Mercy comes late to executed WWI soldier

In Flanders Fields, mercy has come late to Sgt. John Thomas Wall.

His gravestone stands among 950 others under freshly clipped grass at the New Military Cemetery -- in death seemingly an equal among equals.

The memory of “Jack” Wall, though, has always been under a cloud. He was one of hundreds of soldiers of the First World War who were shot by their own men for cowardice or desertion.

Just short of 90 years after he was executed at dawn for refusing to take his men to a near-certain death, Sgt. Wall and 305 other British soldiers were pardoned Wednesday under a law approved by Parliament that now awaits the formality of Queen Elizabeth II’s assent.

“It is better to acknowledge that injustices were clearly done in some cases,” said British Defense Secretary Des Browne. “All these men were victims of war.”

“I hope that pardoning these men will finally remove the stigma with which their families have lived for years.”

Jill Turner watched the House of Commons vote live on TV and drank Champagne. “I burst into tears,” she said. “I don’t normally drink and I did have a drink.”

Jack Wall was the young brother of her grandmother, Fanny Evans. Evans’ husband was killed in France in 1916 and a cousin died in the Allied assault on Gallipoli in Turkey. The execution of Jack Wall at dawn on Sept. 6, 1917, brought shame on top of grief.

Evans mourned the three men for the rest of her life, Turner said in a telephone interview from her home in Eastbourne, England. “She never laughed again.”

Jack Wall was an unlikely target for the firing squad. He joined the army as drummer boy in 1912, at age 16, and made sergeant during World War I.

“It is clear he was an excellent soldier,” said Piet Chielens, who directs In Flanders Fields, the war museum in the Belgian city of Ieper that was better known to the soldiers of 1914-18 by its French name, Ypres.

“Then one day he decides to stay in a bunker with eight men because the stretch he has to cover is open to German fire,” he said. “He is charged with desertion and executed for that one crime.” What he did “was an error in judgment at best.”

During his court-martial on Aug. 20, 1917, in the Belgian town of Poperinge, Wall said he had remained hunkered down to avoid German gunfire. He did not claim shellshock or battle fatigue. “He used tactical arguments in his defense,” said Chielens.

His excellent war record was not taken into account. Before his trial, he had written home that he had met a Flemish girl he wanted to marry after the war.

Amid a death toll of about 600,000 from poison gas, gunfire and shelling in the Flanders region of Belgium, the executions stood out as a particular horror.

“The grimness of the tales made such a big impression on me as a kid. That is why I really dug into the subject,” said Chielens. “It is the most cruel of all deaths, worse than dying on the battlefield.”

Today, many such cases would be treated as “post-traumatic stress disorder,” with the soldiers offered counseling. Back then shellshock was seen as no excuse for “cowardice”; the military used firing squads when motivation in the trenches flagged.

Turner is still dumbfounded at the death sentence. “I could not understand why anyone who entered the forces as an underage soldier and got the rank of sergeant by 21 could have done anything wrong,” she said.

Neither could her grandmother, who in her shame mixed as little as possible with the locals around her remote Worcestershire cottage. “It is an isolated country area and people’s memory goes back forever,” Turner said.

She remembers her grandmother refusing to don the traditional poppy that the British wear to remember their fallen on Armistice Day, Nov. 11.

Turner has addressed the issue publicly, buoyed by the “shot at dawn” campaign in Britain that sought the pardons. Some families, though, still feel the stigma.

“I have relatives now who do not want their names or addresses or anything about them revealed in the newspapers because of the shame,” she said.

Even if the decision won some piece of mind for her and her family, she still felt “bittersweet” at best. After all, a pardon does not amount to an exoneration. “Underneath, some shame is still there.”

In 1993, Britain’s then-prime minister, John Major, ruled out such pardons, saying, “We cannot rewrite history by substituting our latter-day judgment for that of contemporaries.”

This time, the British Parliament was swayed. The recent campaigns have already drawn more visitors to the graves of those executed. Some leave little crosses on the graves, decorated with poppies and bearing handwritten messages.

More such mementoes are found at the wooden post in the courtyard of Poperinge City Hall, at the spot where at least eight British soldiers faced the firing squad. (The site of Wall’s execution is unknown.)

The post, used for the final execution in May 1919, now stands as a memorial, with the words of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Coward”:

I could not look on Death

Which being known

Men led me to him

Blindfold and alone.

Chiseled on Sgt. John Thomas Wall’s gravestone is the old French motto of his Worcestershire Regiment, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense -- “Shamed be anyone who thinks evil of it.”

Now, that also applies to the soldier buried underneath.