less than a week before his twenty-first birthday.
From near Roberts’s grave in Boulogne you can look over the Channel and see England. Boulogne is six miles from Étaples, which was the bullring of fierce training for the Western Front. The Newfoundland officers were posted here for a refresher course to“inculcate the offensive spirit.” The poet Wilfred Owen spoke of the soldiers in Étaples, after recuperating from wounds in the hospitals of Boulogne, preferring to return straight to the front rather than face the training drills of Étaples. How severe were those sergeants, many of whom had not been to the front. “The men here,” Owen said, “had faces unlike any I’d seen in the trenches or in England: faces with the eyes of dead rabbits.” And Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem about the mutiny that occurred in Étaples only a year after the execution of John Roberts. The mutiny was against the same military police who had arrested Roberts. A soldier had been imprisoned, unfairly, for desertion and a thousand men rebelled.
One hundred years later, in a cemetery near Birmingham, England, there is a Shot at Dawn Memorial for the more than three hundred British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for desertion. These men, once considered cowards, had been suffering from post-traumatic shock. It took guts or craziness to amble away from your regiment, or the front line, on your own.
I thought about John Roberts and his twenty-oneyears. His brain knocked clear of the rules of behaviour. That animal instinct of preserving oneself which annihilates the military’s attempt to indoctrinate an
esprit de corps.
A bird will preen when it realizes defense is futile and it cannot escape. These soldiers who have wandered away are preening themselves, devoid of morale. I salute you, John Roberts, Newfoundlander, wrongly executed.
It confirmed something in me. Yes, I decided, I have to see the land around the Somme, the land at Beaumont-Hamel, and I have to see it before the Big Push occurs. This book is partly about the land. The men were either buried in this land or blowing the land up. Of all that ordnance buried in Salisbury, not a round of it had been fired in warfare. So much of war is training. So much destruction happens in the preparation.
I WALK TOWARDS AUCHONVILLERS
The next morning, I was up so early that the hotel lights in Calais were still on, giving off that fatigued glow that dawn presents. How tired the night is—and still you have to swing yourself away from the party of the night and join the bristling morning or you are lost. I hate paying for a room and then leaving it halfway through the morning. But I did so in order to arrive in Beaumont-Hamel on July first.
This is what the men did: a lot of route-marches. And much waiting for buses and trains, and walking through the dark. A young man asleep on a bench at the train platform had been on the Calais ferry with me—I could tell by his deflation that he’d slept on the bench all night. Two pairs of white socks with coloured bands. I thought of the mother of Hugh McWhirter and the socks she’d knit and mailed to him, that she wanted to transfer over to her other son, George. That would be me, I thought, if I was not writing a book. If I didn’t have a modest travel budget. If I was, like him and John Roberts, only twenty-one.
I took the train and it was practically dawn as I zipped past the death of John Roberts and then the bullring of Étaples and managed to lift my head to see the town of Flixecourt, where Sassoon went to training school. Sassoon had a bath at Flixecourt and thought it important enough to write this: “Remembering that I had a bath may not be of much interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story that I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a
From near Roberts’s grave in Boulogne you can look over the Channel and see England. Boulogne is six miles from Étaples, which was the bullring of fierce training for the Western Front. The Newfoundland officers were posted here for a refresher course to“inculcate the offensive spirit.” The poet Wilfred Owen spoke of the soldiers in Étaples, after recuperating from wounds in the hospitals of Boulogne, preferring to return straight to the front rather than face the training drills of Étaples. How severe were those sergeants, many of whom had not been to the front. “The men here,” Owen said, “had faces unlike any I’d seen in the trenches or in England: faces with the eyes of dead rabbits.” And Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem about the mutiny that occurred in Étaples only a year after the execution of John Roberts. The mutiny was against the same military police who had arrested Roberts. A soldier had been imprisoned, unfairly, for desertion and a thousand men rebelled.
One hundred years later, in a cemetery near Birmingham, England, there is a Shot at Dawn Memorial for the more than three hundred British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for desertion. These men, once considered cowards, had been suffering from post-traumatic shock. It took guts or craziness to amble away from your regiment, or the front line, on your own.
I thought about John Roberts and his twenty-oneyears. His brain knocked clear of the rules of behaviour. That animal instinct of preserving oneself which annihilates the military’s attempt to indoctrinate an
esprit de corps.
A bird will preen when it realizes defense is futile and it cannot escape. These soldiers who have wandered away are preening themselves, devoid of morale. I salute you, John Roberts, Newfoundlander, wrongly executed.
It confirmed something in me. Yes, I decided, I have to see the land around the Somme, the land at Beaumont-Hamel, and I have to see it before the Big Push occurs. This book is partly about the land. The men were either buried in this land or blowing the land up. Of all that ordnance buried in Salisbury, not a round of it had been fired in warfare. So much of war is training. So much destruction happens in the preparation.
I WALK TOWARDS AUCHONVILLERS
The next morning, I was up so early that the hotel lights in Calais were still on, giving off that fatigued glow that dawn presents. How tired the night is—and still you have to swing yourself away from the party of the night and join the bristling morning or you are lost. I hate paying for a room and then leaving it halfway through the morning. But I did so in order to arrive in Beaumont-Hamel on July first.
This is what the men did: a lot of route-marches. And much waiting for buses and trains, and walking through the dark. A young man asleep on a bench at the train platform had been on the Calais ferry with me—I could tell by his deflation that he’d slept on the bench all night. Two pairs of white socks with coloured bands. I thought of the mother of Hugh McWhirter and the socks she’d knit and mailed to him, that she wanted to transfer over to her other son, George. That would be me, I thought, if I was not writing a book. If I didn’t have a modest travel budget. If I was, like him and John Roberts, only twenty-one.
I took the train and it was practically dawn as I zipped past the death of John Roberts and then the bullring of Étaples and managed to lift my head to see the town of Flixecourt, where Sassoon went to training school. Sassoon had a bath at Flixecourt and thought it important enough to write this: “Remembering that I had a bath may not be of much interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story that I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a
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