Shot at Dawn. By Judith Allnatt

Private Henry Burden, a Northumberland Fusilier, was shot at 4 a.m. on 21st July 1915 having been found guilty of desertion. He was just seventeen years old.

Like many young men keen for adventure and caught up in the patriotic rush to war, he had lied about his age in order to join up. Once sent overseas, he lost friends at the Battle of Belwaarde Ridge, experienced nerve shattering barrages of shelling and was sent to a military hospital to recover. On the same afternoon that he was discharged, he was sent forward with his battalion to the front line. Burden left his post, he said, to visit a neighbouring battalion to see a friend who he had heard had lost a brother. Two days later he was arrested and two days after that he was tried by a court martial. He had a record of going absent without leave, which went against him and he had no one to defend him as those who could have spoken up for him had all been killed. He wasn't asked about his age and he didn't raise it. He was found guilty, not of the lesser charge of going AWOL, but of desertion, and condemned to death.

Photo credit: Harry Mitchell [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)] 

In the British Army, discipline was harsh. The offences for which a soldier could be executed were many and various. They included: cowardice, casting away of arms, disobedience, striking an officer and desertion. Falling asleep on sentry duty could also carry the death penalty as it endangered a whole section of the line. Soldiers on duty at night stood with head and shoulders above the parapet, rather than using a periscope, so that they could get a good field of view. (There being less chance of being hit in the dark other than by a random shot). It was therefore very obvious, if a sentry slumped, that he had fallen asleep and those who did so were easily caught. Standing at their posts for hours, dealing with mind-numbing boredom and body-numbing cold, it was all to easy to be overtaken by exhaustion. Fear of the consequences resulted in the practice of using matchsticks to prop their eyes open.

Around 3,000 soldiers were executed for offences such as those listed. There is a strong sense of the authorities using the ultimate punishment to 'set an example', a stark warning to re-assert discipline. Before facing the firing squad, the soldier's General Service buttons were removed from his tunic as a mark of his shame. Blindfolded and manacled, he was led to a stake and a target such as an envelope was pinned to his chest. Often, the firing squad was chosen from the soldier's own unit, presumably to hammer home the lesson that breaches of discipline would not be tolerated. One can barely imagine the horror and mental anguish that this practice must have caused both the man and his comrades. Apparently, the traditional belief that one of the bullets used would be a blank so that each soldier was left with the moral let-out that his shot may not have been the lethal one, is actually untrue. The whole squad were, in fact, given live ammunition.

The man's disgrace often continued after death: there were relations who chose not to talk of the relative who had brought shame on the family and memorials in towns and villages that omitted their names. Not until the 21st Century, when it became clear that many of those found guilty had suffered what we now know as Post traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) , was there any attempt to give them a memorial.

At the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, this shift in understanding and attitude found expression. The memorial Shot at Dawn, by Andy de Comyn, consists of a larger-than-life sized statue of Henry Burden, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. Before him, the firing squad is represented by six juniper trees and behind him are an array of wooden stakes representing 309 other victims, each one individually named. These are the men who were posthumously pardoned by the British government in 2006. The pardons were granted not to imply blame for the officers who had acted in line with army regulations and without the understanding of PTSD that we now have, but in a spirit of mercy and in recognition of the battle trauma experienced by many, often very young men, and the suffering of their families. The Director of the Arboretum said that  "over 80 years of medical, psychological and sociological advantage (was) denied those who sat on the court-martial boards that passed sentence."

So, what of Henry Burden? As always, it is the small human details that suddenly pierce the heart. I think of his body taken down from the stake to be prepared for burial and the tattoos discovered upon it of "clasped hands" and "Love Lilly".  I am glad that his statue is placed at the eastern end of the arboretum where the sun's first rays strike.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon 1914

ONLY REMEMBERED ~ ‘Powerful words and pictures about the war that changed our world.’

by

Theresa Breslin

… it’s time for farewells…

This line is from an extract of a recently discovered diary of an unknown French soldier as he goes off to war and into action in 1914. It was chosen by Michael Morpurgo as the first item in his anthology Only Remembered  

 

It’s quite apt for me to choose to write about this book for my blog this month because this is the last blog I’ll do as one of the History Girls – a farewell post from me.

One hundred years have passed since the outbreak of the First World War. To mark the centenary Michael Morpurgo has compiled and edited favourite words and images about the Great War from some of the UK’s leading cultural, political and literary figures to create a beautiful anthology illustrated by Ian Beck. Royalties from each book sold will go to the British Legion and SSAFA who provide lifelong support for forces and their families.  

In setting out to create the anthology Michael’s wish was that such a profoundly important period would continue to be related to young people in an accessible and relevant way. But this book is for all ages and relevant to everyone. Poems, short stories, personal letters, newspaper articles, scripts, diaries, photographs and paintings are just some of the elements of this unique collection – each introduced by the person who selected it.

 Among the contributors is a wide range children’s authors and illustrators, including, among others, David Almond,  Malorie Blackman, Quentin Blake,  Anne Fine, Shirley Hughes, Catherine Johnson, Bali Rai and Jonathan Stroud.  

Speaking of Oh, What a Lovely War, David Almond talks of honouring the decent ordinary folk who go to war.

Malorie Blackman writes of the brave heart and fighting spirit of Walter Tull, the mixed-race son of a Barbadian carpenter and a white English mother. A professional football player who joined the British Army at the outbreak of the war he became a highly regarded black officer, the first to lead white men into battle.

Quentin Blake’s father was a surveyor’s clerk for the Imperial War Graves Commission and his parents lived in France for 10 years after the First World War. He has a simple but telling memory of his father remembering his friend who dies in the conflict.

Anne Fine gives us the source of her own book, The Book of the Banshee, based on the diary of a young man who lied about his age in order to join the Army, and tells of the challenge to make her book into a comedy.  

Shirley Hughes has chosen John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed. (Worth a visit to the London Imperial War Museum to see that alone TB.)  

Welsh poetry that moved me to tears was selected by History Girl, Catherine Johnson.

Bali Rai’s contribution is entitled Sikh Soldiers and he comments on a shared British and Indian heritage

Jonathan Stroud has given us an extract from the diary of his great-grandfather on Armistice Day, 11^th November 1918.

In my entry I write of how the war affected young children on the Home Front – our youth who became the future. Photos of my research materials show the contrast between the newspaper reports of the first day of the Battle of the Somme and the diary entry of an officer who was actually there and watched his men go forward.

The above are a small selection of a book packed with magnificent content – a fascinating mixture of impressions and thoughts plus some useful information e.g. a Timeline and Websites.   

Some time ago Michael Morpurgo stopped to look at the grave of a young British soldier, who’d been killed in 1918, two weeks before the end of the Great War. Michael refers to this in relation to the book, this soldier being one of the ten million soldiers killed on all sides:

‘Most never grew old enough to know and be known by their children or grandchildren. This book is made for them; for all of them.’

He goes on to say: ‘Here in this book you will find the truth, which comes in many guises, in history, in stories, fictional and non-fictional, in poems and songs and pictures.’  

The Introduction to the book is entitled:

WHO’LL SING THE ANTHEM?  

WHO WILL TELL THE STORY?

This seminal anthology Only Remembered answers these questions.

I am feeling quite sad to be writing this post, not only because of the subject matter, but because it is my last post for this Blogspot as a History Girl. Commitments, personal and professional, have meant I have had to resign but am cheered by the fact that it means creating a space to give a platform to another new voice waiting to be heard.

From the very first moments of the start-up party I’ve loved being a History Girl, and through the years it has been terrific to experience our comradeship and support for each other – not least the Admins who had to bail out Techno-Idiot me on several occasions. But, of course, main praise to the main person - the ever indefatigable Mary Hoffman who has been the inspiration for all of this. I’ve read posts which were poignant, thought-provoking, insightful, quirky and humorous and learned a  LOT more history! Thanks to all HGs. 

             

NOTE:  Theresa Breslin is appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 13^th and 19^th August 2014.   

http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor     Twitter: @theresabreslin1  

http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/ 

Theresa Breslin writing on WW1:   

NOVELS:                   Remembrance        Ghost Soldier

CONTRIBUTOR:       War Girls                 Only Remembered

'Poetry is no way to teach the Great War': Sue Purkiss

It will not have escaped your notice that this year is the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. There have already been masses of documentaries, dramas, articles and books to mark the event - one particularly interesting series, Britain's Great War, came from Jeremy Paxman. And there's still some time to go before we reach 28th July, when the war actually began.

Kaiser Wilhelm

What's fascinating to me is that after a hundred years, historians are re-evaluating how it came to happen. It was never easy to understand. Why should the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke have led to such a vast and savage cataclysm? Well, it was all to do with alliances, we were told. That was what I used to tell children too, back in the day when I was an English teacher and taught the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In fact, it was even more complicated than it used to appear. Like most things, the way events unfolded had much to do with personalities. Take Kaiser Wilhelm, for example. He was a child born with a withered arm whom his mother, one of Queen Victoria's daughters, found difficult to love. According to a recent documentary about him and his two cousins, King George V of England and Nicholas, last Czar of Russia, Wilhelm was always the one who didn't fit in, the one who nobody really liked. When it came to negotiating with Russia and England, the relationships and antipathies between these three cousins must have played a part. Fascinating ground for a novelist to explore.

But I am allowing myself to be distracted. The divisive figure I'm intending to write about isn't Kaiser Bill, it's Jeremy Paxman. Last Thursday, Wellington School hosted a prestigious conference at Westminster. The subject was Schools and the Great War Centenary, and the speakers included, as well as a number of eminent historians, Michael Morpurgo and Ian Hislop (who recently co-wrote an excellent TV drama about The Wipers Times).

According to a report in The Times on Friday ( I can't provide a link because access to The Times online is not free), Paxman used the occasion to weigh into schools, which, he apparently said, are 'relying too much on poetry when introducing pupils to the realities of the First World War.' He went on: 'It seems to me poetry is part of the problem of how we teach World War One... All that is taught is about the pointless sacrifice. It's not helpful to see the whole thing through the eyes of poetry... Luxuriating in the horror of the thing really won't do and doesn't set out to answer really interesting questions.'

Please note: I am relying on the report in The Times. I wasn't there. I emphasise this to be clear that I'm very aware, as we all are on this blog, that it's important to get your facts right.

Now, as I said before, I used to teach war poetry. Before this, I studied it at school. I was immensely moved by it - by its beauty, by the pity of it, and because for the first time, through poems like Dulce Et Decorum Est and Strange Meeting, I could really see how the form of the poetry was indispensable to the meaning. Because it seized my imagination, I went on to read more about the war. And when I was teaching, I saw the same poems have a very similar effect on the wide range of pupils that I taught. More than anything except, perhaps, Of Mice And Men, reading these poems created a still and silent classroom. They spoke to the students in the same way that they had spoken to me.

As well as I could, I put them into context. I talked to the students about the causes and the nature of this particular war. (And yes, I even showed them the last episode of Blackadder. I admit it, and I don't regret it, because the effect of that last scene was electrifying.) But - here's the thing, Mr Paxman: as an English teacher, my priority was not to teach them about the war. There was another department that did that - the history department. Are you forgetting about the historians? You shouldn't. Without their teaching, none of those eminent historians at the conference would have been inspired to go on and study history.

So - please. Just think it through a little. 'Poetry is no way to teach the Great War' might make a nice soundbite. But your argument is based on a false premiss: poetry is not the way the Great War is taught - it's only a small part of it. You don't need to take inaccurate shots at teachers to make an interesting argument - they are already targets for flak from all quarters quite often enough.

Michael Morpurgo, of course, had a different approach. 'Stories engaged pupils in a way that history books sometimes failed to do, he said.' (The Times)

Just one last thought before I leave the subject of TV programmes about the war. Last night, interviews were broadcast with veteran soldiers from all sides. The interviews were offcuts from the 1964 landmark series, The Great War. Now, I remember sitting down with my whole family to watch that. It was horrifying and mesmerising.

And yet, my grandfather was himself a veteran. I knew he had fought in France. I was thirteen. Why did it never occur to me to go and ask him about his experiences? It's not always easy to explain the things we do, is it - or the things we don't do.

The Autograph Book - Katherine Langrish

This is an autograph book which was given to my great-aunt, Minnie Davies, by her mother, on January 13th 1911.  Or possibly not: the date below looks  like 13th January1912; it's so close to the corner of the paper that it's hard to tell: but quite a lot of the autographs inside the book are dated 1911.  Which is baffling - unless Minnie's mother gave her the book in 1911, but didn't get around to signing it herself for months? These things do happen.

The book is covered in soft purple suede, with differently coloured pages in pale pink, cream and blue, and people seem to have dotted their autographs around the pages at random, maybe choosing by colour.

A lot of the verses inside are somewhat Hallmark in quality.  "All the sweet things that the birdies/Twittering on the dewy spray/Wish each other in the springtime/I wish you every day," writes 'Auntie Kate' on September 12th 1911.  But 'Uncle Will', on the same day, writes more sternly underneath: "Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms - oftenest, God bless her! in female breasts." (Dickens).

A month or so later, the splendidly named Ethelwyn Strongman is exhorting Minnie thus:

"May she to whom this book belongs/Few troubles have if any/Her hours of grief may they be few/her sunny moments many.

Be a good girl/Lead a good life,/Choose a good husband/Make a good wife."

Pretty soon, though, the entries become more elaborate, and humour makes a welcome appearance with this oil painting - yes, oils! - of a joke:  The Burning Question.  A couple hidden behind a parasol...

 ... and a little boy who interrupts the idyll with the burning question: 'Have you any cigarette cards?'

People clearly went to great lengths to shine in autograph books.   There isn't a single example, in the entire book, of 'merely' a signature.  Everyone wrote a verse or drew a picture.  Did people have a fund of little verses or jokes at the ready, for the next time someone whipped out an album?  I suspect they did.  In 1913 Jock Jowitt of  'Kirkee', somewhere in India (?) must have been happy to have found this simple no-fuss solution:

One half-anna stamp of the King-Emperor, and the simple pun, 'By gum it's stuck'.  Others, however, took the postage-stamp solution to elaborate lengths:

but whoever did this one forgot to add their name.

Romance creeps in. No importunate little boys in this pen and ink picture signed 'Love LL Gordon, 1914'.

And there's a poem from G H C in March 1913:

'You can't stop the sun from beaming/You can't stop the birds' refrain./You can't stop yourself from dreaming,/You can't stop the drops of rain./You can't stop the stars from gleaming/Up in the heaven above,/And you can't stop your heart from beating/For the boy you love.'  It could almost be a Cole Porter lyric.

But the War to End All Wars was looming.  Where was JF heading from or to, in 1916, I wonder, when he paused to carefully draw and paint this?

And the war actually enters the autograph book on these pages here: two carefully executed illustrations by P.V. Bastin, 4th Devon Regt, dated 14.1.15.  The left hand page is a watercolour painting of a ketch entitled 'Running Into Harbour'.  The right hand page, in pen and ink, is labelled in meticulous, tiny handwriting:
'Whitby Abbey (Bombarded by the Germans, Dec. 1914).  What was he thinking of when he drew these?

The last entry in the book, although not the last chronologically, is a set of jingoistic dialect verses entitled - ominously, I think -

'The 'Great War 1914 - 15 - '

Aw! I've listed, mai dear, for a sawjer
Ess, I've tooked the ole shillin' for sure
They've give me a kit and they've give me a gun,
And I'm gwain away to the War.

... An' I'll bet ee a pound to a vardun [farthing] cake
The when us comes marchin' back,
The maidens'll all turn their smiles to me
And give 'Molly Coddlins' the sack.

So blaw up the boogle and sound the Volleen ['the Fall In']
My how they bagginets shine,
'Tion! Move to the right in four.  'Form fours'.
Right. Forward, into the line.

Dalhousie July - 1915 - Geo. E Hart.

I just hope he really did come marching back...


Photos: copyright Katherine Langrish 2012