In recent years the controversy over capital courts martial during the Great War has grown in intensity. This was triggered by Judge Anthony Babington’s somewhat circumspect book, For the Sake of Example, published in 1983. This was followed by the far more detailed analysis of individuals, with details including names and places of burial, by Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes in Shot at Dawn. Both of these books have raised considerable questions about the proceedings that took place against these men who suffered the ultimate penalty for crimes relating only to military discipline, such as desertion and cowardice or for crimes that carried a similar penalty in civilian life, such as murder. They have argued that in a considerable number of cases there was an inadequate defence because of lack of experience in the defending officer, or a lack of information made known to the court, or no account taken of medical evidence, or little value given to personal or family circumstance. There seems to be little consistency in which men had their sentences commuted — some eleven percent of men sentenced to death were actually executed. These other sentences reached the level of the farcical, given the nature of the original judgement and sentence. Dr Alf Peacock, the editor of Gunfire, tells me that in one case the death sentence was commuted to five days confined to barracks!
Sub Lieutenant Edwin Dyett
The reasons for the rigorous use of the death sentence has been justified by its defenders as being to support the morale of the army, by showing the consequences of an action, or a failure of what was perceived to be duty. It might be necessary because of problems within a particular battalion (other armies just extinguished the complete record of a Regiment and dispersed its personnel in cases of such dishonour). It might be (as in the forty or so cases of murder) that the sentence was the equivalent to what civilian society would have awarded.
The end result of all of this publicity is that the courts martial files, closed originally for one hundred years, have now been opened for perusal at the Public Records Office. Some are still clamouring for a pardon for all of those executed, on the grounds that they were denied rudimentary justice. To my mind this sets dangerous precedents, and in any case, begs the question of where is there an end to it? Should men in the Boer and Crimean Wars be pardoned? What of the many executed in Wellington’s armies for crimes as paltry as pinching some chickens? What of children being hung in the nineteenth century for what we should now regard as miniscule crimes against property — and in many cases equally poorly defended, and in our own lights equally unjustly sentenced. Finally, if one pardons them all, this takes no account of those who were vicious murderers and were tried fairly within the law and the norms of justice as they then stood.
One of the veterans with whom I have talked on this matter was remarkably unsympathetic towards those who were executed — we had to go up the line, we had to face the shelling and mayhem, they opted out, would be an imprecise and rather generalised summary of his views. The Australian Army, to the displeasure not only of Haig, was not subject to the death sentence. This arguably produced the worst discipline record of any part of the British and Dominion Armies, and far worse so than their immediate Dominion neighbours, New Zealand. On the other hand, the Anzacs along with the Canadians and a few select British Divisions were the finest fighting troops in the British Empire’s war effort.
Enough of modern controversy; I think no-one can deny that many of the courts martial were flawed. Suffice it to say that no British soldier was executed in the Second World War for offences against Military Discipline.
One of the most celebrated of these cases, even during the war, was that relating to an officer of the Royal Naval Division (the 63rd), Sub Lieutenant Edwin Dyett of the Nelson Battalion. The officer was shot in January 1917 for an offence that was committed during the Battle of the Ancre in November 1916. The matter of the iniquities of the trial were brought to public prominence by Horatio Bottomley’s John Bull, an early example of tabloid journalism. Subsequent investigations have shown that what was written had a very limited connection with the facts, but there was enough evidence for unease to result in questions being asked in the House of Commons in February 1918.
One of the great works of Great War literature is AP Herbert’s, The Secret Battle, published in 1919, and several times subquently, earning an introduction in the 1928 edition by Winston Churchill, and more recently by John Terraine in the Oxford University Press edition of 1982. This short book has as its theme justice. It opens, “I am going to write down some of the history of Harry Penrose, because I do not think full justice has been done to him, and because there must be many other young men of his kind who flung themselves into this war at the beginning of it, and have gone out of it after many sufferings with the unjust and ignorant condemnation of their fellows.” The book ends, “This book is not an attack on any person, on the death penalty, or on anything else, though if it makes people think about these things, so much the better. I think I believe in the death penalty — I do not know. But I did not believe in Harry getting shot.
That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry was shot for cowardice — and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew.”
Dyett was the only member of the 63rd Division to be shot during the war, and therefore the only personal contact that AP Herbert is likely to have had with such a case (and Herbert, even then, was a member of Hawke Battalion). There is no doubt that Penrose and Dyett are not the same men — there are similarities, but very little to do with their actual war service. Whatever the truth of this matter, it seems that the case of Dyett produced some, if not all, of Herbert’s reaction to the courts martial procedures. What he did write was one of those eloquent historical novels based in many cases on personal experience, and which places it in the same league as Williamson’s Chronicles of Sunlit Years and Manning’s Middle Part of Fortune.
A P Herbert with his men in the winter of 1916, at rest on the Somme resort of St Valery.
For a guide to the Battlefields this section on Dyett is somewhat out of place: how can a guide recreate psychological conditions within an individual, or the pressures that surrounded him? Nevertheless, the events that were to lead to his death at Le Crotoy took place here, at the time in the vile conditions of a mud bath in bleak November weather. Dyett had been kept in reserve by his Commanding Officer, who was himself a casualty in the subsequent attack. The Nelson Battalion was in the second wave of attack, on the middle right of the Division front. Dyett claimed to get lost when he was sent forward with a party of reinforcements and they eventually took shelter in a dugout. The battle was a particularly fierce and hard fought one, the Division suffering over four thousand casualties. Subsequently he met up with a staff officer who was collecting stragglers on the battlefield, and ordered him to follow and to watch out for anyone who might fall out. Dyett wished to return to Brigade HQ for fresh orders as he thought that the situation was so chaotic (which indeed it most certainly was) that instructions might well be changed. The staff officer knew Dyett, and was said to have disliked Dyett from their training days at the outbreak of war. In due course Dyett was reported for disobeying an order, and he was found in a nearby village two days later.
After the Battle of the Ancre, the severely mauled Naval Division was withdrawn to the sea, in and around the village of St Firmin near the estuary of the Somme. Dyett spent weeks waiting — he was ‘sick of waiting’ — for some conclusion to be reached about his actions on November 13th. The General Court Martial took place on Boxing Day at Ferme du Champ Neuf, and the panel of judges consisted of commanders who had fought on the battlefield, probably presided over by a Brigadier General.
Dyett did not offer himself as a witness in his own defence, and indeed that defence largely rested on Dyett’s very nervous state and the fact that he had requested a transfer for service at sea — in short that he was neurotic and unfit for Active Service.
Dyett was sentenced to death by the court, but with a recommendation for mercy on the usual grounds of youth (he was just twenty one at the time of the battle) but also, as Sykes and Putkowski observe, “more interestingly, that the prevailing conditions on the day of the battle were likely to have had a detrimental effect on any but the strongest of young men.”
As has been described earlier in this book, Major General Shute was far from being the most popular of Divisional commanders, and in past years he has been accused of supporting the execution, but in fact he supported the court’s recommendation. The Corps and Army Commanders, Generals Fanshawe and Gough both maintained that the sentence should stand. This would leave Haig as the last hope, and he generally intervened at this stage either because of the recommendations of subordinate formation commanders, or on the advice of the Judge Advocate General’s department at GHQ.
Dyett, as indeed most involved in the case, had anticipated a punishment such as loss of his commission and reduction to the ranks. The custom was that the notification of sentence was not made until a short time before the execution, which took place on January 5th 1917 almost certainly in the vicinity of the farm where Dyett had been under house arrest and been tried. He is buried in a Communal cemetery in the small seaside resort of Le Crotoy, in a plot where there are French as well as British, and victims of both the Great and Second World War. Other unusual aspects of the case are discussed more fully in the books cited, both being readily available. However one that is in neither book is the fact that the Admiralty had issued no Death Certificate for Edwin Dyet — it being their responsibility so to do; in fact it took some persistence in recent years to get this final page of Edwin Dyett’s life completed. It describes the cause of death as being, ‘War Service’.
Ferme du Champ Neuf, the scene of Dyett’s imprisonment, trial and – probably – of his subsequent execution.
It is a pleasant enough journey along the valley of the Somme to the little seaport of Le Crotoy, with its narrow streets and resort atmosphere. On the far side of the estuary is the port, St Valery, from which William the Conqueror set sail to begin his conquest of England. The journey to Dyett’s last resting place and a knowledge of something of the history of this young man who had been commissioned in June 1915 can only make us think how varied are the victims of the degeneration of human values and judgement that is a consequence of war.
Le Crotoy Communal Cemetery.