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We have no height, we cannot fight.

What bloody good are we?

And when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say Hoch,

Hoch mein Gott, what a bloody fine lot

is the Bantam companee.

On the sector the Bantams now held, the front line ran through a spot called King Crater, only 50 yards from the German trenches. Among the Bantams was Lance Sergeant Joseph "Willie" Stones. Twenty-five years old, with a wife and two small daughters at home, he had served in France for a year, winning the praise of his superiors and two promotions. At about 2:15 A.M. on November 26, Stones was accompanying a lieutenant on an inspection of the front-line trench when they ran into a group of some dozen German raiders who had slipped across no man's land undetected. The Germans shot and fatally wounded the lieutenant. Stones escaped. He ran along the trench and then toward the rear, shouting desperately: "The Huns are in King Crater!"

The Germans, meanwhile, rushed along the British trench in the other direction, shooting, tossing hand grenades into dugouts, and then slipping back across no man's land with a prisoner in tow. Theirs was one of several German raids on this sector of the front that night. Some British troops, thoroughly panicked, fled the front-line trench, shouting, "Run for your lives, the Germans are on you!" Among them were Lance Corporal John McDonald, who had been in charge of a sentry post near King Crater, and Lance Corporal Peter Goggins, who had been in a nearby dugout. Stones and another soldier were ordered to a halt some distance to the rear, and found to be without their rifles—a serious offense.

It is easy to imagine the complete terror the troops must have felt as the darkness suddenly rang with German voices, bursting grenades, and the screams of the wounded. After fleeing, Stones, by the testimony of one soldier who saw him, "seemed to have lost the use of his legs. He sat down for a good while and tried several times to get up." Even after being ordered back to the front line, he still "could not find the use of his legs." (Stones had twice before gone to the battalion medical officer complaining of rheumatic leg pain.) A sergeant described him as being "in a very exhausted condition and trembling.... He said that the Germans were chasing him down the trench.... He seemed thoroughly done up."

Panic, in the eyes of those in command, was no excuse for a soldier's "casting away his arms and running away from the front line," in the words of the formal charge against Stones, nor was his claim that he had run toward the rear to warn his comrades at the orders of his dying lieutenant. In December 1916, a string of courts-martial dealt with the traumatic night's events by sentencing 26 Bantams, including Stones, Goggins, and McDonald, to death.

Generals frequently recommended mercy after a court-martial decreed capital punishment, and Haig, whose decision this ultimately was, usually agreed, commuting 89 percent of the death sentences that crossed his desk during the war. Joseph Stones had good reason to hope that his own sentence would be commuted, for his company and brigade commanders both urged clemency. "I have personally been out with him in no-man's-land and I always found him keen and bold," wrote the first. "...I can safely say that he was the last man I would have thought capable of any cowardly action." But the division commander and two generals above him confirmed the sentences, and the fate of all the condemned Bantams now rested with Haig.

Casting away arms in the face of the enemy was not the only offense that revealed a draconian side to British military justice. That same December, a man in a nearby unit did something that in civilian life would be no crime at all: he wrote a letter to a newspaper.

At 32, Albert Rochester was older than the average soldier, and when he enlisted at the start of the war he had a pregnant wife and three children. An ardent socialist and a columnist for the newspaper of the National Union of Railwaymen, he had been a signalman for the Great Western