1914 and had done three years at the front:
gave me all his little treasures to give to this friend or that. He wrote a letter to his sweetheart and sent her his letter with all its photographs and trinkets, a lucky farthing which she had given him for a keepsake, his last ‘leave’ ticket and other small things. He sent a letter to his best chum in the regiment and said he was sorry he hadn’t made good, and wished them all a Happy New Year and hoped they would get home safe after the war… As they bound him, I held his arm tight to reassure him – words are useless at such a moment – and he turned his blindfolded face to me and said in a voice which wrung my heart, ‘Kiss me, Sir, kiss me,’ and with my kiss on his lips, and ‘God has you in his keeping’ whispered in his ear, he passed into the Great Unseen.230
The papers relating to the majority of capital courts martial are now available for consultation, and formed the basis for the government’s 1998 decision not to grant a blanket pardon to all those executed. The most that one can say is that the overwhelming majority were justly convicted by the law as it then stood. Indeed, in some of the most-publicised cases, like that of Lance Sergeant Willie Stones of 19/Durham Light Infantry, it is hard to see how the court could have decided otherwise on the evidence presented to it. Most – almost 90 percent – of death sentences were commuted, and the cases where they were not often reflected a desire on the part of the chain of command to reinforce discipline in a particular unit or at a particular time. It was indeed a hard law, but it was, in general, fairly applied. But like so much else about this war the issue divides head from heart, and if my head applauds the logic of capital sentences, they still break my heart.
To official executions must be added an unknown number of unofficial executions where soldiers were shot out of hand by officers or NCOs. Frank Crozier wrote of such things in his breezy way, and Sidney Rogerson describes an incident in the spring of 1918, but reputable accounts are few and far between. So too are genuine accounts of the killing of soldiers by ‘battle police’, and it is to the army’s wider coercive apparatus that we must now turn our attention.
We have already encountered the regimental police under their provost sergeant, members of a specific battalion in the line and out of it. Garrison Military Police, composed of soldiers on long attachments from their units, patrolled large towns. The Corps of Military Police, with its two branches, foot and mounted, had previously recruited only volunteers of four years’ service and exemplary records, but in 1914 it began to recruit directly for the first time. In 1918 it numbered 151 warrant officers and 13,325 other ranks. It had only three officers, largely because it came under the executive authority of the provost marshal at GHQ and assistant provosts marshal at formation headquarters down to division. These were often combatant officers who were no longer fit for front-line duty: for instance, Walter Nicholson tells us that the assistant provost marshal of one of his divisions, Major E. L. Bowring of the Worcesters, had been a company commander in 1914 but was ‘mentally and physically exhausted, starting at any sudden sound’.231 It was certainly no sinecure, and in November 1914 the assistant provost marshal of 1st Division won a DSO for leading his policemen and a group of stragglers in a desperate counterattack. From time to time the provost staff were given temporary command of yeomanry regiments to help with route-signing and traffic control, and from February 1918 had two garrison battalions of infantry under permanent command.
A good deal of the work of the military police was commonplace. They investigated a whole range of crimes, from theft to drunkenness and criminal damage, many all too common where young men gather in large numbers. They enforced discipline over matters of military protocol like turnout and saluting, and in the process became, with their red-topped caps, the all-too-visible symbols of the army’s authority. Their operational role was of growing importance, for they signed routes b
ehind the front and were responsible for controlling movement along them. Most controversially, they also provided a network of ‘battle stops’, ‘straggler posts’ and ‘examination posts’, behind the front. These were intended to redirect genuine stragglers and to detain men attempting to leave the front without due cause, though often the distinction was not an easy one to make. For much of the war stragglers were relatively uncommon: a single corps at Messines Ridge in 1917 had forty-four men composing its straggler posts but found only nineteen stragglers. In March 1918, however, with a large-scale retreat on the whole southern part of the British front, at least 25,000 stragglers were collected, fed and put back into the fighting.
The term ‘battle police’ (sometimes personalised – and we can see where the argument is going – to ‘Haig’s battle police’) has been applied variously to regimental police ordered to follow up attacking troops, and to military police working just behind the line, and there are repeated tales of stragglers being shot by ‘Redcaps in the trenches’. It is hard to find first-hand accounts of such occurrences: most of those who mention it heard it from somebody else. Indeed, the mechanics of the situation should give us pause for thought. Military police were armed with pistols, and the prospect of their moving into the rear area of a battalion in action and shooting rifle-armed soldiers on the spot cannot be taken too seriously. There were certainly rare occasions when military police were authorised to use lethal force: on 25 June 1916 the New Zealand Division ordered its straggler posts to fire on stragglers who refused to stop. But in May 1918 the commander of 19th Division was refused GHQ’s permission to ‘confirm and have carried out’ summary death sentences on stragglers. It was unwise of military policemen to break the rules, for unauthorised use of weapons could put them in the dock: the policeman whose ill-aimed shot started the Etaples mutiny was court-martialled and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Dislike of the military police reflected the deep unpopularity of the civil police in many working-class areas of Britain, and was exacerbated by their role in the maintenance of discipline in the rear areas when soldiers felt that ‘goin’ large a bit’ was no more than their entitlement. But there is surprisingly little evidence to support suggestions that they were used as drovers shepherding men into battle.232 For while coercion undoubtedly played its part in keeping men in the line, it was no more than part of a complex process.
If, on the one hand, the army coerced, it also encouraged. Although relations between officers, NCOs and men varied from unit to unit, they were often very cordial, and morale at sub-unit level was extraordinarily personality-dependent. Private S. B. Abbot of 86th Company MGC censured one of his officers, nicknamed ‘the Orphan’, as a ‘thruster’ who endangered his men’s lives by excessive zeal in shooting up German positions while at the same time paying careful attention to his own safety. But Abbot wrote warmly of another officer, ‘Mr Street… a splendid man’, mourned as ‘our brave and kind officer’ when he was killed in April 1917.233 Frank Gray was a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer conscripted as a private in 1917. His chauffeur took him to the recruiting office, and thereafter he endured the ‘terribly hard’ life of the infantry soldier under training. He was sharply critical of the way the army was run by ‘the united aristocrats of an antique system’. But he dedicated his book to: ‘my Commanding Officer, the late Colonel R. E. Dewing DSO, who was part (or the victim) of the system, but who possessed a fine knowledge of men, was humane, kind, and courageous, and so remained to the end’. He also recorded his debt of gratitude ‘to NCOs and men who were my friends throughout, who made hardship endurable to me, and gave me the life I still retain’. His company commander in 8/Royal Berkshires ‘had more the appearance of an unsuccessful poet than an officer of the British Army’ but ‘was a gentleman – fair, clever and brave’. Junior officers ‘were in the main great’ and ‘even Commanding Officers, in my time recruited from without more frequently than within the system, were distinctly good’.234
Fred Hodges had nothing but praise for his officers, and was sad to see some of the freshly-painted crosses ready for their graves in October 1918.
I walked slowly past them, and noted that Captain Hamilton now had a posthumous MC, and that Lieutenant Gibbs was a captain… I noticed that both these fine young officers were aged twenty-four and at the time I thought it was quite a mature age; in the circumstances of their young lives, it was.235
Private George Fortune of 18/Lancashire Fusiliers affirmed that:
Our officers and NCOs were wonderful the way they used to do their duty. They were always watching over us and seeing we got a hot drink. We used to have a drop of water out of our water bottles to help make the tea. One day I had drunk all mine and could not give any. I told our officer I did not want any tea. He said ‘you must’ and ‘come and see me when we are out of the line’. I went to see him and he gave me another water bottle.
But there were flies in any ointment, and Fortune developed a dislike for Sergeant Watts. ‘He made me clean the metal washbasin with sand,’ he recalled. ‘The water was ice cold, and the sand got into my broken chilblains… Since 1919 I have been looking for that bastard. It’s not too late yet to kill him.’236
Frank Hawkings was heartbroken when a well-respected officer was killed at Zillebeke in May 1915:
The adjutant, Captain Culme-Seymour, has been killed. He went up to the front line to reconnoitre and was shot by a German bombing party while he was cheering the men on. Everyone is awfully cut up. He was a regular attached to us from the KRR [King’s Royal Rifles] and was very popular. The Colonel has gone sick with injuries to his face and knee. There will soon be nothing left of the old regiment. Major Dickens is now in command, but he is not so well known as the old Colonel was.237
After Norman Gladden’s company commander was killed at Passchendale he wrote that: ‘Even amidst so much human disaster… I felt a painful stab of sorrow at this news, mixed with a great anguish at the senseless elimination of a good, brave and truly gentle man.’238 Ernest Shephard was distraught when his company commander was killed in a needless and unplanned foray into the German trenches. ‘The loss of my gallant Captain to the Battalion, my Company, and myself cannot be estimated,’ he lamented. ‘He was the bravest officer I have met, his first and last thought was for the good and honour on the Bn, his Coy and his men.’ Sergeant Goodwillie, the pioneer sergeant, ‘very well liked by the Captain’, rushed out to try to help him, and was killed as well.239 T. P. Marks helped his mates carry back the body of their platoon commander. ‘The ground had been torn up and it was heavy work even with four men,’ he wrote. ‘But we would willingly have carried him twenty miles.’240
William Carr noted how the mood of his battery changed during the March retreat when its former commander returned after recovering from a wound.
Then shouts – orders – the adjutant had arrived – move on. We staggered to our feet; it was going to be a devil of a job getting out of that field… I wondered whether we could manage it with men and horses so exhausted. Then a word from Gardner.
‘The Adjutant tells me the Major’s back. He’s at HQ now – Major Sutherland is back.’ The news went round 377 [Battery RFA] like wild fire.
‘The Major’s back – he’s ah richt – he’s coming back.’
It was miraculous, men were on their feet, horses mounted, shovels seized and a start made to hack down the hedge. The ditch was filled with clods of earth, brushwood – anything we could find… We were the first battery out of the field.241
P. J. Campbell saw how a good battery could be ruined by a bad commander. One was with his battery for only seventeen days, ‘and in that time the morale of the battery had sunk to a lower level than ever before, far lower than after months of fighting and heavy casualties at Ypres’. But another battery commander, though reserved and unfriendly, was respected because ‘we knew that he knew what to do’.242 The efficiency of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers had fallen off by July 1918, but a new CO soon pu
t a spring back into its step: ‘There was to be company training: parades before breakfast were to be revived… and servants, cooks and details used to having a slack time had to parade and furbish up their drill against a day when they might be wanted.’ The regimental sergeant major, late on parade because he had ‘over-slept’, got ‘a good choking-off’. And then the commanding officer organised a trench raid, allowing companies ‘a large latitude in making their dispositions, but he supervised everything, and by a tactful gentle gingering-up soon made everyone feel that a long-absent efficient authority had been restored to the Battalion’. When the raid took place, he met the leading company as it crossed No Man’s Land, and said: ‘You’ll have to go into the village for your prisoners; I’ve been down to have a look, and there aren’t any outside the wire.’ The whole business was ‘a magnificent tonic’.243
Popularity was helpful, though not if too clearly courted. Brave and thoughtful young officers often knew just how to get it right. Guy Chapman heard his company servants discussing the merits of their ‘blokes’ in 1918.
’E’s not a bad little chap,’ said a voice.
‘Little, all right,’ replied my own batman, Johns, ‘why ’e don’t come even as high as my Titch even.’ I mutely thanked him for the comparison.
The voice of the mess cook took up the discourse.
‘That there young Knappett, y’know, ’e’s too regimental, making us all come up for the rum every night. Now young Brenchley, ’e knows ’ow to treat us. The other night, when the Sarn’t wants us all one by one, ’e says – didn’t ’e, Johns? – “All right, Sarn’t,” ’e says, “I can trust the servants.” See. Trusts us ’e does. ’member when we was on the Menin Road, old Nobby an’ me was lying in a shell hole. ’E comes over the top. “’Ow are yer gettin’ on,” ’e says; “would yer like a drop of rum?” Would we like a drop of rum! And ’e brings it over ’isself. O, ’e’s my ideal of an orficer, ’e is.’244