What was shot at dawn ww1

None of his medical history appears to have been given to the court martial and he was found guilty in October of "misbehaving before the enemy in such a manner as to show cowardice". Harry was put before a firing squad the next morning, aged 25, where he refused a blindfold - preferring to look his firing squad in the eye. The Army chaplain at the execution sent Harry's widow a message saying "a finer soldier never lived".

When the news of the pardon came through, his daughter, then aged 93, said: "I am so relieved that this ordeal is now over and I can be content knowing that my father's memory is intact. I have always argued that my father's refusal to rejoin the frontline, described in the court martial as resulting from cowardice, was in fact the result of shellshock, and I believe that many other soldiers suffered from this, not just my father.

Of course, one of the main points of contention about a blanket pardon had been that not all of the cases were so clear and that generalisation was dangerous. Indeed, the Shot At Dawn campaign had itself not sought a pardon for all, accepting that some of those executed were serious repeat military or criminal offenders, and even murderers. Interestingly, those found guilty of crimes such as murder are not commemorated by name at the striking memorial at the Arboretum, which was funded mainly by individual donations.

Response to the memorial was positive from the outset. It features at its centre a figure created by Andy DeComyn, a Birmingham-based sculptor, which stands at over eight-feet.

The figure has his hands tied behind his back and is blindfolded, whilst around his neck hangs an aiming-disk centred on his chest. In front of the figure are six conifers representing the firing-squad and behind are wooden stakes each with the name, age, regiment, rank and date of death of an executed British or Commonwealth soldier.

The main figure is based on Private Herbert Burden who, at 16, added two years to his age in order to enlist in the Northumberland Fusiliers. He deserted at Ypres after his unit suffered huge losses and was court-martialled on 2nd July and executed on 21st July at the age of In a series of haunting images, British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews focuses on the locations at which individuals were shot or held in the period leading up to their execution, between and The photographs, which feature in a photobook Shot at Dawn , were taken as close as possible to the precise time at which the executions took place.

The titles of the photographs feature the names of the soldiers who were executed, alongside the dates, times and locations of their executions. The book also features essays by historians Hew Strachan and Helen McCartney on cowardice, desertion and psychological trauma brought on by military service. Even today, while we debate issues such as state-sanctioned murder and grapple with memory and loss in the context of last year's commemorative events marking the outbreak of the war in , these pictures help us think through the things we should remember about past wars.

Each of Mathews's 23 photographs packs a hundred years of memory by frame-freezing precise spots where something terrible took place. The British photographer, taking two years to complete this project, took her shots as close as possible to the anniversary of the day an execution occurred, and at the same time, usually at dawn. In the book, a blank space, marked only by a few words identifying the place, comes between each illustrated spread and each of these consists of a photograph on one side and dates and names of those executed on the other.

The blank spreads carry their own meaning: the intervening years of silence about what happened only coming to light in recent decades and the lost years of the victims' lives. One of the photographs is different in that it show a chalky wall with barely discernible graffiti. The wall is part of the cell where Eric Skeffington Poole spent his last night, one of the few officers to be executed and one whose court martial was shrouded in secrecy due to his rank.

Like all the photographs in this haunting collection, its mute stillness finally speaks for what for so long was kept out of the public eye. In these empty, yet eerily haunting photographs, we are confronted by the locations in which young men were executed by their own compatriots for offenses such as desertion or cowardice.