I had met at this conference Piet Chielens, the director of the museum, who was, I knew, one of the world’s great experts on the First World War. I asked him more about this letter and it was he who told me there had been about 300 British soldiers executed in the First World War for cowardice or desertion, two for falling asleep on sentry duty. He showed me transcripts of some of their trials, some lasting less than half an hour. Half an hour for a man’s life. I read accounts of the executions, some in open country up against a hedge, some in the courtyard of prisons, some in farmyards. The firing squad was sometimes made up of soldiers from their own company, pals, comrades in arms forced to shoot one of their own.
I visited the graves of one or two of these unfortunate men – “worthless”, one of them had been called at his court martial. Further research convinced me that these proceedings had often been no more than mock trials. Many soldiers on trial had clearly been suffering from shell shock, some had already been treated in hospital for it. Many were not even legally represented. There was a clear purpose in these trials. Examples had to be made, discipline had to be kept. There was little justice in these court martials, but rather a determination to convict and punish, as a warning to others. I soon discovered that many of the families of these unfortunate men had been seeking justice for them ever since, petitioning the government again and again over the decades since the war, to pardon these executed men, to acknowledge the injustice, the cruelty. No such pardons had been given.
I think it was this injustice that made up my mind. I would write the story of one of these men, tell his tale from cradle to grave, so that he was not simply a name on a gravestone, but a child, a boy, a young man. I would set my story in a place I know well, in my home village of Iddesleigh, from where many men had left their farms and marched off to that war, yes, the same village where Joey and Albert had grown up together in War Horse. My soldier would live with his family, in the cottage where I live, with his brothers, his mother and his forester father. Like the millions who went to war, his life at home would be centred round family, school, friends, community, the farms and the countryside, an ordinary enough life, before the war took him away and destroyed him.
The name of Private Peaceful I found by accident in the Bedford Cemetery near Ypres. It seemed at once the right family name for him. He became, as I was creating him, as I was writing him, my Unknown Soldier. He has now become that, I am pleased to say, for many others too.
So often, though, ideas, not just for names but for people, come from readers I meet, readers who write to me. I was in my dreamtime – that period of research I live through with each book, of thinking myself, feeling myself, into the story, dreaming it up, becoming familiar with my characters and the places they live in and have their being. I was trying to create the Peaceful family, to get to know them, their circumstances at home, their place in the community, their relationships to one another. I was still struggling with this, when one day I received a letter from a mother. She had been reading The Butterfly Lion to her children, and said it was the only book she and her children could all enjoy listening to together. This was largely because she had a teenage boy called Joe – who had Down’s syndrome – who found listening to stories very challenging. But with this story, she wrote, he simply loved listening along with his siblings, rocking back and forwards, humming contentedly throughout, and asking to hear the story over and over again. She would love it, this mother wrote, and so would all her children, if one day I could somehow write a boy like her Joe into one of my stories. For family reasons, I already had a great interest in such children and it didn’t take me long to decide to create a character like her Joe. “Big Joe”, I called him, and he became the heart of the Peaceful family. He became the catalyst for me. The Peaceful family were no longer fiction to me. Everything revolved round their love for Big Joe. I could begin my story of Private Peaceful. Big Joe was all the spur I needed.
Now I could become one of the Peaceful brothers, living through a night when there could be no sleep, when the last thing I want is for dawn to come. By reflecting on my childhood at home in Devon, by living my life again, I might postpone dawn as long as possible. To do this, I would become young Private Peaceful, speak it down onto the page in his voice, see and feel it as he did.
I was visiting Ypres a while after the publication of the book, and was being interviewed for radio by the BBC in one of the dozens of cemeteries around Ypres, when a coach pulled up on the road by the gateway into the cemetery. Out of it poured a school party of fifty or more teenage children – English, and from Epsom I saw from the coach. They invaded the quiet of the cemetery, behaving, I thought, rather boisterously and noisily. We had to stop recording. I was about to go over and ask them to quieten down, not because of the interview, but because loud laughter and banter seemed disrespectful in such a place. Then an extraordinary thing happened. They hushed, quite of their own accord. Loud voices became whispers as they moved among the gravestones. Some held hands. Most did not speak at all. The place, the graves, the dead had touched them.
Seeing the microphones, I suppose, the accompanying teachers approached and recognized me. “This is extraordinary!” they said. “You are not going to believe this. We have all come to Ypres because we read Private Peaceful back at school.” He had become the Unknown Soldier for everyone. They had just come from Bedford Cemetery, where they had laid a wreath they had made on Private Peaceful’s grave, along with messages and letters the children had written to him. “You have to go and see them, read them,” the teachers said. So I did. I knew as I crouched there, reading their letters to him, that Private Peaceful had been worth writing.
And some time after publication, and after Simon Reade’s 2004 play of Private Peaceful had been touring the country for several seasons, the government at last relented and granted pardons to those unfortunate men so cruelly executed in the First World War. They were not worthless. It was official. Of course, it was the sustained campaign by their families that had brought about this change of heart. But I hope and believe the book, the play and the concerts of Private Peaceful played their part in it too.
PRIVATE PEACEFUL
“I want no tears, Tommo,” he whispers in my ear. “This is going to be difficult enough without tears.” He holds me at arm’s length. “Understand?”
I can do no more than nod.
He has had a letter from home, from Molly, which he must read out to me, he says, because it makes him laugh and he needs to laugh. It’s mostly about little Tommo. Molly writes that he’s already learning to blow raspberries and they’re every bit as loud and rude as ours when we were young. And she says Big Joe sings him to sleep at night, Oranges and Lemons of course. She ends by sending her love and hoping we’re both well.
“Doesn’t she know?” I ask.
“No,” Charlie says. “And they won’t know, not until afterwards. They’ll send them a telegram. They didn’t let me write home until today.” As we sit down at the table he lowers his voice and we talk in half-whispers now. “You’ll tell them how it really was, won’t you, Tommo? It’s all I care about now. I don’t want them thinking I was a coward. I don’t want that. I want them to know the truth.”
“Didn’t you tell the court martial?” I ask him.
“Course I did. I tried, I tried my very best, but there’s none so deaf as them that don’t want to hear. They had their one witness, Sergeant Hanley, and he was all they needed. It wasn’t a trial, Tommo. They’d made up their minds I was guilty before they even sat down. I had three of them, a brigadier and two captains looking down their noses at me as if I was some sort of dirt. I told them everything, Tommo, just like it happened. I had nothing to be ashamed of, did I? I wasn’t going to hide anything. So I told them that, yes, I did disobey the sergeant’s order because the order was stupid, suicidal – we all knew it was – and that anyway I had to stay behind to look after you. They knew a dozen or more got wiped out in the attack, that no one even go
t as far as the German wire. They knew I was right, but it made no difference.”
“What about witnesses?” I ask him. “You should have had witnesses. I could have said. I could have told them.”
“I asked for you, Tommo, but they wouldn’t accept you because you were my brother. I asked for Pete, but then they told me that Pete was missing. And as for the rest of the company, I was told they’d been moved into another sector, and were up in the line and not available. So they heard it all from Sergeant Hanley, and they swallowed everything he told them, like it was gospel truth. I think there’s a big push coming, and they wanted to make an example of someone, Tommo. And I was the Charlie.” He laughed at that. “A right Charlie. Then of course there was my record as a troublemaker, ‘a mutinous troublemaker’ Hanley called me. Remember Etaples? Had up on a charge of gross insubordination? Field Punishment Number One? It was all there on my record. So was my foot.”
“Your foot?”
“That time I was shot in the foot. All foot wounds are suspicious, they said. It could have been self-inflicted – it goes on all the time, they said. I could have done it myself just to get myself out of the trenches and back to Blighty.”
“But it wasn’t like that,” I say.
“Course it wasn’t. They believed what they wanted to believe.”
“Didn’t you have anyone to speak up for you?” I ask him. “Like an officer or someone?”
“I didn’t think I need one,” Charlie tells me. “Just tell them the truth, Charlie, and you’ll be all right. That’s what I thought. How wrong could I be? I thought maybe a letter of good character from Wilkie would help. I was sure they’d listen to him, him being an officer and one of them. I told them where I thought he was. The last I’d heard he was up in a hospital in Scotland somewhere. They told me they’d written to the hospital, but that he’d died of his wounds six months before. The whole court martial took less than an hour, Tommo. That’s all they gave me. An hour for a man’s life. Not a lot, is it? And do you know what the brigadier said, Tommo? He said I was a worthless man. Worthless. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, Tommo, but none of them ever upset me, except that one. I didn’t show it, mind. I wouldn’t have given them the satisfaction. And then he passed sentence. I was expecting it by then. Didn’t upset me nearly as much as I thought it would.”
I hang my head, because I cannot stop my eyes filling.
“Tommo,” he says, lifting my chin. “Look on the bright side. It’s no more than we were facing every day in the trenches. It’ll be over very quick. And the boys are looking after me all right here. They don’t like it any more than I do. Three hot meals a day. A man can’t grumble. It’s all over and done with, or it will be soon anyway. You want some tea, Tommo? They brought me some just before you came.”
So we sit either side of the table and share a mug of sweet strong tea, and speak of everything Charlie wants to talk about: home, bread and butter pudding with the raisins in and the crunchy crust on top, moonlit nights fishing for sea trout on the Colonel’s river, Bertha, beer at The Duke, the yellow aeroplane and the humbugs.
“We won’t talk of Big Joe or Mother or Moll,” Charlie says, “because I’ll cry if I do, and I promised myself I wouldn’t.” He leant forward suddenly in great earnest, clutching my hand. “Talking of promises, that promise you made me back in the dugout, Tommo. You won’t forget it, will you? You will look after them?”
“I promise,” I tell him, and I’ve never meant anything so much in all my life.
“You’ve still got the watch then,” he says, pulling back my sleeve. “Keep it ticking for me, and then when the time comes, give it to Little Tommo, so he’ll have something from me. I’d like that. You’ll make him a good father, like Father was to us.”
It is the moment. I have to do it now. It is my last chance. I tell him about how Father had died, about how it had happened, what I had done, how I should have told him years ago, but had never dared to. He smiles. “I always knew that, Tommo. So did Mother. You’d talk in your sleep. Always having nightmares, always keeping me awake about it, you were. All nonsense. Not your fault. It was the tree that killed Father, Tommo, not you.”
“You sure?” I ask him.
“I’m sure,” he says. “Quite sure.”
We look at one another and know that time is getting short now. I see a flicker of panic in his eyes. He pulls some letters out of his pocket and pushes them across the table. “You’ll see they get these, Tommo?”
We grip hands across the table, put our foreheads together and close our eyes. I manage to say what I’ve been wanting to say.
“You’re not worthless, Charlie. They’re the worthless bastards. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, the best person I’ve ever known.”
I hear Charlie starting to hum softly. It is Oranges and Lemons, slightly out of tune. I hum with him, our hands clasping tighter, our humming stronger now. Then we are singing, singing it out loud so that the whole world can hear us, and we are laughing as we sing. And there are tears, but it does not matter because these are not tears of sadness, they are tears of celebration. When we’ve finished, Charlie says: “It’s what I’ll be singing in the morning. It won’t be God Save the ruddy King or All Things bleeding Bright and Beautiful. It’ll be Oranges and Lemons for Big Joe, for all of us.”
The guard comes in and tells us our time is up. We shake hands then as strangers do. There are no words left to say. I hold our last look and want to hold it forever. Then I turn away and leave him.
When I got back to camp yesterday afternoon I expected the sympathy and the long faces and all those averted eyes I’d been used to for days before. Instead I was greeted by smiles and with the news that Sergeant Hanley was dead. He had been killed, they told me, in a freak accident, blown up by a grenade out on the ranges. So there was some justice, of a sort, but it had come too late for Charlie. I hoped someone at Walker Camp had heard about it and would tell Charlie. It would be small consolation for him, but it would be something. Any jubilation I felt, or any of us felt, turned very soon to grim satisfaction, and then evaporated completely. It seemed as if the entire regiment was subdued, like me quite unable to think of anything else but Charlie, of the injustice he was suffering, and the inevitability of what must happen to him in the morning.
We have been billeted this last week or so around an empty farmhouse, less than a mile down the road from where they’re keeping Charlie at Walker Camp. We’ve been waiting to go up into the trenches further down the line on the Somme. We live in the bell tents, and the officers are billeted in the house. The others have been doing their very best to make it as easy as they can for me. I know from their every look how much they feel for me, NCOs and officers too. But kind though they are I do not want or need their sympathy or their help. I do not even want the distraction of their company. I want simply to be alone. Late in the evening I take a lamp with me and move out of the tent into this barn, or what is left of it. They bring me blankets and food, and then leave me to myself. They understand. The padre comes to do what he can. He can do nothing. I send him away. So here I am now with the night gone so fast and the clock ticking towards six o’clock. When the time comes, I will go outside, and I will look up at the sky because I know Charlie will be doing the same as they take him out. We’ll be seeing the same clouds, feeling the same breeze on our faces. At least that way we’ll be together.
Treatment of soldiers in the trenches
In the First World War, 306 British soldiers were shot for desertion, mutiny or cowardice. By contrast, not one American or Australian soldier was executed.
Initially, these executions were kept secret from the public: “I had my first direct experience of official lying when I read some twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion. A few days later the responsible minister denied that any sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France.” (Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That, 1929)
Rifleman Hen
ry Williamson recollected the process of an execution: “He was tied to a post against a wall in his civilian clothes, and we were told to fire at a piece of white cloth pinned over his heart. We didn’t know what the rifles were loaded with. Some were loaded with ball, others with blank.” Afterwards, if the victim was still alive, the officer in charge would shoot him with his revolver.
Private William Holmes witnessed another execution: “These two youngsters had only been with us two weeks. When they knew we were going to do this attack, they were literally crying their eyes out.” They ran away, but were captured, then “Their caps were taken off, every insignia of their regiment was torn off, to disgrace them. The verdict … described how they had let their mates down.” The platoon drew lots for the firing squad. They “were sick with the whole thought of it. They were going to go and shoot their own mates. But there you are… For the mere disobedience of an officer you could be shot.”
Journals, and details of the trials, suggest the disturbing conclusion that class and race prejudice played a major part in the decision to execute a man. A disproportionate number of those executed were working class privates from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Of the 306 men executed, only three were officers. Fifteen officers sentenced to death received a royal pardon. Privates noticed that officers received lighter sentences. In 1916, General Haig ordered that more officers should be executed to “strengthen the fighting spirit of the troops”.
Many of the victims were shockingly young. Private Thomas Highgate was executed, aged a mere seventeen, thirty-five days into the war, the first soldier to face a firing squad. He fled the carnage of the Battle of Mons and hid in a barn. He was undefended at his trial, because all his comrades from the Royal West Kents had been killed, injured or captured. Another Private, Herbert Burden, had lied about his age to join up. When he was shot ten months later, he died officially too young to be at the Front.