Shot at Dawn Memorial, Staffordshire UK Photo by Dave Green.jpg |
Shot at Dawn: in
the First World War, 306 men who fought with the British Army were executed,
typically by men in their own unit, after court martials found them guilty of
desertion or other acts of cowardice. It is estimated that the French executed
over 600 of its soldiers for cowardice (many think this number is actually much
higher, due to the French practice of decimation—shooting
every 10th man in units that mutinied or refused orders to attack).
Italians executed an estimated 750 men; Austria-Hungary shot over 1,100 of
their soldiers, and the Germany Army executed 48 of their own men during the Great War.*
It is now
believed that many of the men convicted of desertion, cowardice, and refusing to
follow military orders suffered from shell-shock or Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD), but at the time of these executions, military authorities were
nearly always more concerned about setting an example and maintaining discipline
than they were about attending to the specifics of individual cases.
Herbert Read was
a Yorkshire farmer’s son whose studies at the University of Leeds were
interrupted by the war. Serving in
France and Belgium with the Yorkshire Regiment, Read’s conduct in battle earned him
the Military Cross and Distinguished Service Order, but he was no stranger to
fear. In his posthumously published essay "The
Cult of Sincerity," Read writes,
I have never written about the real
horror of fighting, which is not death nor the fear of mutilation, discomfort
or filth, but a psychopathic state of hallucination in which the world becomes
unreal and you no longer know whether your experience is valid—in other words, whether
you are any longer sane.
In 1919, shortly
after the war had ended, Herbert Read published Naked Warriors, a collection of poems he had written during the war. The poem “Fear” is one of six short imagist poems
collected under the title “The Scene of War.”
III. Fear
Fear is a wave
Beating through the air
And on taut nerves impingeing
Till there it wins
Vibrating chords.
Beating through the air
And on taut nerves impingeing
Till there it wins
Vibrating chords.
All goes well
So long as you tune the instrument
To simulate composure.
So long as you tune the instrument
To simulate composure.
(So you will
become
A gallant gentleman.)
A gallant gentleman.)
But when the strings
are broken . . . .
Then you will grovel on the earth
And your rabbit eyes
Will fill with the fragments of your shattered soul.
Then you will grovel on the earth
And your rabbit eyes
Will fill with the fragments of your shattered soul.
--Herbert Read
Read’s poem uses
the metaphor of music and sound to let us feel the horrors of shell shock. Fear is compared to an eroding wave that
beats against the shore or to a concussive blast of sound that hammers at the
skull. It strikes at nerves stretched to
the breaking point until they resonate with an unholy, dissonant music. And once tuned to fear, the mind vibrates with
panic and horror until its strings snap.
A broken thing, the
man trapped in the siren song of fear is reduced to an animal-like state. He
crouches close to the earth, trembling with terror and blinded to all but his
own shattered self.
The only hope in
holding out against the beating wave of fear is to “simulate composure,” to
pretend to a courage one cannot feel, to fake a calm that is patently absurd in
a situation fraught with peril. With quiet irony, the poem reveals that if a man's acting is good
enough, then he will be proclaimed “a gallant gentleman,” chivalrously
brave and full of noble daring.
Herbert Read |
According to
Read’s biographer David Goodway, “Survival, as he [Read] said elsewhere, came
through the members of a community being with
each other in real communion….His concern to show courage was not just so
as to prove himself, but because that quality was essential for the survival
and success of the whole group. Read was
obsessively determined not to betray his own men through cowardice” (34).
In the Preface
to his 1919 poetry collection, Read sharply rebuked anyone who might seek to
romanticize the war or to ignore the toll it had taken on men who had endured the
unimaginable:
“We, who in manhood’s dawn have been compelled
to care not a damn for life or death, now care less still for the convention of
glory and the intellectual apologies for what can never be to us other than a
riot of ghastliness and horror, of inhumanity and negation.”
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*Further
research on executions in the First World War can be found in Steven R. Welch’s
article “Military
Justice” in the online 1914-1918 encyclopedia.
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