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Original poster

Pardon sought at last for WWI

43 replies

Marina · 16/08/2006 10:18

here
This must mean such a lot to surviving family members...and thank goodness we live in more enlightened times with regards to understanding Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Still don't seem to have worked out how not to send people in to battle in the first place alas

OP posts:

Joolstoo · 16/08/2006 21:10

well I'm an 'ole right' caligula and just can't get my head round the fact that they our own soldiers in these circumstances.

Can you imagine? for cowardice! makes me want to barf!

Joolstoo · 16/08/2006 21:11

executed our own soldiers

(having a senior moment there)

Heathcliffscathy · 16/08/2006 21:15

couldn't agree more caligula.

thank goodness it is no longer referred to as 'the great war'.

Blandmum · 16/08/2006 21:25

I am very pleased that they have been given a pardon. But we also have to remember that the concept of 'post traumatic stress' wasn't understood then. 'shell shock' as a concept was onlty taken on board in the latter stages of ww1.

It was a diferent world then.

i am very glad that the families will now have a degree of closure

CaligulaCorday · 17/08/2006 20:59

LOL at you being an "ole right" joolstoo.

I just think cowards have as much right to live as heroes.

We might not admire them as much, but imo that shouldn't give us the right to kill them. It's one thing to kill a traitor who has freely and genuinely signed up to an ideal and a concept and then betrayed his/ her fellows out of sheer selfishness. It's quite another to kill a human being who happened to have the misfortune to be a born at a time and place where the state required them to surrender their body for its purpose. I really hate the whole ideology of the pardon business, because it basically accepts that the state had the right to shoot cowards. And imo, it never did and never should have. Cowards have the right to life too, especially when they didn't freely sign up to whatever war it was that the state said they had to join in.

Overrun · 18/08/2006 11:57

I am so pleased that the daughter of this man is still alive, too little too late but I am still delighted.
Some of those shot for cowardice, incl under eighteens who shouldn't even have been there. There is a famous case of one young boy, who was 15 I think, and his family tried so hard to get him discharged, but the army wouldn't accept that there were underage soldiers. Even though they often knew (imo) when some one was underage, but if the boy said they were eighteen and they needed volunteers, they didn't ask too many questions

mw14 · 18/08/2006 12:28

Imagine your great grandfather was on a trench raid during WWI. Then imagine a member of his platoon had just deserted. Your ggf gets to the enemy trench, enters it, goes round a corner, and as he throws his grenade, is shot by the enemy. He dies.

Now imagine he is on the same trench raid. No-one has deserted. He gets to the enemy trench, goes round a corner, and as he throws his grenade, a shot rings out. The enemy with his weapon pointed at your ggf falls, dead, shot by your ggf's mate, a man who hated where he was, but did his duty and stayed in the line.

CaligulaCorday · 18/08/2006 12:35

Why is it the "duty" of an 18 year old conscript to stay and fight an imperialist war in which he's had no say and which will not benefit him in any way?

Sorry, don't buy it.

Overrun · 18/08/2006 12:37

Blimey MW14! Now imagine that the deserter is your 14 year old son, who volunteered because he thought it would all be lots of fun, and that every one would think that he was a hero.WOW!
Now here he is, shivering it a trench, cold, frightened, he can't stop shaking. He just wants his Mum, the older men try and look afer him but its just not the same.
He asks to go home, but just gets laughed at by his commanding officer. He thinks, I won't leave completely, but will just go back from the front line for a little while to get some sleep. He is found in a barn, sleeping, within days he is in front of a firing squad.
Some of that I made up, but some of it was based on documentary I saw. I'm sure those older men that he served with, didn't blame him for leaving.

colditz · 18/08/2006 12:37

If we are talking of imagine, if all the people here with 10 year olds could imagine that in 6 years time someone will come and take your beautiful child away to be shot at... wil you child be ready for that? Would you think your child a coward for being frightened?

SaintGeorgeMarple · 18/08/2006 12:42

I am truely torn over this.

My GD was an underage volunteer in WWI. He lost a leg and was gassed, leading to his ultimate loss of sight. He was a prisoner of war and suffered from shell shock.

I never had the blessing of meeting him but I know his thoughts and feelings on 'cowardice' and the firing squad because I have his diaries.
He was also torn because he knew men who were executed, some, in his view, rightly others very much wrongly.
He was there, he knew these men and even he could never make his mind up as to if those men were really deserters or simply terrified young men.

mw14 · 18/08/2006 12:44

Underage soldiers should not have been accepted. When found they should have been discharged. I make no excuses for that. But you cannot run an army based on the wants of individuals. Battles rely on people doing what they are supposed to be doing, when they are supposed to do it. If they do not, people get killed unnecessarily. Those who have served know that.

motherinferior · 18/08/2006 12:47

I agree with Caligula.

I'm not hog-whimpering wild about war, really.

colditz · 18/08/2006 12:47

BUT NOT EVERYONE THERE WAS THERE VOLUNTARILY

motherinferior · 18/08/2006 12:51

Or if they were, it was a deeply compromised sense of the word 'voluntary'; one in which 'it would all be over by Christmas', one in which men who didn't go to the Front were sent white feathers, one in which it was thought to be sweet and dutiful to die for one's country...while the reality of the Front was unimaginably more obscene than any war had ever been before.

My grandfather went to the front aged 16 (I imagine his Swedish surname, which can be taken for German, was a major factor in this). He was, I am very glad to say, invalided out.

Blandmum · 18/08/2006 12:57

Life (and death) were all just so much harder then, in the army and out of it. Life expectancy of a woman in 1900 was round 50 in the UK.

A different time, a different view of life.

I am glad they have been pardoned

mw14 · 18/08/2006 13:04

Not trying to be difficult here, but they have not yet been pardoned. Des Browne plans to add a clause tot he latest Armed Forces bill that would grant a collective parliamentry pardon.

SaintGeorgeMarple · 18/08/2006 13:21

I'm not saying they were all there voluntarily. Just explaining my GD's position and why it colours my own opinion.

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