‘I came to say a prayer for your soul, my boy,’ the chaplain said, but the medical officer told him to hold off the Bible bash until he could explain things properly to me.
‘It’s a scandal, Steve, a bloody disgrace. I managed to get your medical records from Netley, but the court refused to reopen the case and allow them to be admitted. No one seems to give a stuff about cases of shell shock. They prefer to call it cowardice, but clearly it’s not. It’s a mental disturbance, an illness like influenza or TB. A decent court would’ve at least attempted to understand the medical implications, but that was not a decent court. We tried to do our best for you, which I’m afraid was not good enough.’
‘Now we’ll say a prayer together,’ the chaplain tried again.
But Major Cornwall — Tim, as he told me to call him — did not seem as anxious about prayer as the padre. He said there was more to discuss, and that was why they were really here.
Tim said the sentence would be carried out in private: it was how the British did these things, they never gave out the names. So he and the padre were going to write the usual letter home — the one called the bereavement letter — with all the same stuff about dying bravely, and say to Jane that I’d been reported missing, believed killed in action. That would not necessarily mean a lie — well, not a big one, he said, looking firmly at the padre — and in time it would come to be accepted by my family at home that I’d died in battle. They said it was all they could do, and had never previously done it for anyone. But I was one of the few remaining originals, and they both thought I’d had a truly rotten deal. The trial had been a complete farce, they’d heard. I was undefended, and it had only lasted a few minutes.
‘You were well and truly fitted up by a pompous and vindictive British officer,’ Tim said. ‘We think the bloody man’s a disgrace, and if the war wasn’t in such a state with confusion everywhere, he’d never have got away with it.’
‘I keep feeling as if I know him,’ I said, and they both went a bit quiet. It was about then, perhaps because of the expressions on their faces, that I remembered him. ‘He used to be a major, is that right?’ I asked.
When Tim confirmed it with a grim nod it all came back to me. Major Carmody, the one in the trenches at Pozieres, when I told the joke about old Birdwood. I remembered how he’d brought the charge after I had to leave Marie-Louise, the same day that I’d found out Blue was dead, and everything seemed like such a rotten hopeless waste. We’d won Pozieres, but lost thousands of decent blokes like Bluey Watson, and here was this overdressed, gutless wonder telling lies, saying I’d threatened him and I was unfit to be a sergeant… The same joker, sitting with a smile on his face while he presided at my trial, pretending to be unbiased.
‘That’s the bugger,’ Tim said. ‘The truth is, if you’d been in full possession of your faculties, your own legal knowledge would’ve made you realise it was improper for him to preside. Not that anyone would’ve cared in a kangaroo court like that.’
‘We’ve tried to point some of this out,’ the padre explained, ‘but the trial’s over, the verdict’s confirmed, and no one will listen.’
‘And,’ I said to them both, ‘I did walk away from the line.’
‘After three years and God knows how many bombardments and bayonet charges, as well as living with rats and lice, it’s a bloody miracle you could walk at all. But the chaplain’s right. Nobody is prepared to listen, let alone consider an appeal.’
‘So Tim and I talked about it,’ the padre continued, ‘and we decided to both send a routine letter as if you were still serving with the battalion. We won’t put the exact date on them, so nobody will be able to check the details. We just wanted to come here and tell you that, so you’d at least know it’ll be better for Jane. This way she’ll never know the truth.’
I was hardly able to thank them, I was so close to tears over what they were doing for me.
‘Now,’ the padre said, ‘may we please say a short prayer?’
‘I’d be grateful if you would, Captain Packard,’ I said, and knelt on the floor. They both knelt alongside me.
‘Dear Lord,’ the chaplain said quietly, ‘I would like to commend my comrade and brother Stephen Conway, aged twenty-three, who joined our army at nineteen to help protect his country. If it were not for this war he would have remained a student, and perhaps by now have qualified in his chosen profession. Guide and protect his wife and son, and cast your blessing on this man who has done no wrong, but has been wrongfully treated. May the grace of Your Light, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with him evermore. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ I said, my face now awash with tears. When I managed to dry my eyes and compose myself, we shook hands and they left. The warmth of their visit, how they had tried to help and what they proposed to do, has remained with me the whole day long. But it is evening now, and I think I am finally afraid — because if it is the last day of my life, I will never encounter such kindness as that again.
Tomorrow, or tomorrow. I hope I’ll be brave. At least the pencil has lasted as long as I have. I can throw the stub away now.
TWENTY THREE
That was where the notebook ended. The few remaining pages were blank. To anyone without their prior knowledge it would seem certain Stephen Conway had been executed the day after that final entry. But the photograph Patrick and Claire had seen was clearly taken years later and Georgina’s letter sent with his diary was their confirmation he had survived. How he had done so was beyond their comprehension.
‘She sent the diary to my father. Why didn’t she send this as well?’ Patrick wondered.
‘Protecting him, surely.’ Claire felt convinced of it. ‘In those days, I think people would’ve been shocked to know a soldier in their family had been sentenced to death. Even if it was unjust. The diary finished in May, before he went to Netley. All this in the notebook — the hospital, the trial and death cell — everything in here would’ve shattered your father, and especially your grandmother. I feel sure Georgina knew that.’
Yes, Patrick thought, attitudes had changed so much with the years. People were now understanding about what was once labelled ‘malingering’ and ‘cowardice’ by the rigid military mind. These days it was known there were invisible wounds. There was a new medical vocabulary, with conditions like post-traumatic stress syndrome.
‘And for that reason,’ Claire continued, ‘she took this with her to the old people’s home and kept it safely hidden in her locker, until she got sick and no longer remembered she even had it. Perhaps she would have burnt it, if she’d had the chance.’
‘I’m glad she didn’t,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s very painful, but to me there’s nothing in it that’s shaming or disgraceful, except for the court-martial itself. My grandfather wrote the truth — he certainly wasn’t off his head and hallucinating, because there really were those letters from his unit padre and medical officer. I’ve seen them. My father kept them with his papers.’
‘That awful trial!’ Claire said. ‘Can you imagine a colonel who’d brought a charge against him being allowed to preside? What a travesty of justice!’
She poured them each a glass of wine and they sat on the balcony where the last rays of the sun were reflecting off the windows opposite. It was almost the end of another day, and as they touched glasses Claire wondered how many more they had left. It was also the end of their search, for there seemed nowhere else to go from here.
It left Patrick with mixed emotions — satisfaction that from the chance discovery of the diary he had reached so deeply into his grandfather’s life. But that was the only achievement. There was anger at the brutal way he’d been treated, and disappointment they’d never know what had saved him from execution. Nor would they ever find out details of his life afterwards. So many questions left unanswered; the frustration lay in realising they would always remain so.
‘Tomorrow I’ll try to repair the notebook some more, so you can take it home for Sally,’ Claire said.
The subject of when he would go home had begun to occupy both their minds, but Patrick was not anxious to talk of it. ‘Maybe I’ll post it,’ he replied. ‘Sal will freak out when she reads how men with shell shock were treated. They were running out of troops. Doctors were told to get their patients out of bed and back to the war. That was the real disgrace. It’s obvious he should never have been diagnosed fit to be sent to France again.’
‘But there must be something more,’ Claire said. ‘I don’t know how we’ll find it, but there must be an explanation of how he survived.’
‘Nobody’s alive to tell us. And even if Georgina had lived, she wouldn’t have remembered.’
But Claire was adamant. ‘Think about it. He was in a death cell, everyone was shot except him. Not just British troops. The Canadian, an Indian, a New Zealander, but not Stephen. Why not? Why was he the only one spared?’
‘It couldn’t have been a change of heart by the court-martial. Or an illegality, like undue prejudice.’
‘Not in those days. But something happened,’ she persisted. ‘He survived. How? And why?’
There seemed no answer to it.
The following day when Patrick came home with groceries from the supermarket and an armful of flowers, Claire called excitedly to him from the study.
‘Patrick?’
‘No, it’s the milkman, bringing flowers.’
‘Nice milkman. Gorgeous flowers.’ She put them in the sink, kissed him fondly and took his hand. ‘Now quick, look at this.’ She led him into the study. Patrick sat and stared at the screen, where a web site was illuminated.
SHOT AT DAWN, the site was named. Above it was a graphic of uniformed men tying a soldier to a post prior to his execution.
‘It’s a campaign to gain pardons for soldiers executed in the First World War!’ Claire explained. ‘Shot At Dawn. The acronym is SAD.’
‘For once the acronym seems completely apt,’ Patrick said.
‘The people who run this crusade have probed hundreds of military executions. They call Marshal Haig “the butcher”, because he signed death warrants for men who were sick, drunk, or even just insubordinate. He said executions set an example: they kept the men in order. He had a pair of British soldiers shot two days before the armistice — to set an example.’
‘God Almighty!’
‘Another one: absent for five hours with dysentery. Accused of desertion and executed. Unbelievable cases. Your grandfather didn’t exaggerate about those men in the death cell.’
‘But how did Stephen escape? We still can’t find that out.’
‘I think we can. Read this.’ She clicked on another file. A heading appeared: A REPORT ON VIEWS HELD OF THE AUSTRALIAN POSITION.
‘It’s a government file,’ Claire told him, ‘released under the Freedom of Information Act. The people who run the SAD crusade published it as support material. They’re hammering the British government to get retrospective pardons, and in the process they’ve turned over a few rocks. This is one that interests us.’
Patrick began to read it as the printer released more pages. An indifferent researcher himself, he was startled at the expert way she had found this data. More than that, as he read the file with growing astonishment, he realised here was an explanation he had never imagined. Perhaps, at last, the answer to their questions. It seemed to explain how Stephen Conway had escaped a bullet at dawn, and even to reveal what had happened to him during the final days of the war, and afterwards when the guns fell silent.
First there was an article that was suppressed by politicians of the day to preserve the illusion of Empire solidarity. But such solidarity, in fact, was far removed from the truth. Ever since the first Anzacs had landed at Gallipoli, a massive row had begun between Britain and her former colony. It was predicated on the entrenched determination by the Australian government that none of their troops would ever face a firing squad.
The rationale for this was based on a simple fact: these men were volunteers, enlisting to fight in a war that, while it concerned the Empire, was not Australia’s own conflict. A proposal to introduce conscription had twice been put to a national referendum, and twice defeated by the people. As a result the army consisted only of voluntary recruits, unlike British and other allied forces. Discipline and punishment were covered by the Commonwealth Defence Act. And Section 98 of that Act was a model of clarity:
Those who volunteer to serve outside the country cannot face capital punishment, except for mutiny, treachery, or desertion in the face of enemy fire. However, no sentence of death can be carried out unless it is confirmed by the order of the Australian Governor-General.
This sentence buried in the Act meant vice-regal power had total dominance over all domestic or foreign military decrees. The Governor-General, despite his high-sounding status, was a political appointee, a figurehead counselled by the prime minister and his cabinet. He did what he was told. And the cabinet had no intention of allowing volunteers to be shot — which would not only discourage future enlistment, but also ensure their party lost the next election.
It meant that while a number of Australian soldiers had been condemned to death, in every case the sentence had been commuted. It was totally political. The government had twice been given a clear message by the electorate that conscription would not be tolerated, and they knew military executions were unacceptable. These had become vastly unpopular since the trial and execution of Lieutenants Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Hancock in the Boer War.
Australians were also starting to feel their country was too far away from this European conflict, and although there had been great support and enthusiasm for it in 1914 — now, after four years of casualty lists, that fervour had faded.
‘So the government stopped the execution!’ Patrick said.
‘It wasn’t altruism,’ Claire replied, ‘just the usual self-interest. Politicians trying to save their own skins. And by sheer chance, saving a life or two.’
‘But this is all surmise, isn’t it? We can only assume… or is there something else?’
‘There is definitely something else,’ Claire said as she clicked and the screen was lit with a new background graphic depicting a slouch hat with the familiar badge of the rising sun. Patrick stared at the wording of the title.
‘Is this Stephen?’
‘Read it. See what you think.’
He sat in front of the computer and began to read. It was a report entitled THE CASE OF THE UNNAMED SOLDIER.
The strange case of an unnamed and unknown soldier in France during September 1918 accused of desertion in the face of enemy fire has been kept classified for almost eighty years until now. It was disclosed on the file that he was an infantryman who had joined up in the first weeks of the war, had served with distinction in Gallipoli where he had been promoted to sergeant, and following this spent over two years, much of it again as a private soldier, serving on the Somme.
The British court-martial insisted in this case — as he was temporarily attached to a British unit at the time of the offence — that no immunity could exist. This, at last, was to be the exception to a rule that had irritated the High Command throughout the war.
Speedily sent to trial and found guilty, his execution was scheduled, but then deferred because of immediate protests of illegality. The Australian Consul-General in London was adamant. They alone must rule on this matter. A ferocious argument, never made public at the time, then broke out between the two countries. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who had already signed the execution paper, passionately put his own army’s point of view. How could the AIF continue this insistence on being treated differently from the British and all other Empire troops, while they were in the same field of battle, fighting the same enemy in the same war?
The British cabinet vehemently pointed out that as long as two years ago, the Honourable Secretary for the Colonies had requested the Commonwealth agree to their soldiers being placed under the British Army Act.
/> Australia’s prompt reply to this acid reminder asked: Did London not yet realise they were no longer a colony? Had they heard of Federation, or did they still think the country was a prison settlement, run by expatriate old governors put out to pasture and following the dictates of their masters in England?
The increasingly furious High Command would have none of it. The execution of this unnamed soldier, they argued, was a positive step to prevent men fleeing from battle and escaping punishment by claiming they were suffering from ‘nerves’. It was important that, having been properly and fairly tried and sentenced to death, the sentence must be carried out. If this were not to happen, court-martials would become a farce.
In the heated exchange that followed, the Australian government held firm. The AIF was a volunteer army, and as the men in it had chosen to go to the aid of the Empire and to face death, they could not be forced to also face the unreasonable penalty of death while on a duty which they had willingly and cheerfully elected to serve.
London was not impressed. ‘We wish to know why you are being unreasonable in this absurd and continuing fiasco!’ Whitehall bellowed.
‘My God,’ Patrick said, ‘you mean all this was going on while Stephen was held in prison, believing every day would be his last?’
‘It certainly was,’ Claire answered. ‘Keep reading.’ She sat close beside him, as they watched the screen and the details that unfolded.
An agreement had to be reached: this was jeopardising relations between friendly countries. His Majesty King George V was asked by Sir Douglas Haig and the British prime minister to intervene. The King considered the matter; he consulted his close advisers, who felt it had awkward political implications, and could best be solved by politicians acting in good faith and with a measure of plain commonsense.
Prime Minister Lloyd George felt the King’s reply put the onus on the Australian government. Commonsense was the requirement, and until now his stubborn counterpart in the southern hemisphere had shown little sign of it. In the interests of sensible conciliation, it was suggested the government in Australia relent. Relations were being endangered by a positive storm in a tea cup. After all, it was only one man.
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