And although medical officers were often called, their evidence was treated with suspicion by many officers and might be totally ignored. William Brown, a neurologist with Fourth Army during the Battle of the Somme, was often asked to give a medical opinion of a man’s mental state at courts martial and he found this ‘an extremely difficult and distasteful task’. However, he usually ended up giving evidence in favour of the defendant because he felt ‘that his state of mind in the line when he was under heavy shellfire, was not the same as his state of mind when he was at the Base’.4 The natural sympathy medical officers felt towards shell shock victims made many officer-judges highly suspicious of their evidence. As good and loyal officers they were often more concerned with maintaining the honour of the regiment than with establishing the truth about a man’s mental health. Although strict procedures were laid down, they were applied unevenly and some courts martial could be over in only a matter of minutes.5 It’s difficult when reading accounts of these tribunals to avoid the conclusion that many of the courts provided only a quick and arbitrary jurisdiction, that the whole process was stacked against the accused soldier and that many judgements were desperately unjust.
The whole system of military law went into immediate operation in the opening days of the war. The first sentence of death was passed on the day after the first engagement by British troops at the Battle of Mons, when Private Whittle was found guilty of falling asleep at his post. However, his sentence was commuted. The first soldier put to death was nineteen-year-old Private Thomas Highgate of the 1st Royal West Kents, who had been in action at Mons and in the retreat that followed. Highgate had deserted at the beginning of September 1914 and was discovered in civilian clothing hiding in a barn. The court martial was swift, his defence was unassisted, and he was shot by firing squad two days afterwards, on 8 September. The next soldier to be executed, two weeks later, was Private George Ward of the 1st Royal Berkshires. Charged with cowardice, Ward did have an officer ‘friend’ but it seems he offered no defence and again, he was shot two days after being found guilty.6
The lingering question over many of these military executions, both during the war and ever since, is whether, with the summary nature of the justice handed out, men who should have been treated for shell shock or nervous conditions were in fact found guilty of desertion or cowardice and shot. The first of many cases to raise this question was that of Lance Sergeant William Walton, who deserted after his battalion had been involved in heavy fighting at the first battle of Ypres in November 1914. He took refuge in a house in a village near St Omer and was not found until March 1915. At his interrogation he had difficulty in answering even basic questions and claimed to have had a nervous breakdown. Walton repeated the claim at his trial, but the officer-judges called no medical witnesses to provide an assessment and he was sentenced to death. He was shot a few days later. Over the following months dozens of men charged with cowardice or desertion displayed at their trials the classic symptoms of shell shock, which were either ignored or misunderstood by the officers sitting in judgement. By the end of June 1916, one hundred British soldiers had been sentenced to death by a court martial and executed.
In the first days of the Battle of the Somme, Private Arthur Earp was court-martialled on a joint charge of quitting his post and conduct ‘to the prejudice of good order’. He was in the 1/5th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, part of 48th Division which was in the line at the northern end of the Somme front near Hebuterne. Earp’s battalion did not go over the top on 1 July but was caught up in the intense German shelling of the British lines that followed the launch of the offensive. After two hours under heavy bombardment, Earp told his sergeant that he could stand it no longer and rushed away to seek refuge in a dugout in the support trenches. A few days later he was arrested. At his court martial it was said that he had displayed signs of distress for some time before making off. On this occasion the officer-judges showed sympathy for Earp’s mental condition; although they found him guilty they recommended mercy on the grounds of his previous good service and added that the ferocity of the German bombardment was a further mitigating circumstance.
The court’s verdict went up the chain of command, his divisional and corps commanders both agreeing with the recommendation of clemency because of his perilous mental state. As usual, the papers arrived on the desk of General Haig, who overruled the recommendation for mercy and confirmed that the death sentence should be carried out. It was unusual for Haig to write anything on the court martial papers that came before him, other than the single word ‘Confirmed’. However, in this case he wrote, ‘How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?’ Furthermore, he rapped the knuckles of the generals who had agreed to commute the sentence. It has been argued that in writing this Haig accepted that Earp had shell shock, but believed that to commute the sentence would be to legitimise the condition and open the flood gates to thousands of others who would see it as a way of escaping the trenches.7
Haig clearly felt it essential to maintain discipline in order to prevent a collapse in morale, and this was one way in which he encouraged his subordinates to take a strong stand against the spread of shell shock. He might also have known that Earp’s battalion had a bad reputation. In the middle of July, the battalion commander of the 1/5th Royal Warwickshire Regiment sent a report to his brigade commander, Brigadier Dent, complaining about ‘the large percentage of utterly useless men’ who seemed incapable of using their rifle and bayonet, and noting that ‘This class of man is petrified with fear when he meets a German in the flesh.’ He concluded, ‘There are about a hundred and thirty of such men in my battalion and I would prefer to be without them.’
Brigadier Dent forwarded the report to Major-General Fanshawe of the 48th Division, who decided that the men should be transferred from the Warwicks to a Labour battalion that was unloading ships in the Channel ports. The Labour battalions were made up of men who were sometimes thought to be unfit for combat. The corps commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, agreed and wrote a note saying, ‘These men are degenerates. They are a source of danger to their comrades, their battalion and the brigade.’8 Nowhere in this exchange is the term ‘shell shock’ used, but the men in question are described as having a ‘vacant, hang-dog look’, typical of men suffering from war neuroses. The readiness with which their commander accepted the transfer of up to one-eighth of the battalion’s strength to another unit suggests that shell shock had spread badly among the Warwicks; he wanted to get rid of the shell shock victims and replace them with a new complement of eager, fresh recruits.
Later in the year another case similar to Earp’s came up. Eric Skeffington Poole had volunteered in 1914 and the following year was commissioned as an officer. On 7 July 1916, Lieutenant Poole was in the trenches with the 11th West Yorks taking part in an assault on Bailiff Wood, near Contalmaison, when a German shell partially buried him. He was examined by a doctor who said he was shell shocked and should be evacuated. Having been in hospital for a month, he was sent back to his battalion which was in reserve, and placed in command of a platoon. On 5 October, the battalion was ordered up into the front line and took part in a bloody frontal assault on Flers which resulted in the loss of eight officers and 217 men. But Poole complained that he was not well and went missing for two days. When he was found he was court-martialled, although his brigade commander had recommended that he should not be charged due to his nervous state. The court martial adopted a harsh line, finding Poole guilty of desertion and making no recommendation for mercy. His brigadier recommended clemency but when the paperwork came before Haig, despite the clear evidence that Poole was not only suffering from shell shock but had indeed been hospitalised by it, he insisted that the death sentence should be carried out. Haig wrote in his diary, ‘After careful consideration, I confirmed the proceedings … Such a crime is more serious in the case of an officer than of a man, and also it is highly important that all ranks should realise that the law is the same for an
officer as a private.’9 Poole was shot on 10 December 1916, the first officer in the war to be executed. By the end of the war, Haig had personally confirmed the death sentences on 255 other ranks and three officers, all of whom were shot.10
Throughout the Somme offensive, as we have seen, it seemed clear to those in command that there was a close connection between morale and shell shock. Nearly all senior officers confirmed this view. In giving evidence to the War Office Committee of Enquiry in 1922, Colonel Rogers, Medical Officer of the 4th Black Watch, claimed that the problems created by shell shock could be ‘summed up in one word “morale”. If the morale is good in a battalion, you will have less so-called “shell shock” or war neurosis. The better the morale the less the neurosis.’11 Major Adie of the RAMC claimed that shell shock could arise not only in an individual but also in a body of men. He remembered seeing two battalions side by side at the front: ‘In one the morale was good – it had a good colonel and officers and a good medical officer – and they had practically no men going down with “shell shock”. The other battalion was sending ten men away at a time.’ He decided that maintaining a high level of morale was ‘the crux of the matter. Keep up the morale of the troops and you will not have emotional “shell shock”, at least you will reduce it tremendously.’12
Colonel Fuller, who later became a great champion of armoured warfare, reported, ‘If a crowd of men are reduced to a low nervous condition, “shell shock” becomes contagious.’ He particularly recalled seeing this during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 when, he said, there was a higher rate of desertion of British soldiers to the enemy than at any other point in the war. He remembered what he called the ‘moral stampede’ or ‘panic’ of ‘crowd shell shock’, although he was convinced that this was a temporary thing and good rest and recuperation could soon reduce its effects.13 Colonel Stubbs of the 1st Suffolk Regiment confirmed that shell shock ‘spread very quickly’ and ‘as soon as one started to come away the rest followed.’ He recalled that his battalion’s medical officer ‘collected about 20 or 30 [cases of shell shock], and he wanted to send them back up the line’. But Stubbs eventually ‘got rid of them to some division who put them into a Labour Company’.14 Not only did the link between war neuroses, morale and the apparent collapse of the fighting ability of entire units in the front line encourage senior officers to view the men’s suffering with a mixture of suspicion and contempt, it meant the whole subject of shell shock during the Battle of the Somme raised fundamentally challenging questions about leadership and discipline.
However, it was not just poorly officered battalions that suffered from indiscipline and the failure to obey orders. Popularly known as the Welbeck Rangers, the 17th Sherwood Foresters was a Pals battalion raised in 1915 from among the men of the counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. After a period of extensive training in England, the battalion arrived in France in March 1916. They went into the front line on 11 June in a position well north of the Somme battlefield near Festubert. As they took over the line the battalion commander noted that ‘The officers are keen’, the NCOs and the men were all ‘good material’ and that ‘Discipline is on the whole good.’ He particularly commented on the good morale in the battalion, adding that ‘the right offensive spirit exists.’ When the Battle of the Somme began, all units in this section of the line were required to take part in aggressive trench raids to maintain pressure on the enemy along the entire British front. The first of many raids took place on the night of 3–4 July when the Sherwood Foresters and a battalion of the Rifle Brigade jointly assaulted a strongly defended section of the German line, sustaining many casualties. The following day, Brigadier Oldman sent a message congratulating the Sherwood Foresters on the raid and again commended the battalion for its ‘fighting spirit’, saying that the raiders had ‘brought credit to the battalion by their gallant conduct’. A few days later, none other than the commander of First Army, General Sir Charles Monro, inspected the men to congratulate them. He said they looked ‘much steadier than when he saw them last’.15 The 17th Sherwood Foresters seemed to be an exemplary battalion.
On 5 July, another raiding party was ordered to go out and retrieve some portable wooden bridges abandoned two nights before within yards of the German line. Private George Lowton was allocated to the party but refused to take part; saying that the mission was suicidal and he had a wife and five children to think of, he remained in the trench. That night there was heavy German shelling of the Sherwood Foresters’ positions. Three days later, Private Bert McCubbin refused to go out into No Man’s Land to occupy a listening post, a dangerous task that involved spending the night on guard in an isolated position known as an ‘island’ in front of the British line. The Sherwood Foresters remained in their front-line positions until 14 July, completing a highly unusual 34-day stint in the trenches. Although they had not participated in the Battle of the Somme, they had lost five officers and 125 other ranks, even though their battalion war diary records most days simply as ‘Trench Routine. Situation normal.’
When the battalion returned to the rest area a great deal of catching up and administration was needed. Privates Lowton and McCubbin were arrested and charged with cowardice and wilful defiance. At their courts martial both men pleaded that their nerves were in a bad state. Lowton said he had been buried for four hours some weeks before when his dugout had been hit by a shell and collapsed on him. McCubbin claimed that he was so jittery when asked to go out into the ‘island’ that he would have put the lives of his comrades in jeopardy. Both men received sympathetic trials, and although they were found guilty the verdicts were forwarded with a recommendation for mercy. This was endorsed up the chain of command until it reached General Monro, the First Army commander, who had been so impressed when he inspected the battalion a week before. Maybe because of his inspection, he was clearly determined to make an example of the two men; he wrote on the papers that soldiers who deliberately chose to avoid danger ‘would not be tolerated’ because ‘all the qualities which we desire [in a soldier] will become debased and degraded’.16 He ordered that the death sentence should be carried out.
Haig, as commander-in-chief, confirmed the decision, and the two men were shot at dawn on 30 July. It was extremely rare for two men from the same battalion to be tried and executed simultaneously. After the gallantry of the Sherwood Foresters had received such high praise it was even more surprising to find this particular battalion being so discredited. Ten days after the executions the divisional commander inspected the battalion and said it was ‘the best turn out he had seen since taking over’ and noted that the battalion appeared to be ‘in a very high state of efficiency’.17 In this context, the joint execution indicates yet again senior commanders’ determination to make a stand against signs of a breakdown in unit morale. Claims that a man was suffering from a poor nervous condition would not be enough to save him from traditional military justice.
The 1st Hampshire Regiment had been among the battalions that went over the top on 1 July. Their assault, just north of Beaumont-Hamel, had been pinned down by machine gun fire and the men did not get beyond No Man’s Land. It was a dreadful and costly failure. The battalion remained in the thick of the Somme fighting throughout July, but at the end of the month was withdrawn and transferred to the Ypres salient. The night of 8 August was dark and moonless. At 10.30 p.m. the gas gong sounded the alarm that the Germans were launching a poison gas attack on the trenches occupied by the 1st Hampshires. As the men dragged on their gas masks, the Germans also launched a trench raid. Seven men were killed and forty-six wounded in the gas attack that night. During the panic, Private John Bennett fled to the rear trenches. He was charged with cowardice and a week later appeared before a court martial. His company sergeant major reported to the tribunal that ‘as soon as shelling starts, he goes all to pieces and goes practically off his head through sheer terror.’ Bennett’s commanding officer confirmed this and added that while on the Somme in July he had been sentenced to two
years’ imprisonment with hard labour after fleeing the trenches during a bombardment. The sentence had been suspended and so the man was still with his battalion. Bennett had no ‘Prisoner’s Friend’ to defend him at his trial.
Despite this, Brigadier Rees, who presided over the court martial, took a lenient line, and while finding Bennett guilty of cowardice recommended mercy. When the court papers reached his corps commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston once again decided that a man’s nervous condition could not be used as an excuse for desertion. He wrote, ‘Cowards of this sort are a serious danger to the army. The death penalty is instituted to make such men fear running away more than they fear the enemy.’18 This was one of the clearest statements yet that military punishments were intended to deter soldiers from desertion, regardless of their mental state, and to set an example for others to see. Bennett was shot at dawn on 28 August.
Another classic case was that of Harry Farr. A regular soldier from Kensington, London, Farr had joined the West Yorks Regiment in 1910 at the age of sixteen, claiming to be three years older. He later said that he was proud to be a soldier and to serve his country. In November 1914, Farr was sent with his battalion to France and was in and out of the trenches for six months. In May he was evacuated from the front suffering from shell shock. From hospital, he wrote to his wife, Gertrude, but he was in such a bad way and shaking so badly she could barely recognise his handwriting.
After five months of treatment, Farr returned to his battalion and served at Ypres before his unit was transferred to the Somme. Again, he suffered from mild attacks of shell shock and needed treatment, but repeatedly returned to his battalion. In mid-September, the 1st West Yorks were sent into the front line to take part in a new assault at Flers. Saying that he felt unwell again, Harry Farr did not go with his battalion to the front. On 17 September, he visited an aid station, but they were so busy they could not see him as he was not physically wounded. A sergeant found Farr in the rear and asked what the matter was. Farr said he ‘couldn’t stand it’. The sergeant called him a coward and ordered him to join a ration party taking supplies up to the front. Farr refused to go even when the men tried to drag him, saying he was too afraid to go to the front. Doubtless this behaviour did not endear him either to the sergeant or to the men in the ration party. Farr was eventually charged with cowardice and a court martial took place on 2 October. He decided to defend himself. No medical evidence as to Farr’s condition was given at the trial. His commanding officer simply reported, ‘I cannot say what has destroyed this man’s nerves but he has proved himself incapable of keeping his head in action and is likely to cause a panic.’ The officer did however add that ‘Apart from his behaviour under fire, his conduct and character are very good.’19 The court martial lasted just twenty minutes. Farr was quickly found guilty. No medical board was asked to examine him after his conviction. He was shot on 18 October.
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