Читать книгу Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II - Len Deighton - Страница 43

The British liked to ascribe Germany’s remarkable fighting record to its robotic, merciless war machine, but it was the British soldiers who had been unceasingly ordered into futile and costly offensives. And, while 345 British soldiers faced firing squads during the war, only 48 German soldiers were executed.¹¹ Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria wrote in his diary in 21 December 1917 that while he knew of only one death sentence in his army, the British had executed at least 67 men between October 1916 and August 1917.

This disparity was partly due to the reckless way in which the British army had recruited men without consideration of their mental and physical stamina. It was also accounted for by the fact that the British army retained no less than 25 offences for which the penalty was death. Some of these, such as ‘imperilling the success of His Majesty’s forces’, gave the courts wide powers. General Haig, who confirmed every sentence, believed that the firing squads were essential to maintaining discipline, and repeatedly demanded that Australian soldiers be made to face them. But the Australian government resisted Haig’s pleas, in the confident knowledge that their infantrymen were widely acknowledged to be the best anywhere on the Western Front.¹²

All information about military executions was concealed from the British public. The government would not even tell the House of Commons how many soldiers were being shot, because publishing such figures was ‘contrary to the public interest’. No one, not even next of kin, was permitted to know anything of the court-martial proceedings, and British soldiers had no right of appeal against a death sentence.

The army used firing squads to set an example to soldiers who needed one. Proclaimed throughout the army, executions were often staged before troops of the condemned man’s unit. It was thus made clear to his comrades that it wasn’t only murderers and rapists who were executed, it was exhausted men who closed their eyes, and men who refused to do the impossible. As the war went on, and ever younger conscripts were sent to the trenches, parents worried about how their sons would endure the ordeal. As stories of executions gained wider currency, the under-secretary for war admitted that there was great public anxiety, and questions by members of parliament, about whether wounded or ‘shell-shocked’ men were being executed, were met by outright lies. In the debate on 17 April 1918, several members, including serving officers, urged the government to change court-martial procedures so that an officer with some sort of legal training should be available to defend a soldier accused of a serious offence, and to ensure that all presidents of the court had previous experience of evaluating evidence. Even these modest reforms were denied.¹³

In February 1919 the most senior of the official historians spent an evening with Douglas Haig, dining and studying the maps and papers. ‘Why did we win the war?’ Haig asked him.¹⁴ No one knew. But after the war Haig had demanded, and got, a massive cash hand-out. He was also presented with a mansion overlooking the River Tweed, where he carefully revised his memoirs. No matter what lengths he went to in rewriting history, Haig was never forgiven for what he had done. Nor was it forgotten. There was no wild cheering in public places when war was declared on Sunday 3 September 1939. The ‘Great War’ and the dead in Flanders were still very much in the minds of the survivors from all nations.