To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [135]
On the evening of December 8, 1916, at his London lodgings, Milner received a message summoning him to 10 Downing Street. Before leaving the house, he sent a note to Violet Cecil with the news, adding, "My own disposition is strongly against being in the Govt. at all, most strongly against being in it unless I am part of the Supreme Direction." But part of the new inner-circle War Cabinet he was to be, as minister without portfolio, charged with supervising the war effort. At 64, after more than a decade in the political wilderness, Alfred Milner had suddenly become one of the most powerful men in the embattled empire he loved.
V. 1917
16. BETWEEN THE LION'S JAWS
WHILE THE THREE condemned Bantams waited to hear if Haig would commute their sentences, they had good reason for hope. Haig had, after all, commuted nearly nine out of every ten death sentences. After his arrest, Joseph Stones had shown no foreboding in a letter to his sister: "I am sending out a few lines to say I am going on all right. I've had no time to write before.... It will soon be Christmas and I hope you all enjoy yourselves. I only wish I had been at home to make you all happy."
However, Haig made it clear that he felt there were times when the supreme penalty was fully justified. In the first weeks of the Battle of the Somme, for instance, a private named Arthur Earp was tried for leaving his post in a front-line trench. The court-martial sentenced him to death, the prescribed penalty, but recommended mercy. When the verdict reached the general commanding Earp's division, he concurred, as did the general at the next level up, the corps commander. But when the case reached Haig, at a time of soaring casualties, he was in no mood to be merciful. He confirmed the sentence. The report of the court-martial said, "The court recommend the accused for mercy owing to the intense bombardments which the accused had been subjected to & the account of his good character," but Haig underlined the phrase about bombardment and wrote, "How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?" He then ordered that this opinion "be communicated to the Corps and Divisional commanders." In army protocol, this was a stinging rebuke; each general subsequently felt obliged to write "noted" under Haig's comments.
An undercurrent of rumor drifted back to England. "Reports of large numbers of executions at the Front came to us constantly," wrote Sylvia Pankhurst, who visited the grief-stricken family of one executed soldier from London's East End. "Men often told us sadly that they had been in firing parties which had been ordered out to shoot six or seven poor fellows." As the bloody deadlock in the trenches continued, discipline became steadily tougher and each year of the war so far had seen an ominous, sharp increase in the number of British military executions, mostly for desertion: four in 1914, 55 in 1915, 95 in 1916. (The actual total is somewhat higher, for records of executions among the more than 100,000 Indian soldiers on the Western Front have disappeared.) The considerably larger German army, which we usually think of as more draconian in discipline, sent only 48 men to the firing squad during the entire war.
The army's stringent disciplinary code took no account of what was then called shell shock. Simply put, after even the most obedient soldier had had enough shells rain down on him, without any means of fighting back, he often lost all self-control. This could take many forms: panic, flight, inability to sleep or—as with Joseph Stones—to walk. "Apart from the number of people ... blown to bits, the explosions were so terrific that anyone within a hundred yards' radius was liable to lose his reason after a few hours," wrote a British lieutenant after being under mortar fire at Ypres, "and the 7th battalion had to send down the line several men in