In his First World War memoir Good-Bye to All That, the British poet and former infantry officer Robert Graves wrote, “I had my first experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915 and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion. Yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s forces.”
It was indeed a lie. Between the beginning of the war in 1914 and the Armistice in 1918, 307 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed by firing squad after courts-martial convicted them of cowardice or desertion, the latter charge described in very military language as “fleeing in the face of the enemy.” Included in that tally were 25 Canadian soldiers, 22 Irish servicemen, and five New Zealanders. How many Indian soldiers in British service were executed on the same charges is uncertain, but if their names were added to that grim tally the numbers would certainly be even larger.
In some armies applying the death penalty was a matter
