Commanders thought harsh regime would instil order
By JOHN KEEGAN, Defence Editor
DURING the First World War more than 300 British soldiers were executed for cowardice or associated military offences such as sleeping on sentry duty, casting away arms or abandoning a post.
The figure was much higher than in the German army, whose commanders took the view at the outbreak of war that conscript soldiers could not be expected to meet the standards of discipline imposed in peacetime.
Ludendorff, who became deputy chief of staff in 1916, stated quite bluntly that the German army was the nation in arms and that their families at home would not accept sons and husbands being treated with the full rigour of military justice.
The British Army, at the outset, adopted an entirely contrary policy. The Old Contemptible army was a tough organisation, run on ruthless standards. The Kitchener army of volunteers which succeeded it really was a citizen force, and the commanders thought that unless strict discipline was imposed it would crack.
As a result, disobedience to orders was treated with great severity. Soldiers were shot in the early stages of trench warfare for "crimes" that, with hindsight, can be recognised as the result of exhaustion, inexperience or what we would now call combat stress.
As time went on, the number of executions for "cowardice" fell, partly because even tough-minded officers came to realise that some men were not suited to the strains of war , partly because the medical services began to develop a theory of psychological breakdown which they were able to put into practice in the field.
Trench warfare was a particularly stressful form of combat, at certain times and places.
For long periods a trench sector could be quiet and soldiers might not be under strain for many months.
Before attacks, however, soldiers were subjected to prolonged bombardment, often lasting days, and had to wait in trenches from which they could not move, while knowing that the next shell might kill them.
The tension produced by shelling did sometimes drive soldiers mad. A particular reaction was hysterical inactivity, when the victim became unable to move or speak.
Once attacks began, and soldiers moved out of the trenches into no man's land or the enemy's positions, they were afflicted by other strains. A sense of isolation was one, brought on by heavy casualties among a soldier's comrades.
Simply getting lost was another. In the wasteland of the trench zone, a soldier could lose orientation, not know where he was and so lay himself open to the charge of running away simply in his efforts to re-establish contact with his unit.
The practice of returning soldiers to duty however many times they had been wounded was also a cause of breakdown, only gradually recognised.
By the end of the warj5, a more experienced and humane regime ensured that execution for cowardice became quite rare. Among those executed in the earlier years, however, there must have been some who were shot for no worse offence than having become psychiatric casualties.
The difficulty, at this distance in time, is to identify which the real cases of injustice were.
