ON MARCH 14, 1857, Admiral John Byng was marched on to the quarterdeck of his ship, HMS Portsmouth, and executed by firing squad. According to the court-martial verdict, Byng had failed to “do his utmost” to relieve Fort St Philip on the island of Minorca. Instead of engaging the enemy, he had allowed a French squadron to escape. This was a grave error, but hardly an act of cowardice. Even so, Byng’s behaviour was deemed to have breached the articles of war, for which the mandatory punishment was death.
A more cynical motive was detected by others, including Voltaire, whose Candide witnesses an execution in Portsmouth and observes: “In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”
Admiral Byng was the victim of a military tradition in which justice is too often dictated by utility, and deserters, shirkers and failures are punished, as publicly as possible, pour encourager les autres, for the greater good of the greater number. In the early 19th century the authorities branded deserters with the letter D. During the Crimean War, exemplary floggings were deemed preferable to executions, but the aim was the same: to maintain discipline in the ranks.
Wellington was explicit: “I consider all punishment to be for the sake of example and the punishment of military men in particular.”
Reading the accounts of the 306 executions for desertion or cowardice carried out by the British Army in the First World War, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that many died because the top brass simply wanted to make a point, regarding guilt or innocence as secondary. “I am of the opinion,” wrote Field Marshal Earl Haig, “that it is necessary to make an example to prevent cowardice in the face of the enemy.”
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The Government’s decision to seek parliamentary approval to pardon all those executed in the Great War is surely the right one, for the justice meted out was not only arbitrary and uneven but often deliberately harsh, designed more to ginger up the innocent than punish the guilty. Certainly some of those in line for pardons were wretched cowards, but there are enough doubts about enough of the others to warrant a blanket pardon.
Rejecting demands for a general pardon in 1993, John Major rightly observed: “We cannot rewrite history by substituting our latter-day judgment for that of contemporaries, whatever we may think.”
The executed men do not deserve exoneration on the grounds that we have since discovered post-traumatic stress disorder, nor because we have left capital punishment behind, but because many did not receive justice even by the standards of the time. The executions are not merely unjust in retrospect; they were unfair 90 years ago.
Often there was little or no evidence, no medical examination, no defence from the “prisoner’s friend”, no plea in mitigation. The condemned footsoldiers were not told they could appeal for a royal pardon, as 15 officers successfully did. Some of those executed were educationally subnormal or mentally ill, some had no idea what they were doing, and some were children.
The pattern of condemnations is revealing: the rate of executions rose if a unit was seen to be straggling, or ill-disciplined, or if a big offensive was in the offing, to stiffen the sinews of the rest. The Irish were executed at a far higher rate than other nationalities.
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The condemned were lumped together as “deserters” and medical excuses were rejected, but although psychiatry was still in its infancy the military chiefs knew very well that cowardice was not the only reason a man might refuse to fight. The issue of shell-shock was under discussion in the House of Commons as early as 1916. Indeed, Haig himself sent home a fellow officer saying the “strain” had got to him from “many weeks constantly under shell fire”. Stress, however, was a luxury reserved for the officer class.
Nine out of every ten men condemned to death were spared, but there was little consistency in the clemency decisions. In far too many cases, the punishment seems wildly out of scale with the crime or, worse, a way of weeding out troublemakers. Approving a death sentence, one brigade commander wrote chillingly that the condemned man was “quite worthless, as a soldier or in any other capacity, and is better off removed from this world”.
Even after taking into account the unsentimental times, the widespread acceptance of capital punishment, the desperate struggle under way and the fear of mass desertion, the standards of wartime justice were often inadequate, unreliable and sometimes intentionally brutal. Germany was also locked in mortal combat, and the German soldier was just as liable to desert as any other sort of human, yet the German Army executed just 18 men. The Australians flatly refused to institute the death penalty; so far from discouraging the others, there is no evidence that this diminished Australian military zeal one jot.
The pardons debate has too often been deployed as an auxiliary in the class war, to depict the ruling officers as heartless and cruel, donkeys sending lions to their deaths without a second thought. Most of the officers who sat in judgment were honourable men who opted for extreme retribution in terrible circumstances. Yet they also made dreadful mistakes and deliberately suppressed their own compassion. “If toleration is shown to private soldiers who decline to face danger, all the qualities which we desire will become debased and degraded,” said General Charles Monro, commander of the First Army, thus debasing the quality of mercy itself.
Four hundred men were killed, on average, during every day of the four-year war, but in recent years remembrance has tended to be overshadowed by the furious battle over the 306 executed by their own side. The condemned should now be pardoned and remembered alongside those, equally deserving of forgiveness, who condemned them. It is time for an armistice.