The overall impression left by the notes given to Guilford is that they are very detailed and read as if based on the accumulation of good practice to date, although the source of the good practice and whether it applied across the whole British Army has not been possible to determine at the time of writing.
It is not clear why these notes were given to the chaplain and not to the APM, who had responsibility for the conduct of the execution. The likeliest explanation, particularly as Guilford was handed a carbon copy, is that the notes were given to him by the senior chaplain as a copy for his information about what was to happen so that he was forewarned and prepared – the equivalent of copying someone in on an email, for example.
In addition, although some of its phraseology might appear to be unmilitary in terms of its structure and language, Peter Fiennes has confirmed that although torn and a little ragged, it was in all other respects intact.
Instructions do exist for the execution of Private John Skone, of the 2nd Welch Regiment, on 10 May 1918, who was found guilty of the murder of Lance-Sergeant Edwin Williams on 13 April 1918. These were sent by Major Joseph Wesley, the deputy assistant adjutant-general, to Brigadier-General Morant, and are much briefer although essentially covering the same points as those issued to Guilford (Putkowski and Dunning, 2012). There is also a tantalising report of the experiences of Lieutenant-Colonel H. Meyler (Moore, 1999) which indicates that such regulations may have existed. Meyler recalled an execution in 1915 where he had detailed a firing squad from ‘A’ Company to shoot a man from ‘B’ Company, and went on to say, ‘You may say that regulations do not allow this to be done. I have seen it done myself.’
Therefore, despite the concerns raised in the previous paragraph and in the absence of alternative documentation, the Guilford notes will be used as the basis for examining the roles and experiences of those who played a part in the executions.
Soldiers who had been executed were later buried in the same cemeteries as their comrades who had died in action. In September 1916, the adjutant-general issued an order which read:
There is no rule that any man who has suffered the extreme penalty of the law should be buried near the place of execution. Any man who suffers the extreme penalty of the law may be buried in a cemetery, the inscription being marked DIED instead of KILLED IN ACTION or DIED OF WOUNDS.
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Having taken into account the standards of the time, there are two major areas of concern: namely, the lack of a right to an appeal and the part played by chance. The right to an appeal is enshrined in British civilian law, so why did the politicians, presumably under pressure from the British Army hierarchy, agree to the removal of this right under military law? The simplest explanation is likely to be that it was because the offences were committed whilst on active service, and the army wanted to avoid having resources tied up in dealing with what could potentially be large numbers of appeals. This seems to fall under the term ‘exigencies of the service’, which seems to give approval for doing less than would normally be acceptable as circumstances demanded.
It seems an unavoidable conclusion that chance played too big a part in whether a death sentence was confirmed and carried out, and yet that did not seem to trouble the military hierarchy or the politicians of the day. If a soldier subject to military law was found guilty of an offence committed on active service that was subject to a mandatory death sentence, then in the absence of any mitigation, that should have been the sentence. It should not be used as a tool to correct perceived deficiencies in the discipline and fighting abilities of a battalion or regiment as this introduces a worrying level of subjectivity into the proceedings – as seems to be the case with Sir Douglas Haig’s decision-making criteria, based on the limited number of diary entries that he made, which were both troublingly subjective and opaque. If Sir Douglas Haig, for example, considered that someone needed to be made an example of because ‘The state of discipline in this battalion is not very satisfactory…’, then, in his mind, a condemned soldier was expendable in the cause of making that example.
In the case of Private Arthur Earp, of the 1/5th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who was executed on 22 July 1916 for the offence of quitting his post, Haig’s attitude to capital punishment and the expendability of an individual soldier was made clear. It had been recognised by the court martial and those in the chain of command that Private Earp had been ‘unnerved by a barrage’ and so, at each level, a recommendation for clemency had been supported – with the exception of General Gough, his army commander, and Haig as the commander-in-chief. Haig’s practice was simply to write ‘confirmed’ together with his signature on the paperwork of those sentenced to death. However, in Private Earp’s case, he wrote, ‘How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?’
Private Bernard McGeehan was shot for desertion at 6.16 a.m. on 2 November 1916. He was almost certainly autistic: ‘Ever since I have joined up the men have made fun of me … Every time I go into the trenches they throw stones at me and say it is shrapnel and they call me all sorts of names. I have been out here 18 months and have had no leave.’
Almost certainly, Private Earp was suffering from shell shock and Haig was clearly concerned that any clemency shown would legitimise the condition and open the gates to a flood of similar cases as men sought to escape the trenches (Sheffield, 2012). It is clear, therefore, that Earp was shot purely and simply because he had shell shock and to discourage others from using it as an excuse for avoiding what Haig saw as their duty.
Such attitudes pre-dated Haig: in 1915, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the Second Army, wrote to the officers of the court martial convened to consider the case of Fusilier Joseph Byers, 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers: ‘… would urge that discipline in the 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers had been bad for some time past, and that a severe example is very much wanted.’
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. ‘There is a serious prevalence of desertion to avoid duty in the trenches, especially in the 8th Brigade and I am sure the only way to stop it is to carry out some death sentences.’
The impression that life was cheap and of no value beyond the needs of the army is one that, 100 years later, gives pause for thought, but in 1914–18 it would not have seemed so surprising. This is also a point that other military historians dispute, arguing that the officers and their men developed strong bonds, but, while this might have been the case at battalion level, those bonds would have been weaker the further up the command chain that decisions were being made, when the individuality of the person was replaced by a collective view.
This raises a further interesting point because, if a battalion was underperforming and this had been in some way drawn to the commander-in-chief’s attention, then the battalion as a whole bore a collective responsibility if the sentence was confirmed. There is no evidence to suggest that this was ever acknowledged, but we will discuss later the impact that death sentences had within battalions and regiments.
The Irish Government Report (2004) gave other examples of the part played by chance and the collective responsibility of a condemned man’s comrades:
There have been far too many cases already of desertion in this Battalion. An example is needed as there are many men in the Battalion who never wished to be soldiers.
I consider that, in the interests of discipline, the sentence as awarded should be carried out.
[I recommend] the extreme example be carried out as a deterrent to other men committing a similar offence.
The state of discipline of the unit as a whole is good, but there are individuals (such as the accused) in the unit who take advantage of leniency and for whom an example is needed.
Under ordinary circumstances I would have hesitated to recommend the capital sentence awarded be put into effect as a plea of guilty has been erroneously accepted by the court, but the condition of discipline in the Battalion is such as to render an exemplary punishment highly desirable and I therefore hope that the Commander
in Chief will see fit to approve the sentence of death in this instance.
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The Army Acts, the Manual of Military Law and the King’s Regulations are very detailed documents, but they have surprisingly little to say where the death sentence is concerned once the regulations for the conduct of court martial have been dealt with. The document that could be considered the closest thing to a standard operating procedure are the notes given to the Anglican chaplain Edward Guilford, and yet so far it has not been possible to establish their origins or how widely they were disseminated.
It has sometimes seemed within the published material concerning executions that the fact that 90 per cent of sentences were commuted was seen as something to be proud of, as a demonstration that somehow the system worked – yet really the opposite is true, even allowing for the fact that some of those sentenced were in fact serial offenders. If the British Army and the politicians were convinced of the need for the death penalty on active service then the sentence should have been mandatory with a right to an appeal. The British Army’s apparent lack of transparency and honest conviction about the death sentence is also of concern, as evidenced by the practice of ‘weeding out’, or what is now known as redacting, to ‘defeat the inquisitive’, and the next chapter will deal with this aspect in more depth.
After the war, Mr H.V. Clarke (Corns and Hughes-Wilson, 2001), who stated that he had worked at General Headquarters (GHQ), the overall headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, made what seems to be an extraordinary claim. He said that during his time at GHQ he had extracted data from the routine orders relating to executions which showed that the number of actual executions exceeded the official figures, and he wrote to newspapers stating that in his view the true number of executions was in fact 37,905.
Although no newspaper published his extraordinary claim, it came to the attention of the authorities, leading Clarke to state that he had, as a result, destroyed his evidence. Subsequently no evidence has ever been found to substantiate Clarke’s claim and it is hard to believe (or maybe it’s a case of not wanting to believe) that his claim of 37,905 executed men was accurate. After all, the figure he claimed was nearly twice the number killed on the first day of the Somme in July 1916, or the equivalent of thirty-seven wartime battalions – executions on that scale would have been hard to conceal from the soldiers, the public and the politicians. It was not something that the death-penalty abolitionist, Ernest Thurtle, ever raised during his long campaign. Also, an attrition rate at that level would have caused a shortage of men that the generals would have been keen to avoid, even allowing for their support of the death penalty. This would have broken one of the underlying tenets of the death penalty – that it should not contribute to a shortage of men.
But a final, and perhaps uncomfortable, thought before leaving this point, is the possible connection between Clarke’s claim and the army’s practice of weeding out problematic documentation. In 1917, the Under Secretary of State for War was asked in Parliament to discontinue the practice of naming soldiers who had been executed in routine orders, but he refused on the grounds that this would remove the deterrent nature of the sentence. These routine orders are notable for their absence from the official documents held today at The National Archives.
Army discipline was based on the ideas of intimidation and fear, but if these were not regulated then it should not be a surprise to see this leading to abuse. Military law is quite explicit about what could and could not be done where field punishment was concerned, and yet this chapter has outlined instances of abuse, and more will be discussed over the coming chapters. Is it really too big a step to say that if the regulations for field punishments were abused, then it should not be a surprise to find that the ultimate sanction, the sentence of being shot at dawn, was equally open to abuse in the way that it was organised?
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We will now move beyond the discussion of the legal and organisational aspects of the executions to consider the individuals who found themselves cast as players in these very human dramas, and what their experiences can add to our understanding of this aspect of the First World War.
2
THE SELECTION OF
THE FIRING SQUAD
In the First World War men joined the army for many reasons, such as patriotism, thirst for adventure and wanting to do their bit with their mates. Even those who were conscripted would, to some extent, have shared those feelings, even in the face of increasing casualty lists and a growing awareness of what this war actually entailed. Somewhere in that mixture of feelings would have been an acceptance that war involved killing your enemy, but none would have thought as they headed for the Western Front that they might one day be called upon to kill one of their own.
To give this issue some perspective, a look at the figures involved shows that, given the number of men who were executed, the number of those involved in a firing squad or in some other role at an execution, would in turn have been small bearing in mind the fact that over 5 million British and Commonwealth soldiers served on the Western Front at some point in the First World War.
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According to the notes given to Guilford, the firing squad was to ‘consist of an Officer, 1 Sergeant and 10 men of the prisoner’s unit’. Contrary to what the notes suggest, however, the firing squad was not always drawn from the condemned man’s own unit, or indeed comprised the number of men specified.
The order to form a firing party produced different responses from the officers concerned. Some were sensitive enough to realise that being a member of a firing squad was not a universally popular duty. Those officers would therefore first of all ask for volunteers, possibly even offering bribes in the form of extra pay, leave or rum rations. If bribery did not work, then an officer might turn to those men who had been convicted of committing minor offences and yet still remained with the unit.
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Ernest Thurtle, MP, was a leading member of the abolitionist movement seeking to end the death penalty in the military in the years after the First World War. In a general debate in the House of Commons in 1926 that sought the abolition of the death penalty, he made a specific attack on sentencing soldiers to death for sleeping at their posts. He maintained that sleeping at one’s post was not a real, wilful act, adding that after the Commons had been sitting for sixteen hours, ‘members all around fell asleep. If the House was kept up for ninety-six hours without any sleep at all he would guarantee that 75 or 80 per cent of the members would be falling into deep slumbers.’
Although the War Office denied Ernest Thurtle (amongst others) access to the records of those executed, he did manage to gather some evidence from those who had been involved in military executions in the First World War. A number of individuals wrote letters to Thurtle with their experiences; when these were published, he withheld the names of both the authors and of those shot. Subsequently, however, as more information has entered the public domain, it is now possible to reinsert some of the names concerned.
Thurtle (2013) included an extract from a previously published article written by a soldier by the name of Private Albert Rochester, who had been sentenced to field punishment No.2 for an undisclosed offence. He had found himself taken by a military police corporal to a Royal Engineers depot where he was issued with three posts, three ropes and a spade, which he had to carry to a secluded spot. He was ordered to dig three holes, a specified distance apart, for the stakes, while all the time becoming more aware of their purpose.
The preparations were for the executions of three men from the 19th Durham Light Infantry on 18 January 1917. Lance-Sergeant Joseph Stones had been sentenced for ‘casting away his arms’, while Lance-Corporals Peter Goggins and John McDonald had been sentenced for quitting their post.
An article in the Guardian newspaper on 16 August 2006 carried a description by Private Albert Rochester of what he had witnessed:
A motor ambulance arrives carrying the doomed
men. Manacled and blindfolded, they are helped out and tied up to the stakes. Over each man’s heart is placed an envelope. At the sign of command, the firing parties, 12 for each, align their rifles on the envelopes. The officer in charge holds his stick aloft and, as it falls, 36 bullets usher the souls of three of Kitchener’s men to the great unknown.
Rochester went on to say:
As a military prisoner, I helped clear the traces … I helped carry those bodies towards their last resting place. I took the belongings from the dead men’s tunics … A few letters, a pipe, a photo. I could tell you of the silence of the military police after reading a letter from a little girl to ‘Dear Daddy’, of the blood-stained snow that horrified the French peasants, of the chaplain’s confession that braver men he had never met than those three men he prayed with just before the fatal dawn. I could take you to the graves of the murdered.
On this occasion each of the condemned men was assigned a firing squad of twelve men. When the condemned men had been killed, Rochester was ordered to clear away all traces of what had taken place, collecting the blood-soaked straw from the foot of the posts and burning it, and removing the posts. All this, when his greatest fear that morning when summoned by the military police corporal, was that he was about to experience his first session of full pack drill!
This would then heap an extra level of punishment that would be out of all proportion to the original offences committed, as can be seen in a further letter discussed below, written to Ernest Thurtle, MP.
Executed at Dawn Page 4