1917: Private Joseph Bateman, shot at dawn
Add comment December 3rd, 2019 Headsman
On this date in 1917, Black Country volunteer Joseph Bateman was shot for desertion.
The 2nd Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment private was among the earliest wave of young Britons to sign up, in late 1914 — but his three years of service were marked by intermittent AWOL episodes, including when the unit was on home soil, far from the front lines. It's not clear the reason for this eventually fatal pattern.
For ninety years, Bateman was, like most "shot at dawn" soldiers, persona non grata for official war commemorations. His name was finally added to Wordsley's Great War cenotaph in 2007, thanks to the tireless campaigning of an interested teacher/historian named Graham Hodgson.*
Press reporting on Hodgson's campaign subsequently turned up Bateman's relations, including a grateful granddaughter whose only photo of Joseph Bateman was "marked by lipstick where her grandmother kissed it after learning of his death." (BBC)
He's buried at Rocquigny-Equancourt British Cemetery in the Somme.
* Unfortunately, Mr. Hodgson was killed in a car accident on Cyprus shortly afterwards. At the time he apparently had a historical novel about Private Bateman in progress, but I can find no indication that it's been posthumously published; however, Bateman does figure in To War with God: The Army Chaplain who Lost his Faith by Peter Fiennes. Fiennes's grandfather, the titular army chaplain, stayed up all night consoling Joseph Bateman in the hours ahead of his execution.
2009: Bobby Wayne Woods - 2018
Feast Day of St. Cassian of Tangier - 2017
1678: Edward Colman, Popish Plot victim - 2016
1948: Sam Shockley and Miran Thompson, for the Battle of Alcatraz - 2015
1556: Beatrice, a servant - 2014
Themed Set: Filicide - 2014
1864: Bill Sketoe, hole haunt - 2013
An unspecified Monday: Fagin - 2012
1920: Tom Johnson and Jim McDonald, criminal assailants - 2011
1849: Anna Koch of Appenzell - 2010
1876: The samurai leaders of the Hagi and Akizuki rebellions - 2009
1990: Pastor Hossein Soodmand, apostate - 2008
1952: Rudolf Slansky and 10 "conspirators" - 2007
1916: Private Billy Nelson
1917: Sub-Lt. Edwin Dyett, shot at dawn
1915: Private Herbert Burden, memorial model
1918: Louis Harris and Ernest Jackson, the last British soldiers shot at dawn
1915: Peter Sands, home leave
1916: Abraham Bevistein, child soldier
1914: Thomas Highgate, the first shot in the Great War
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,England,Execution,France,History,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1917, joseph bateman, shot at dawn, world war i
1917: James Smith, Early One Morning
Add comment September 5th, 2017 Headsman
One hundred years ago today, a Bolton private (formerly lance corporal) named James Smith fell to his countrymen's guns on Belgian soil during World War I.
A career soldier since 1909, Smith had served honorably in India and Egypt before the war. He had the hardiness and luck to survive Gallipoli and the Somme — but their horrors broke him mentally.
According to this biography, "Jimmy almost lost his life on the Somme on 11 October 1916 when a German artillery shell exploded, burying him alive and causing a shrapnel wound 'the size of a fist' on his right shoulder." When he returned from two months' convalescence leave his mates could see that shellshock had destroyed the old Jimmy Smith.
Erratic behavior that cost him his good conduct badges culminated in a break on July 30, 1917, the eve of the frightful Battle of Passchendaele, when Smith deserted his post and disappeared from the front — to be found later, wandering in a nearby town. In World War I, such an offense invited the brass to make an example of you.
Smith's own comrades from the 17th Battalion King's Liverpool Regiment were drafted into the firing squad. Pitying their victim, the executioners pulled their shots and missed the target, only succeeding in wounding the brutalized private. When the firing squad commander faltered at his duty to deliver the coup de grace, the task monstrously fell on a close friend of Smith's, Private Richard Blundell, to press the revolver to Smith's temple and blow out his brains. For its service to the war effort, the firing detail got 10 days' R&R … and a lifetime of shame.
In the weeks before his own death, in February 1989, Blundell was often heard by his son, William, to murmur deliriously: 'What a way to get leave, what a way to get leave.'
According to historian Graham Maddocks, in his book Liverpool Pals, William Blundell asked his father in a more lucid moment what he meant.
Still desperately upset seven decades after the incident, the dying Richard told his son what had happened. It was clear, that as he faced his own death, Richard had never forgiven himself.
Jimmy Smith was the subject of a 1998 play, Early One Morning.
1917: Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch, Wilhelmshaven mutineers - 2019
1878: George Howell, family arbiter - 2018
1553: Giovanni Mollio, Italian reformer - 2016
1789: Thomas Phipps the elder and Thomas Phipps the younger - 2015
1782: Bartolina Sisa, indigenous rebel - 2014
1981: Nasiru Bello, a little overeagerly - 2013
1937: Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky, counterrevolutionary kulak - 2012
1924: Richard A. Birkes, stickup man - 2011
1942: Lodz ghetto "Children's Action" begins - 2010
2007: Duan Yihe, mistress-murderer - 2009
1930: Carl Panzram, rage personified - 2008
1916: Eric Poole, the first British officer shot at dawn during World War I
1918: Private Harry James Knight, deserter
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Arts and Literature,Belgium,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,Diminished Capacity,England,Execution,History,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1917, james smith, mental illness, richard blundell, september 5, shellshock, shot at dawn, theater, world war i
A century ago today in the Great War, Second Lieutenant Eric Poole laid down his life at the city hall of a Belgian border town.
As it was put by the sadly defunct Shot At Dawn site (still preserved at the Wayback Machine), "The cemetery register of Poperinghe New Military Cemetery states that Lt. Eric Skeffington Poole died of wounds on 10 December 1916. Tactfully, it omits to record also that his death was caused by a British Army firing squad."
A Canadian-born engineer, Poole had enlisted in the very first weeks of the war and been commissioned an officer by May 1915.
In July of 1916, a falling artillery shell struck so close that its concussion knocked Poole down, spattering him with earth. He was hospitalized for shellshock but returned to duty in September — still complaining of rheumatism and feeling "damned bad."
One night in October as his unit moved up to a forward trench, Poole disappeared from it — nobody knows how or when, but he wasn't there when it mustered at its new position at midnight. He was detained two days later, wandering well west of the trenches, a leather jacket hiding his private's tunic … "in a very dazed condition," an officer who interviewed him would later remember. "From conversation which I had with him I came to the conclusion he was not responsible for his actions. He was very confused indeed."
Evidence collected in Poole's desertion trial pointed to a man taxed beyond his capacities by command responsibility and the strain of two years at war. His division commander recommended against the court martial, for Poole was "not really accountable for his actions. He is of nervous temperament, useless in action, and dangerous as an example to the men" — but still "could [be] usefully employed at home in instructional duties or in any minor administrative work, not involving severe strain of the nerves." Another captain in his battalion described him as "somewhat eccentric, and markedly lacking in decision" and liable under pressure to "become so mentally confused that he would not be responsible for his actions."
By the book the man's irresolute midnight ramble was a clear instance of abdicating duty, but Poole's weakness was apparent enough to trouble the court that tried him for desertion — not only to solicit this and other testimony from his comrades about the lieutenant's state of mind but even to remark from its own observation that his "mental powers [were] less than average. He appears dull under cross examination, and his perception is slow." Perhaps this was fellow-feeling by other officers that would not have been extended to a mere grunt; if so, what was a mitigating consideration for the court made Poole's execution a in the eyes of Field Marshal Haig: "Such a case is more serious in the case of an officer than a man, and it is also highly important that all ranks should realise the law is the same for an officer as a private." Two years in, and somehow not one officer had suffered such a punishment; Shot At Dawn speculated that military courts' recent shocking verdict excusing Captain John Bowen-Colthurst on grounds of insanity for an atrocity in Ireland had also raised pressure on the armed forces to show that British officers stood not above the law.*
The British army executed 306 of its own soldiers during World War I. Among them, Poole was the first of only three officers.
* The War Office's decision not to publicize his fate (and the euphemistic reference in the cemetery register) would seem sharply at odds with any intended demonstrative effect.
1940: Carl Heinrich Meier and Jose Waldberg, the first hanged under the Treachery Act - 2019
304: Saint Eulalia - 2018
1591: Edmund Geninges - 2017
1919: Not Joseph Cohen - 2015
1965: Andrew Pixley - 2014
1875: William Wilson, taking the priest with him - 2013
1900: John Filip Nordlund, Mälarmördaren - 2012
1852: Jose Forni, the first legal hanging in California - 2011
1718: Stede Bonnet, gentleman pirate - 2010
1541: Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham, the Queen's lovers - 2009
1796: Jose Leonardo Chirino, Venezuelan slave revolt leader - 2008
1937: Teido Kunizaki - 2007
1945: Private Eddie Slovik, the last American shot for desertion
1757: Admiral John Byng
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,Diminished Capacity,England,Execution,History,Milestones,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1916, december 10, douglas haig, eric poole, john bowen-colthurst, shellshock, shot at dawn, world war i
1914: Lt. Jean-Julien Chapelant, mort pour la France
2 comments October 11th, 2016 Headsman
On this date in 1914, the French army shot Lt. Jean-Julien Chapelant as a coward.
Most resources about Lt. Chapelant are in French, as are almost all the links in this post — but within France this case has been contested since the interwar years when his father fought in vain ferocity to reinstate the honor of his son.
Four days before his execution, Chapelant, commanding a machine gun section near a village in the Somme, was captured with four other gunners when the Germans overran their position. Though he'd been shot in the leg, Chapelant managed to escape his captors and return to French lines. (Three of the other gunners escaped, too.)
While the categorical rehabilitation of Great War soldiers "shot at dawn" as cowards or deserters has been a going concern in recent years, Chapelant also has a compelling individual argument that he ought not have been construed such even by the standards of his time.
The luckless lieutenant was shot for "capitulating in open country". This was at best an extremely prejudicial interpretation of the facts, seemingly one that commanding officers themselves still adjusting to the unexpected prowess of German arms had already settled upon before any proper investigation, out of their pique at losing the position. The verdict was so certain that Chapelant's commanding officer gave him his revolver back urging him to "burn out his own brains" and save everyone the trouble.
Chapelant refused, insisting that he had done his proper duty, and military justice was edified by the spectacle of a crippled man who could not stand propped up in his stretcher against an apple tree for the tender ministry of his firing squad.
"I die innocent. You will all know it later," he told his executioners — then added, futile wish, "do not tell my parents."
Although we have been treated in these pages to the heartbreaking scene of an officer comforting a man about to be shot with the remark that "yours also is a way of dying for France," the idea has until very recently been confined to the precincts of personal sentiment and certainly not to the institutions responsible for the dying.
On November 11, 2012 — the centennary of Lt. Chapelant's execution* — he was ceremonially rehabilitated and his death officially ascribed to that same cause that laid so many of his comrades low: "mort pour la France."
* Adding round numbers is hard, apparently.
1636: Johann Albrecht Adelgrief, king-scourged - 2019
1871: Eugen Kvaternik, for the Rakovica revolt - 2018
1946: Damian Kratzenberg, Luxembourg Nazi - 2017
1689: Fyodor Shaklovity, marking the arrival of Peter the Great - 2015
1593: Gabriel Wolff, Nuremberg adventurer - 2014
2009: Behnoud Shojaee, Mohammad Mostafaei client - 2013
1817: Gertrudis Bocanegra, Mexican independence heroine - 2012
1878: Bill Longley, gunslinger - 2011
Unspecified Year: The Last Day of a Condemned Man - 2010
1870: Margaret Waters, baby farmer - 2009
1936: Antonio José, forgotten composer - 2008
1915: Four French Corporals, for cowardice
1914: A French soldier, "yours also is a way of dying for France"
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,Execution,France,History,Military Crimes,Ripped from the Headlines,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1914, jean-julien chapelant, october 11, shot at dawn, world war i
The British military shot 306 soldiers for desertion or cowardice during World War I, but the very first of them was 19-year-old Thomas Highgate on September 8, 1914.
This Kent farmhand and former seaman had enlisted back in 1913, before the world fell apart and that meant that even though Highgate was a trained up and ready to go when the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment deployed to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Young Master Highgate had the honor of participating in the first British engagement of the Great War, the Battle of Mons.
The ensuing Retreat from Mons scrambled the BEF, sprinkling the French countryside with stragglers, though there is little evidence that these men represented a trend towards wholesale desertion as against the disorder inherent to the retreat. The horrors of trench warfare still lay in the (very near) future but perhaps British commanders who aspired to put the Hun to jolly rout were already shaken by the dawning reality of a long and inglorious slog.
"Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth," Mike Tyson once quipped. In Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War, Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson suggest that BEF Commander-in-Chief John French had become a bit unmanned by the punches the Germans had thrown at his beautiful army* and fired off the memo that would doom Thomas Highgate in an embarrassed panic.
The C in C views with grave displeasure the straggling which still continues … and has reason to think that in certain cases sufficient effort is not being made to rejoin units. … All ranks will in the event of being detached from their units use every effort to [rejoin] … and [will face] severe punishment if there is reason to suppose that every effort has not been made.
"I have the feeling that what we are looking at here is a crisis of confidence amongst the senior officers and not necessarily anything to do with Highgate himself," said historian Julian Putkowski, author of Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act.
On September 5, Highgate slipped away from his unit to relieve himself, then just stayed away. "I got strolling about, went down into a farm, lay down in an empty house," he would explain to his court-martial. (For whom Highgate's inability to account for doffing his military duds played very ill.**) A few hours later, he had the rum luck to be found by a manor gamekeeper who happened to be a former British soldier. "I have lost my army," Highgate declared, "and I mean to get out of it." The private suggested to his judges that the sense of this remark was to express his intent to return (i.e., get out of the barn).
The court martial didn't buy it: here was the public example to make as a sop to the boss's anti-straggling ukase. There was little time wasted.
Highgate was condemned on the 6th, the death sentence endorsed by superior officers on the 7th, and it was carried into effect on the morning of the 8th — Highgate having the benefit of only 47 minutes' advance notice, just enough time to scribble a tear-jerking "will" leaving the remains of his salary due to a girlfriend in Dublin. His execution was published in army orders a few days later — a little warning to the rest of the team.
* French would be relieved of BEF command in 1916.
** Dressing in civvies reads pretty badly, but slumming in more comfortable French peasant gear too was a (disturbingly, to the brass) common indiscipline in these days. Adrian Gilbert in Challenge of Battle: The Real Story of the British Army in 1914 quotes a cross directive of Brig. Gen. Forestier-Walker: "No unauthorized articles of dress should be allowed. Articles of civilian pattern are absolutely prohibited … The crime of throwing away clothing must be severely dealt with." To be fair, Forestier-Walker had in mind ad hoc amendments to the gear, like tossing the army cap in favor of a shady straw hat, more so than wholesale wardrobe changes.
1873: James Connor - 2019
1961: Henryk Niemasz, the last hanged at Wandsworth - 2018
1306: Simon Fraser, William Wallace comrade in arms - 2017
1292: Johann de Wettre, medieval Europe's first documented sodomy execution - 2015
1971: Ishola Oyenusi, smiling to his death - 2014
1686: Jonathan Simpson, merchant turned highwayman - 2013
1812: Not Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace - 2012
1999: Double execution in Arkansas - 2011
1790: Johan Henrik Hästesko, Anjalaman - 2010
1820: John Baird and Andrew Hardie, for the Radical War - 2009
1642: Thomas Granger and the beasts he lay with - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,England,Execution,France,History,Milestones,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1914, john french, september 8, shot at dawn, thomas highgate, world war i
1916: Four French soldiers of the 96 RI
Add comment May 22nd, 2016 Headsman
Four French soldiers of the 96th Régiment d'Infanterie were shot 100 years ago today for resisting an order to return to their World War I trenches on the western front. Their names (per French Wikipedia's tragically lengthy entry on World War I executions) were Émile Frédéric Lhermenier, Lucien Baleux, Félix Louis Milhau, and Paul Pierre Regoult. Baleux was only 19 years old.
We have an affecting memory of the demoralizing effect of this shooting upon their fellow soldiers in the 55th division courtesy of a remarkable epistolary war memoir. Titled Émile et Léa : Lettres d'un couple d'instituteurs bourguignons dans la tourmente de la Grande guerre (Emile and Lea: Letters of a Burgundy teacher-couple amid the turmoil of the Great War), the book was lovingly assembled in the early 200s by Emile and Lea's grandson Michel Mauny, from a box marked "GUERRE" that turned out to be heavy with over 1200 letters exchanged by husband and wife during Emile's years at the front. (See French review here)
Two days after the quadruple execution, Emile heartbreakingly wrote —
Four soldiers of the 96th having been sentenced to death, the companies of the 5th Battalion 246th [regiment] were responsibe for providing the four firing squads. Of my company, we had five soldiers, four corporals, and five sergeants. Fortunately I was not designated for this horrible work.
Our comrades described the scene to us. It was mournful, poignant. All were stunned to have participated in the execution. Perhaps those unhappy four deserved it (I do not know), but we should find another way to enforce the law in the century we live in. One of them it seems had only 18 or 19 years. I think I, who used to live with children and young people, I would have gone crazy had I been forced to participate in this drama.
According to Michel Mauny's commentary on the incident, a machine-gun captain in the regiment was so overwhelmed he became fixated on the nightmare of being executed himself, and eventually had to be relieved from his duties with dementia. "After twenty months on campaign, the commanders must be truly cruel to put four of our comrades to the post!"
That man, Captain Paul Tuffrau, wrote in a letter a few days afterwards
In the first days of the week, there was a morning where four soldiers were shot … I did not hear the volley, but I knew from Bourgoeois and Geoffroy that we had taken the prisoners an hour early before the guns. One of them, a strong lad of nineteen, committed to the war, as strong as an ox, bellowing out "Kill me? Go ahead! It's impossible!"
Bayon directed the execution; he had prepared four pole with ropes, for he guessed they would resist. It was quickly done, everyone in haste to finish; once all were bound the four platoons were lined up facing left, took aim, and there was not even a command for the first shot caused all the others. Afterwards Bayon imposed eight days' punishment on a sergeant who was to represent the division and arrived four minutes late: "You made these men die twice, you!"
Such records as remain do not make clear why this quartet joined the 600-plus French troops shot for military offenses during the Great War, but three other soldiers from the same regiment accused of the same offense in the same incident did not have the honor of dying for France but suffered only demotion. Was it that four sufficed "pour encourager les autres" — that three would show a want of backbone, and five would be barbarity?
1538: John Forest and the image of Saint Derfel Gadarn - 2019
1918: Edla Sofia Hjulgrén, Finnish parliamentarian - 2018
1889: Fulgence-Benjamin Geomay, at the Paris Exposition - 2017
1929: Nikolaus Karlovich von Meck, wrecker - 2015
1824: Antonio Brochetti, galley-dodger - 2014
1942: Stjepan Filipovic, "death to fascism, freedom to the people!" - 2013
1856: Casey and Cora, by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee - 2012
2001: Terrance Anthony James, snitch-killer - 2011
1393: The Muzaffarids, by Timur - 2010
1946: Karl Hermann Frank - 2009
1833: Midgegooroo, Noongar rebel - 2008
1914: Regiment Mixte de Tirailleurs decimated
1917: Jesse Robart Short, Etaples mutineer
1914: Seven retreating Frenchmen, with surprising results
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,France,History,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1916, may 22, shot at dawn, world war i
Add comment September 15th, 2015 Headsman
Irish lance corporal Peter Sands was shot as a deserter one hundred years ago today at Fleurbaix, near Armentières.
Sands, a nine-year veteran age 26 or 27, left the Royal Irish Rifles with another soldier on a home leave pass in February 1915 and returned to his family in Belfast.
Sands had a pass for four days. Instead, he stayed for five months — openly living with his wife, and wearing his military uniform, until some unknown busybody turned him in as a deserter that July.
He would tell his court-martial that he had lost his travel documents to return to the horrible front, and had been blown off when he visited a Belfast barracks to see about a replacement. He did not aim to desert, he insisted; "Had I intended to desert I would have worn plain clothes, but up to that time I was arrested I always wore uniform." It is not so hard to reach Corporal Sands, psychologically — a man perhaps indulging a lethal opiate of denial. Suppose his "desertion" began with a good-faith mishap and thereafter did not last for five months, but just for one day more … day upon day.
He had no pass, so what was he to do next? He stayed in Belfast with his wife and daughter wearing his service duds while he contemplated that question. (Who can say whether he contemplated it in bemusement or terror.) He stayed every day in March, and it became every day in April, and every day in May and June, too. Nobody came for him on any of those days.
Had his war ended, then? Had he somehow slipped the toils of the machine back to a domestic idyll?
Maybe he truly had … but for that anonymous snitch.
Even if it had to be reminded of its prodigal corporal's absence, His Majesty's royal meatgrinder expected a little more hustle from its meat than one barracks call in five months: while Sands was at home, his mates had gone out of the trenches in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle (11,000+ British casualties), and the disastrous* Battle of Aubers Ridge (another 11,000+).
His commanding officer "consider[ed] this a bad case of desertion and I recommend that the sentence be carried out." And it was.
Sands was buried at a nearby churchyard, but his resting-place was lost during the war. He has a marker at Cabaret-Rouge Military Cemetery at Souchez.
* The report of the Times from Aubers Ridge — headlined "Need for shells: British attacks checked: Limited supply the cause: A Lesson From France" — precipitated the "Shell Crisis of 1915".
1525: Jan de Bakker - 2019
1697: Three at Tyburn, multiply sinning - 2018
1982: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, revolutionary foreign minister - 2017
1921: Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg - 2016
1731: Catherine Repond, the last witch burned in Switzerland - 2014
1939: Charles McLachlan - 2013
1866: Dmitry Karakozov - 2012
1922: Eugene Weeks, by Sheriff Robb - 2011
1944: Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Galinski - 2010
1842: Francisco Morazan, Central American statesman - 2009
1973: Victor Jara, among thousands in Chile's September 11 - 2008
1916: James Crozier, an Irishman in His Majesty's service
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,England,Execution,France,History,Ireland,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1915, fleurbaix, peter sands, september 15, shot at dawn, world war i
4 comments November 7th, 2013 Meaghan
On November 7, 1918, mere days before the end of World War I, British privates Louis Harris and Ernest Jackson were shot for desertion and cowardice. Jackson, of the 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, and Harris, of the 10th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, were the last British soldiers shot for military offenses in the First World War.
Jackson had been conscripted into the military in July 1916 and sent to France in November. He first ran into trouble in April 1917, when he went AWOL for 28 hours and was sentenced to two years in prison. In most cases the sentence would have been suspended, but for some reason that didn't happen with Jackson and he spent sixteen months behind bars before he was released and returned to his battalion in August 1918.
A little over a month later, on September 29, he disappeared from his battalion transport lines near Flesquières, where he'd been sick and waiting to be sent to the field ambulance.
Arrested on October 3, Jackson got sent back to the to the 24th Battalion, which was then at Noyelles, 3,000 yards from the front lines. By mid-afternoon he had dropped out of sight again, but was arrested by the military police the next day at Douellens. On October 8, Jackson's NCO found his arms and equipment in a shelter not far from where he'd gone missing.
Jackson faced a Field General Court Martial (FGCM) on three charges:
Going AWOL on September 29
Deserting on October 4
"Shamefully casting away his arms, ammunition and equipment in the presence of the enemy" on October 4
When asked to explain himself before the tribunal, Jackson said, "I left because I could not stand the treatment I was receiving. I wanted to get away from everything … I have been looked down on by everyone and that is the cause of my being here today." He added that both his parents had died in insane asylums and he himself suffered from "mental problems caused by worries."
The FGCM would have none of it and sentenced Jackson to death. He was shot at St. Python in northern France at 6:10 a.m. He was 32 years old.
Nineteen minutes later and 25 kilometers away, at Locquignol, Private Louis Harris faced the firing squad.
Harris had volunteered for the Army in 1915, but was discharged as unfit. He got conscripted in 1916, however, and was sent to France in July, where he served as part of a Lewis gun team. On September 2, in the middle of an attack at Rocquigny, while there was "no firing and practically no opposition," Harris ditched his kit and his comrades and vanished. He was arrested the next day and faced an FGCM for desertion and cowardice.
The book Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War notes,
Harris — surprisingly … was not defended at his trial and made no attempt to cross-examine any of the witnesses, nor did he make a statement in his own defence. It would appear that the 23-year-old soldier either did not understand the seriousness of his position, or was resigned to his fate.
He was found not guilty of cowardice, but guilty of desertion, and his bad record (which included repeated charges of insubordination) was held against him. His CO wrote, "Pte. Harris L. has not got a good record in this Battalion. His fighting value is NIL." The Brigade Commander agreed, summing up his case thusly:
I recommend that the extreme penalty be carried out for the following reasons:
Pte. Harris's action was deliberate.
He has previously attempted to desert unsuccessfully.
He is worthless as a soldier.
During an action he deliberately abandoned his comrades.
His example is a disgraceful one.
Harris's execution was, as previously stated, the last. Four days later on November 11, the war ended and all death sentences for military offenses were commuted to penal servitude. In 1929 the death penalty was abolished for desertion and other military crimes.
1944: Hannah Szenes, who gambled on what mattered most - 2008
1922: Seven Republican guerrillas in the Curragh of Kildare
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Crime,Death Penalty,Desertion,England,Execution,France,Guest Writers,History,Milestones,Military Crimes,Other Voices,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1918, ernest jackson, flesquieres, lewis gun, louis harris, november 7, shot at dawn, world war i
Add comment July 21st, 2011 Headsman
On this date in 1915, Private Herbert Burden was shot for desertion — at age 17, still too young to even legally enlist in the Northumberland Fusilliers he'd deserted from.
This teenager rashly joined up at the outbreak of hostilities, fudging his age up by two years to qualify. It's more than likely that he, and his real age, were known to the recruiters who signed him up. (He wasn't the only child soldier in that war.)
A few months on into this less-noble-than-advertised perdition, with friends and comrades becoming burger meat all around him at the dreadful Battle of Bellewaarde Ridge,* the kid panicked and ran.
Burden is the "model" for the memorial statue a later, more soft-hearted British Empire put up in 2001 commemorating 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers shot during the first World War for desertion and cowardice.
* Here's a book about an Irish battalion that was nearly annihilated in the battle.
Shot at Dawn memorial/Herbert Burden likeness photo (cc) Noisette.
1775: Not Richard Carpenter, strong swimmer - 2019
1661: Antonius Hambroek, defying Koxinga - 2018
1972: Misao Katagiri - 2017
1834: Catherine Snow, the last hanged in Newfoundland - 2016
1797: David McLane, an American traitor in Quebec - 2015
1683: Lord Russell, Whig martyr - 2014
356 BCE: Herostratus burns the Temple of Artemis - 2013
1798: Anthony Perry and Mogue Kearns, Protestant and Catholic - 2012
1986: Vice-President Paulo Correia and five others - 2010
1976: Lt. Col. Abu Taher - 2009
1944: Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, for the plot to kill Hitler - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Arts and Literature,Capital Punishment,Children,Death Penalty,Desertion,England,Execution,France,History,Military Crimes,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1910s, 1915, battle of bellewaarde ridge, fear, herbert burden, july 21, shot at dawn, statuary, world war i
On this date in 1916, 19-year-old Durham Private William Nelson was shot for desertion by the British military.
The Pity of It
I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like "Thu bist," "Er war,"
"Ich woll," "Er sholl," and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: "Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between folk kin tongued even as are we,
"Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly."
According to the archive capture of the lamentably defunct Shot at Dawn site — which campaigned (successfully) for clearing the names of World War I soldiers who had been executed for military failings like desertion or cowardice — Nelson gave a pitiable account of his situation. It was less the horror of trench warfare and mustard gas than desperation on his own home front that undid Nelson's "nerves".
"I have had a lot of trouble at home, and my nerves are badly upset. My father is a prisoner in Germany and is losing his eyesight there through bad treatment. My mother died while I was still in England, leaving my sister aged 13 and my brother aged 10. I am the only one left. I had to leave them in charge of a neighbour. I had no intention of deserting. I did not realise what I was doing when I left the camp. When I did so I went and gave myself up. When I went to the store my object was to get a night's sleep and then go and surrender in the morning. I thought it was too late to do so that night. I did not know when the battalion was coming out of the trenches."
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
–Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
That 13-year-old sister whom Nelson worried over long suffered her brother's senseless death. In 2004, that woman's daughter (Billy Nelson's niece), Nora High, told the Guardian:
Every Armistice Day, my mother shed buckets of tears. We've got Billy's Bible, I got that when mother died. She used to lay that out on a piece of blue satin cloth, and she would cry. She always said: 'I won't cry any more because that only upsets Billy. He doesn't want me to cry. Everything's fine for him now.'
In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"*
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
* The title is a Biblical allusion to Jeremiah 51:20.
As a slight stretch, part of the Themed Set: Thomas Hardy.
1264: Not Inetta de Balsham, gallows survivor - 2019
1853: Hans McFarlane and Helen Blackwood, married on the scaffold - 2018
1944: Eliga Brinson and Willie Smith, American rapists abroad - 2017
1869: Charles Orme, rambler - 2016
1849: Konrad Heilig and Gustav Tiedemann, Baden revolutionaries - 2015
1838: The slave Mary, the youngest executed by Missouri - 2014
1703: Tom Cook, Ordinary's pet - 2013
1908: Khudiram Bose, teenage martyr - 2012
1828: William Corder, for the Red Barn Murder - 2011
1997: Zoleykhah Kadkhoda survives stoning - 2009
1978: Antonina Makarova, Nazi executioner - 2008
1945: Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo
Tags: 1910s, 1916, billy nelson, nora high, poetry, shot at dawn, thomas hardy, war, william nelson, world war i