Breakdown

by Taylor Downing

  Farr’s widow, Gertrude, initially received a widow’s pension, but after six months she went to her local post office to collect the pension and was told that it had been stopped. It was only then that the War Office informed her that her husband had been shot for cowardice. She felt so ashamed at what had happened that she kept it from the rest of the family. Neither her mother nor Harry’s ever found out the circumstances of his death. Gertrude had to start her life anew and struggle on without her husband’s income or pension.

  The War Office was in something of a dilemma over whether to tell families when someone had been executed. Sometimes families received a letter saying their loved one had ‘died of wounds’ or simply that he had been shot at the front. On other occasions, the next of kin were informed of the disgrace, any medals or decorations were withdrawn and the man’s army records were erased.20 But it was official policy that widow’s pensions would not be paid to the spouses of executed men, and so the families of married men discovered the truth before long. This policy of course meant that a man’s family would pay the price for his punishment.

  The issue of executing soldiers did not pass without public debate during the war. Many senior officers not surprisingly felt that the maintenance of discipline in the army relied on the use of punishment. Brigadier Crozier of the 36th (Ulster) Division summed this view up succinctly when he wrote, ‘I should be very sorry to command the finest army in the world on active service without the power behind me which the fear of execution brings.’21 And many others, not only generals, felt that if a soldier let down his mates and refused to fulfil his duty then he deserved whatever punishment was due to him. However, a small but growing group felt that such a draconian penalty was a leftover from the days of floggings and the lash. Not only was it inappropriate in a citizen army, but it was most definitely wrong when a man was suffering from mental illness and deserved medical treatment rather than military punishment. During 1917, questions were asked in Parliament. In October, Philip Snowden, a pacifist and leading member of the Independent Labour Party (and later Chancellor of the Exchequer) asked the Under-Secretary of State for War about the case of a man in the Royal Scots Fusiliers who that summer had been diagnosed with shell shock but had still been shot for desertion. The War Office minister said he was not prepared to challenge the decision of the commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, who had reviewed the case and confirmed the death sentence. On 14 December, another Labour MP, Robert Outhwaite, asked the Under-Secretary to guarantee that no soldier who had been invalided with shell shock would ever be executed. The minister replied that he could not enforce a proposal of this sort. A Conservative member, a retired general, then said that it was ‘a universal practice for a most complete and exhaustive report to be called for in every case after a death sentence has been awarded and that under these circumstances it is practically impossible for any man to be executed who has suffered from shell shock’. The minister agreed.22 Whether the claim was made out of ignorance or in an attempt to mislead the House and the British public, it was clearly far from the truth.

  In March 1918 Haig issued a statement that was read out in Parliament, confirming that ‘When a man has been sentenced to death, if at any time any doubt has been raised as to his responsibility for his actions, or if the suggestion has been advanced that he has suffered from neurasthenia or shell shock, orders are issued for him to be examined by a Medical Board … The sentence of death is not carried out in the case of such a man unless the Medical Board expresses the positive opinion that he is to be held responsible for his actions.’23

  Such a claim was again evidently absurd. Men like William Walton, Arthur Earp, Eric Poole, Harry Farr and many others had already been executed having undergone treatment for shell shock. Many more would be shot in future. And even after he had made his statement to Parliament, Haig continued until the end of the war to confirm the death sentence on men who had at some point been treated for war neuroses.

  Denials that soldiers with mental illness had ever been shot continued to sound unconvincing. After the war was over a long, public debate about military executions began, but the army refused to disclose the records of the courts martial. They were kept under lock and key in the Judge Advocate General’s files, and when finally handed over to the Public Record Office they remained closed for seventy-five years. In 1919, Lloyd George’s government responded to the criticism and asked Sir Charles Darling, a senior judge, to investigate the provisions relating to military tribunals. There were several senior military figures on his committee, so it is not surprising that the majority report concluded that the work of the courts martial had been carried out properly and fairly. However, a minority report questioned the fairness of the army’s judicial procedures and recommended that soldiers sentenced to death should have a right of appeal in a UK court, giving them the status of civilian criminals.

  In 1922, the year the Darling Report came out, another debate in the House of Lords led to the establishment of a much bigger War Office Committee of Enquiry into the issue of shell shock. Chaired by Lord Southborough, the committee collected evidence and made wide-ranging comments about shell shock and war neuroses.24 However, its conclusions were absolutely clear in endorsing the army and its systems. It reported, ‘As regards expert medical evidence and advice in court martial cases, the system pursued in France in the late war seems to have been a satisfactory one … when any medical question or doubt arose before or at a trial … the best possible expert advice was placed at the immediate disposal of the military authorities, either in the form of a board or otherwise.’25 This claim was flagrantly incorrect. Unable to study the records of the courts martial, which were still closed, the committee members relied on the second-hand testimony of senior officers. If they had been given access to the original papers they would have seen that medical evidence was not called upon in a large number of cases, nor were medical boards consulted after a verdict had been reached.

  Despite the committee’s conclusions, however, concern over the issue refused to go away. During the late 1920s, the subject came up repeatedly when the Army Act was debated each year. In 1925 an interdepartmental committee made up of senior military men concluded, again, that no miscarriages of justice had occurred in military courts martial. But later that year, a Labour Party motion to abolish the death penalty in the army was only narrowly defeated in the Commons. The leading light in the campaign for justice was now Labour MP Ernest Thurtle. Although son-in-law of the celebrated pacifist and Labour pioneer, George Lansbury, Thurtle was himself no hard-line pacifist. He had volunteered to join a London Pals battalion in 1914 and fought on the Western Front. Commissioned in 1917, he was badly wounded at the Battle of Cambrai in November. Using his inside experience and fired by his passion for social justice, Thurtle became a defender of the rights of discharged soldiers and a staunch opponent of capital punishment in the army, forcing a series of debates on the subject.

  In 1928, the War Office agreed to remove the death penalty for certain offences, such as striking a superior officer and falling asleep on duty. When, in the following year, the Labour Party formed a minority government, the case for abolition was finally presented. Tom Shaw, a Lancashire trade unionist and Labour Secretary for War, proposed the end of the death penalty for cowardice, although he admitted that the Army Council disagreed with him and argued it was still necessary; the death sentence would remain, however, for desertion. This was not enough for Thurtle, who argued it should be abolished in all cases, and in a free vote his arguments won the day. Although the Army Act was held up in the Lords, it finally became law in 1930. The only crimes now subject to the military death penalty were treachery and mutiny. Notably, there were only four executions on these grounds in the whole of the Second World War.

  However, with the records still closed, the sense remained that those who had faced a firing squad in the First World War were the victims of injustice. In the early 1980s, Judge Anthony Babington was allowed ac
cess to the court martial records to write a book, For the Sake of Example. As a condition of access, he was told that he could not quote directly from the records or name the accused individuals. But the doubts he expressed about the justice meted out in the military courts revived the issue once again. When in the 1990s the Ministry of Defence released the papers of the courts martial, the topic returned to the headlines. Once more questions were asked about the number of men ‘shot at dawn’, which became a popular campaigning phrase. The evidence at last made it clear that the courts martial had failed properly to take into account the psychological condition of some men. It also showed that they had made no allowances for a soldier’s lack of legal experience or education, or for the difficulty he would have found in expressing himself without legal counsel. It was realised, moreover, that evidence had been accepted without proper questioning.

  Harry Farr’s case became notorious as his widow Gertrude, still alive at the age of ninety-nine, and his family led a campaign for justice. With more questions being asked in Parliament, Prime Minister John Major refused to issue any retrospective pardons. He argued that it was wrong to impose modern judgements retrospectively on historical cases. Others claimed that civilians who had committed murder would have been sentenced to death (by hanging rather than by firing squad) had they been prosecuted in the criminal courts at the time, and that the same should apply to those found guilty of murder within the military. However, as it became increasingly clear that many soldiers had been executed while suffering from various forms of shell shock, public pressure continued to mount. Andrew Mackinlay, a Labour MP, maintained the pressure in Parliament. And at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire a special memorial to the men shot at dawn, showing a blindfolded soldier facing a firing squad, was unveiled in 2001.

  Finally, in 2006, when the Army Act came up for its annual renewal, the Defence Secretary in Tony Blair’s government, Des Browne, a Scottish lawyer who had strong personal views on the subject, announced a posthumous pardon for all 306 British soldiers executed for military crimes. Claiming that it would be invidious within the limitations of the surviving records to go through each case one by one, he decided to pardon them all in a single gesture. The phrase ‘As recognition that he was one of many victims of the First World War and that execution was not a fate that he deserved’ was to be added to the record of each condemned man. Their families were of course delighted.

  Most other armies who fought in the First World War also executed men who had been found guilty of cowardice or desertion. The German army executed forty-eight men and the French army about 600 – roughly double the number in the British army – on similar grounds. The French army on rare occasions adopted a policy of collective punishment, picking men randomly by lots from a unit accused of displaying cowardice. They were court-martialled together and shot as a group. The execution of three men from a battalion accused of cowardice during an assault on an invulnerable German stronghold was in 1935 the subject of a book by Canadian writer Humphrey Cobb called Paths of Glory. In 1957 Stanley Kubrick turned the book into a classic Great War movie and a chilling portrait of military injustice.26

  In the British imperial armies, a small number of Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, West Indians, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and a group of Chinese labourers, were court-martialled and executed.27 The exception was the Australian army, which did not allow soldiers to be shot for cowardice or desertion, and in which the only grounds for military execution were mutiny or treacherous dealings with the enemy. Both in the army and among the Australian people at large there was, as the Australian Official History put it, ‘an invincible abhorrence of the seeming injustice of shooting a man who had volunteered to fight in a distant land in a quarrel not peculiarly Australian’.28 The reading out of the news of death sentences to men on parade only strengthened distaste for the policy, and so strong was this feeling that no government would have attempted to flout it. The only punishment allowable for cowardice and desertion in the Australian forces was imprisonment, and this did not change throughout the war.

  Despite official denials over the last hundred years, the evidence is absolutely clear that some men who had psychologically broken down under the strains of the fiercest and most deadly war fought to date were subjected to appalling injustice. The military authorities believed they had to do whatever was necessary to prevent outbreaks of mass hysteria and a general collapse of fighting spirit, as they believed had been the case with the 11th Borders, the Lonsdales. But this did not excuse the treatment of men who, instead of receiving sympathy and understanding for the terrible mental injuries they suffered, were put up against a wall and shot. It is a shadow that hangs not only over the British army, but over many of the armies that fought in the terrible, brutalising conditions of the Great War.

  10

  Laboratory of the Mind

  By 1914, hospital administrator and reformer Sydney Holland, Lord Knutsford, had been chairman of the governing body of the London Hospital for nearly twenty years. That November, moved by accounts he was hearing from the fighting front, he launched an appeal in the columns of The Times to raise money to open a hospital for the treatment of ‘gallant soldiers … suffering from severe mental and nervous shock’ caused by the ‘excessive strain and tension’ of the war. ‘They can be cured’, wrote Knutsford, ‘if only they can receive proper attention. If not cured they will drift back to the world as miserable wrecks for the rest of their lives.’1 These were prophetic words. Lord Knutsford was way ahead of his time in realising that men with nervous complaints could be treated successfully, and that if they were not they would live on to haunt the post-war world.

  The appeal was a great success and raised enough money to open what was called a ‘Special Hospital’ (as distinct from a mental hospital or a lunatic asylum) at Palace Green in Kensington. Later fund-raising enabled Knutsford to open three more hospitals. He had clearly hit a popular chord in raising sympathy for soldiers suffering from what would become known as shell shock. And in revealing the need for his ‘Special Hospitals’ he had highlighted the fact that the military medical authorities were unprepared to cope with the large number of psychiatric casualties that presented themselves. His efforts were given the royal seal of approval when Queen Alexandra visited Palace Green in January 1915.

  The army dealt with the first mental casualties of the war either in general hospitals or in D Block of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley, a ward intended for army mental patients. But this was far too small to cope with the number of cases and in December 1914, the War Office acquired the Red Cross Hospital at Maghull outside Liverpool. Maghull (later called Moss Side Hospital) had been built before the war as a large, airy and spacious establishment to treat epileptics. Having requisitioned it, the War Office initially provided 300 beds. But this soon proved insufficient and another 500 beds were added in huts around the garden. Maghull was intended for the ‘other ranks’, although a small number of officers were allocated to Quarry Bank House nearby. The Springfield War Hospital in Wandsworth was also given over to the treatment of shell shock, and wards were made available elsewhere in London at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic in Queen Square and the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis in Maida Vale. By 1916, even this was not enough and more beds were allocated to nervous cases at the new Maudsley Hospital at Denmark Hill in south London, at the King George V Hospital in Dublin and at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Edinburgh. Eventually hospitals dedicated to the treatment of nervous patients could accommodate 1,200 officers and 4,500 other ranks. Throughout the war these facilities were in continuous demand.

  While the need for specialist centres like these was recognised, most cases of shell shock were thought to be mild. As we have seen, great emphasis was put on quiet rest and relaxation, in hospitals near the front, as the principal cure for the victims with badly disturbed nerves. Throughout the war, this would be the first stage at which attempts were made to cur
e victims of war neuroses. At its simplest level, the process consisted of giving a man a few days out of the line, allowing him to catch up on sleep – always difficult in the trenches – and then being told to ‘pull yourself together.’ Dr Gordon Holmes said that in many cases a shell shock victim was merely ‘shaken up’ and that if these men ‘slept for 24 hours after a few nights good rest [they] were requesting to go back to the line’. Even when a man exhibited a physical symptom like losing the ability to speak, after a good period of sleep ‘we often found that next morning he had regained his speech.’ If the men around him said ‘You’ll be all right soon’ and the MO insisted ‘that there was nothing wrong and there was no reason why the patient should not recover’, then he usually did recover. There was a great advantage, according to Holmes, in keeping these men near the front and under conventional military discipline. Overall, a shell shock patient ‘was in a better mood for returning while he was still in the Army area. The further men got from the line the more difficult it was to get them back.’2