keating and gallipoli, page-32

Anyway, back to Keating's Irish heritage - read this and note 22 Irishmen including poor James Crozier:

In World War One, the executions of 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers took place. Such executions, for crimes such as desertion and cowardice, remain a source of controversy with some believing that many of those executed should be pardoned as they were suffering from what is now called shell shock. The executions, primarily of non-commissioned ranks, included 25 Canadians, 22 Irishmen and 5 New Zealanders.

Between 1914 and 1918, the British Army identified 80,000 men with what would now be defined as the symptoms of shellshock. There were those who suffered from severe shell shock. They could not stand the thought of being on the front line any longer and deserted. Once caught, they received a court martial and, if sentenced to death, shot by a twelve man firing squad.

“We went up into the front line near Arras, through sodden and devastated countryside. As we were moving up to our sector along the communication trenches, a shell burst ahead of me and one of my platoon dropped. He was the first man I ever saw killed. Both his legs were blown off and the whole of his body and face was peppered with shrapnel. The sight turned my stomach. I was sick and terrified but even more frightened of showing it.”
Victor Silvester.

Senior military commanders would not accept a soldier’s failure to return to the front line as anything other than desertion. They also believed that if such behaviour was not harshly punished, others might be encouraged to do the same and the whole discipline of the British Army would collapse. Some men faced a court martial for other offences but the majority stood trial for desertion from their post, “fleeing in the face of the enemy”. A court martial itself was usually carried out with some speed and the execution followed shortly after.



Few soldiers wanted to be in a firing squad. Many were soldiers at a base camp recovering from wounds that still stopped them from fighting at the front but did not preclude them from firing a Lee Enfield rifle. Some of those in firing squads were under the age of sixteen, as were some of those who were shot for ‘cowardice’. James Crozier from Belfast was shot at dawn for desertion – he was just sixteen. Before his execution, Crozier was given so much rum that he passed out. He had to be carried, semi-conscious, to the place of execution. Officers at the execution later claimed that there was a very real fear that the men in the firing squad would disobey the order to shoot.