Executed at Dawn by David Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

apart, for the stakes, while all the time becoming more aware of their purpose.
    The preparations were for the executions of three men from the 19th Durham Light Infantry on 18 January 1917. Lance-Sergeant Joseph Stones had been sentenced for ‘casting away his arms’, while Lance-Corporals Peter Goggins and John McDonald had been sentenced for quitting their post.
    An article in the Guardian newspaper on 16 August 2006 carried a description by Private Albert Rochester of what he had witnessed:

    A motor ambulance arrives carrying the doomed men. Manacled and blindfolded, they are helped out and tied up to the stakes. Over each man’s heart is placed an envelope. At the sign of command, the firing parties, 12 for each, align their rifles on the envelopes. The officer in charge holds his stick aloft and, as it falls, 36 bullets usher the souls of three of Kitchener’s men to the great unknown.

    Rochester went on to say:

    As a military prisoner, I helped clear the traces … I helped carry those bodies towards their last resting place. I took the belongings from the dead men’s tunics … A few letters, a pipe, a photo. I could tell you of the silence of the military police after reading a letter from a little girl to ‘Dear Daddy’, of the blood-stained snow that horrified the French peasants, of the chaplain’s confession that braver men he had never met than those three men he prayed with just before the fatal dawn. I could take you to the graves of the murdered.

    On this occasion each of the condemned men was assigned a firing squad of twelve men. When the condemned men had been killed, Rochester was ordered to clear away all traces of what had taken place, collecting the blood-soaked straw from the foot of the posts and burning it,and removing the posts. All this, when his greatest fear that morning when summoned by the military police corporal, was that he was about to experience his first session of full pack drill!
    This would then heap an extra level of punishment that would be out of all proportion to the original offences committed, as can be seen in a further letter discussed below, written to Ernest Thurtle, MP.
    In letter No.4, its author, a sergeant in the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, described being ordered to choose ‘the two worst characters’ in his platoon to form part of the firing squad for the execution of Lance-Corporal Alfred Atkinson, also of the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, on 2 March 1915, for the offence of desertion. When the two men, who were acknowledged by the author to be tough men, returned, he wrote that they were sick, suffered from nightmares, and could not keep their food down. They said: ‘The sight was horrible, made more so by the fact that we had shot one of our own men.’
    A week later the same sergeant recalled how he was sergeant of the regimental guard, with thirty-two prisoners whom he described as ‘mostly twenty-eight day men’, when the execution of Private Ernest Kirk, 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, was ordered to take place on 6 March 1915. Some of the prisoners had been part of the previous firing squad and the order that the sergeant received made clear that: ‘You must warn a party of twelve men from the prisoners you have (those who shot Lance-Corporal Alfred Atkinson must not be included).’
    In his letter the sergeant went on to write about his experience of putting together that firing squad:

    I witnessed a scene I shall never forget. Men I had known for years as clean, decent, self-respecting soldiers, whose only offence was an occasional military ‘drunk’ screamed out, begging not to be made into murderers. They offered me all they had if I would not take them for the job, and finally when twelve of them found themselves outside selected for the dreaded firing party, they called me all the names that they could lay their tongues to. I remained with the guard for three days, and I leave you to guess what I had to put up with. I am poor with eight