This was another recommendation from Five Books. It's by A.P. Herbert (that's Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, 1890-1971), and it was published in 1919.

It's one of the saddest books I've read in a long time, and it's another of those works that ought to be compulsory reading for any world leader contemplating sending human beings off to fight each other.

We start off with our narrator, Benson, in the trenches of Gallipoli. It's the scene of "genuine infantry warfare" that goes on relentlessly, from one dawn to the next. Constant sniping affects everyone's nerves; confusion and mismanagement breed cynicism; close-quarters living peels back everyone's true character, and fans arguments; and then -- as though that is all not enough -- you have to deal with heat, dust, wind, flies, dead bodies, noise, and dysentery.

Then the focus shifts to France, first to a relatively easy position, but then to the Somme. Though more bearable than the Gallipoli summer, it was still "very vile". One of the battles sees Benson's force losing 400 men and 20 officers.


France. Much fought-over...

This is all interesting, not to say gut-wrenching.

But the book's main focus is elsewhere. Benson wants to tell us the story -- the tragedy, as he describes it right from the beginning -- of his friend and comrade Harry Penrose.

Like so many young volunteers, Harry starts out idealistic and enthusiastic. But he does have a certain lack of self-confidence. He worries about things. Events generally turn out better than he fears, but that doesn't stop him worrying the next time: "That's what I feel about the whole war," he tells Benson. I've a terror of being a failure in it." He is determined not to be "the battalion dud".

He starts out almost recklessly brave. But two incidents where he loses men knock the "romance of war" out of him: "Henceforth it must be a necessary but disgusting business, to be endured like a dung-hill... What was more serious was this. The two incidents had revived, in a most malignant form, his old distrust of his own competence."

Complicating his life are a bad one-upmanship contest with a fellow-officer, Burnett, and a nasty bout of dysentery. Harry is actually ill enough to request a transfer. But he will not let himself bail. He feels his courage starting to falter, and needs to prove to himself that he can still muster it when required.

At this point, Burnett retreats from a digging task with his party of men. Harry offers to take over. He does a good job, but by the morning he is very sick, and has to be invalided out. "As it turned out, the accident of the digging-party, and the way in which Harry had seized his chance, sent him off with a renewed confidence in himself, and with regard to Burnett, even a sense of triumph."

So Harry goes home, and gets married. But he applies to go back out, and rejoins Benson's battalion in France. He again takes up the scouting work that he had done at Gallipoli. This is a particularly stressful, taxing, and nerve-wracking job, and he does it every night they're in the line for three months.



Then he gets caught in a particularly violent raid. It rattles him. "I must say that strafe the other night put the wind up me properly... Sort of lost confidence, you know," he tells his comrade Hewett when he's due to go out again. He comes back without having completed the mission, and feels he's finished as a scout. So they make him gun officer. Which is when they head for the Somme.

At this point they are joined by Colonel Philpott, one of the "Old Duds", and a great believer in "The Book". He and Harry cross swords, and the young officer ends up detailed for a succession of nasty working-parties as a result. Again, he performs well, but there is some sort of snafu with the handing over of some rations. Harry is not at fault, but Philpott doesn't trust him, and he's slow to let go of a bad opinion.

Things start to slide again at this point. There's constant shell-fire to endure, and because of Philpott's vindictiveness, Harry not only gets no chance to take a break, but ends up shouldering three times more dangerous jobs than anyone else. As he faces death night after night, the strain exacts a terrible toll: "The more he hated and feared these parties, the worse he felt, the keener became his determination to stick it out, to beat Philpott at his own game. Or so I imagine. For by the third week there was no doubt; what is called his 'nerve' was clean gone; or, as he put it to me in the soldier's tongue, 'I've got complete wind-up.'"

So Philpott succeeds in breaking his nerve. And the long, hard winter eventually breaks his spirit too. It's cold; his old friends are gone; and he must -- the narrator feels -- experience some bitterness that his day-to-day bravery has earned no rewards, since no recognition, no medals, and no distinctions ever come his way. Harry is increasingly prey to black moods. He becomes suspicious and intolerant. The breaking of the man is complete...

Eventually, Benson is wounded, and sent home, followed, a little later -- and after a display of somewhat desperate recklessness -- by Harry.



Again there's a chance for Harry to choose an easier path, when he is offered a job in the War Office. Take it, Harry, you want to say... He is clearly suffering from shell-shock. He has nightmares about shelling and shell-holes, and wakes up sweating and screaming. But he just can't let himself off the hook. Despite all he has endured already, he can't bear to risk being taken for someone who's bunked off.

He turns down the desk job, and returns to France. And by the time Benson returns to his battalion, Harry is under arrest...

Philpott had immediately -- on the young officer's first night back -- set him to leading another dangerous carrying-party. When he doesn't succeed, and takes refuge in a dug-out, because he and his similarly shell-shocked troops are coming under heavy fire, Burnett (himself in the dug-out, mind you) is the one who shops him. Harry tells Benson: "I knew I should have to go on again... get past the corner somehow... And -- And I couldn't... I simply couldn't face it..."

There's a Court-Martial. There doesn't really have to be. Things could have been "arranged". But there's a Court-Martial. The "naturally stout-hearted men" who preside over it are not young enough, Benson tells us, to have seen too much war...

There's a very moving scene where a group officers informally discuss the case. Some, predictably, are all about the regiment's good name. Others are more understanding. "Ought anyone who VOLUNTEERS to fight for his country be shot?" wonders one. Another points out: "They don't expect everybody to have equally strong arms or equally good brains... But every man's expected to have equally strong nerves in all circumstances, and to GO ON HAVING THEM till he goes under." And again: "[A man] oughtn't to be ALLOWED to go on too long... It seems to me the doctors ought to be able to test when a man's really had enough." And often, this is what actually happens. After a long spell at the front, if someone is suffering from nervous collapse, he is offered a job at home. The problem is that sometimes -- one in ten cases maybe -- "you get a fellow with the devil of a conscience". Should some mechanism not be in place, then, to save him from himself?

They can't entirely agree on what needs be done. "Only most of us were in troubled agreement that something -- perhaps many things -- were wrong about the System, if this young volunteer, after long fighting and suffering, was indeed to be shot like a traitor in the cold dawn."

Initially, Harry is recommended for clemency. But the death sentence ends up being confirmed. To make an example, you can imagine some jobsworth saying... So Harry, aged just 23, is killed by a firing squad (in the excerpt I saw quoted elsewhere, it says he was executed by his own company, but my version just has ellipses at that point).

Benson concludes: "This book is not an attack on any person, on the death penalty, or on anything else... I think I believe in the death penalty -- I don't know. But I did not believe in Harry being 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."

This is an immensely moving story. A powerful example of how external circumstances (exposure to war, prolonged psychological stress, and petty vindictiveness), combined with internal circumstances (faltering self-confidence, and the kind of unhinged perfectionism that will not permit a person to ever demand less of himself than 200 per cent), end up creating a monumental tragedy.



It was not until 2006 that the 306 First World War soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice were pardoned, on the grounds that they had likely been suffering from war trauma. Their families had been campaigning for justice for 90 years.

Herbert's book definitely contributed to the conversation in the early years following the conflict. Katherine Ebury notes: "As early as 1922, a government report on shell shock admitted that similar injustices had undoubtedly occurred, as 'psychoneurotic soldiers might have been court martialed and executed for cowardice before the phenomenon was understood'. It is suggested in this report that shell shock defences were rejected in around a third of cases." The death penalty for cowardice was abolished in 1930.

But the pardons were a long time coming. And some feel they have not gone far enough, allowing the government to express regret, but not entirely overturning the original judgements of the military courts.

A sad and angry article, written seven years before the pardons were issued, bitterly highlights some of the tragic cases: A lad of just 17 was shot for desertion; a widow was told that there were no pensions for the families of cowards; a man detailed to a firing squad remembered, for the rest of his 101-year-old life, the boy soldier he was required to shoot...

A theatre of warfare is never a great site for justice. All the more reason to work tirelessly to stop conflicts degenerating into battles in the first place.