Horror of being shot at dawn

Capital punishment is an inherently disgusting business. When a certain Private Bolton of the Cheshire Regiment was to be shot for desertion in February 1916, a staff officer sent his CO a note to outline "the form": "The sentence should be promulgated tomorrow afternoon ... The execution will take place at 5am on 14th inst ... You will arrange to have a grave dug at the site of execution, on evening of 13th inst., also to have two men with spades to fill in the grave after burial. The following will be provided by you: a chair, blanket and two ropes. Your medical officer will be present and bring with him a bandage, a piece of white cloth to mark the heart and the death certificate ready made out, so that he will merely have to fill in whether death is instantaneous or not ... The Divisional commander wishes 1 platoon from each company of your battalion to be present."

Since the purpose of executing deserters and cowards was exemplary, many of the 346 executions carried out by the British Army in the First World War were, in effect, public events, pour encourager les autres. It was a highly arbitrary matter, whether a man who ran away was shot or not. Confirmation of sentence by divisional and Army commanders was influenced by the local state of discipline. If straggling was rife, if a given unit was suffering a high rate of desertion, senior officers were inclined to err on the side of severity, or rather death.

Cynics might say that since British generals were killing huge numbers of their own men every day by sending them over the top to face German firing squads, they were unlikely to be fastidious about subjecting the odd military malefactor to death at the hands of a British one. That is exactly the sort of clich? many people adopt today, in addressing an intensely emotive issue. Yet the purpose of this excellent book is to banish modern prejudice.

The thrust of its argument is that if justice was rough, justice was generally done by the standards of the time and the society in which these things happened. The italics are mine, but the sentiments are those of the authors. If the accused received only brief trials, evidence of their dereliction of duty was seldom in doubt. Most of those convicted sound inadequate men, who did wretched things. But did the punishment fit the crime? Corns and Hughes-Wilson have amassed an unprecedented collection of case histories of men executed in the First World War. These make compelling, often moving reading.

Take Lance-Corporal Moon, who suffered an unspeakable experience on the battlefield in December 1915, when a shell burst near him and blew part of a comrade's head and brains into his face. He spent weeks in hospital recovering, before he disappeared from his unit for months. Today, he would undoubtedly be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1916, he was shot for desertion. His fate, the authors agree, was very harsh.

Most recent studies of shell shock suggest that many men who gave way under the strain of battle in both world wars should never have been accepted for service, because their psychological weakness was apparent. Private James Archibald of the Royal Scots, 19, abandoned his unit on being warned for sentry duty. He was later found asleep in a barn some miles behind the lines. His commanding officer reported at his trial: "He is considered by his platoon commander to be of poor intellect, and I consider he is a typical slum product of a low level of intelligence. From a fighting point of view, Pte. Archibald was of not much consideration ... I am doubtful that he realised the gravity of the offence he was committing."

Archibald was already serving Field Punishment No 1, strapped to a wagon wheel for two hours a day, for "neglect of his duty in the trenches". Monro, the Army commander, commented on confirming sentence: "This appears to me to be a bad case. The man in question not only evaded duty but threw away his arms and equipment." So Private Archibald was shot in June 1916.

Our generation finds it repugnant that any soldier who displayed such understandable human weakness should have been so brutally punished. Yet the mistake made by those who today campaign for posthumous pardons is to seek to impose our values upon an utterly different era. Three million British soldiers in the First World War were daily enduring hell. Why, most of their contemporaries asked, should shirkers be able with impunity to flee a battlefield, or live for months in comfort hidden by some sympathetic Frenchwoman, or even abscond to England? The burden of their failures fell on the decent men in the line, who had to do duty - and die - for those who ran away.

The book highlights a little-noticed statistic that overall, only around one in 10 of all men condemned to death were indeed shot. Nine out of 10 were reprieved. In the First World War, 38,584 men were tried for desertion (as distinct from other capital crimes). Just over 2,000 death sentences were awarded, of which 266 were carried out. The much-derided ch?teau generals usually exercised their prerogative of mercy.

In 1916, the greatest fear of every army's commanders was that the will of its citizen forces would collapse. In the Second World War, senior British generals including Gort and Alexander lamented the abolition of the death penalty for desertion. They believed that its absence made the maintenance of discipline far more difficult.

In the 1940s, the British government was surely right to ignore the generals' demands to restore execution. British society had moved on. Shooting a man in cold blood for running away (though heaven knows, it was done often enough in the heat of battle) was no longer acceptable. Corns and Hughes-Wilson's account of the previous generation makes ugly reading. Today, judicial killing seems repugnant to most civilised people - witness the revulsion against America's current capital punishment binge. It would be a mere moral conceit, however, for a government to go through the motions of rewriting the verdicts reached by the men of Ypres and Passchendaele. What was done in those days should now simply be a matter for study by historical debate. If politicians are to pretend to undo the judicial decisions of our great-grandparents, why not throw in a New Labour pardon for poor old Admiral Byng, whose death started the whole thing two and a half centuries ago? It would be no less ridiculous.