They came for him early on a Tuesday morning, Army early, not normal early. Early before the sun came up. Early before the few birds that dared risk the close approximation to hell that was Eastern France in the first World War started singing their dawn chorus and before the Chaplain came around to ask if anyone needed to pray before breakfast.
There may not have been any birds, salvation, or daylight above the barbed wire, mud, and shell holes of no man's land, but His Company Commander was there, as was the Company Sergeant Major and Provost Sergeant. Behind them were the Platoon Commander and Platoon Sergeant, so with the four Burly Regimental Policemen as well it made the twelve-man underground dugout quite cosy.
They dragged him from his bed, a thin blanket left behind with his tobacco tin and spare boots and gave him two minutes to dress. The company commander stepped forward with a pocketknife and sliced the regimental buttons from his battledress then snatched his cap badge. The Major paused only to slap the man hard in the face as he pronounced him a disgrace to the Regiment, the Army, the Nation and the King and expressed a desire to see him punished before God, then performed as smart an about turn as his rank and circumstances allowed.
With a curt "Sarn't Major, Colour Mulligan, with me," he left. The two Senior NCOs showed that cramped conditions were no hindrance to performing smarter drill movements than Officers and marched out as if on a parade square.
The Platoon commander was a young man, more a boy really, no older than nineteen. A few straggly hairs on his top lip masquerading as a moustache. He stepped up to the prisoner and with what he hoped was a steady, commanding voice pronounced:
"You're a Bally Swine. An absolute disgrace. You've really shown yourself up."
His voice was neither commanding, nor steady, which gave the platoon sergeant a moment's sorrow that he was expected to take orders from that callow boy, then he too gave the prisoner a look of utmost contempt and followed his young superior out into the trenches. The young officer would meet his demise two months later, less than a hundred yards from the dugout, crying into his sergeant's shoulder as he bled out from a shattered leg. The Sergeant would survive the war but would forever find himself haunted by the horrors he and so many others endured.
The same horrors may be some explanation for the actions that led the prisoner to his fate that day, or it may be there was a deeper more visceral cause, maybe some people are just evil, forever.
The Regimental Police took him back through the trenches to a forward holding location for trial if you can call it a trial. At the time, early in nineteen-sixteen, there was a belief amongst the higher echelons of the British Army that quick and decisive treatment of prisoners was best. They said it provided a clear declaration that unacceptable behaviour would not be tolerated, promoted the standards to which all soldiers should aspire, and was good for the men's morale.
To further enhance the morale boosting properties of their actions the punishments were recorded photographically and sent to the front to be displayed on battalion noticeboards, alongside Part One Orders each day.
What no one considered was that seeing their comrades brutally punished for indiscretions from failure to correctly address an officer or incorrect dress at one extreme to capital crimes such as desertion and murder at the other only added to the all-pervading depression and fear that hung over the western front like a dark cloak. Beatings for a button undone on a trouser pocket, or firing squads for cowardice, or as we would call it now PTSD, emphasised the contempt in which the men felt their lives were held by their superiors.
For more serious crimes summary court martial by field officers was not only allowed, it was actively encouraged, all the better to get things done quickly "for the good of the service." Which is why Brigadier the Honourable Lord Aubrey-Hinshelwood and Colonels Allison, and Whittle convened a court martial two days later, on the Thursday, to hear the guilty man's plea and sentence him to execution.
The Brigadier was a tall man with red hair that he dyed black, and a distant look in his eye. He was often thought to be aloof, whereas in fact he simply had no point of reference with people that hadn't grown up on a five-hundred-acre estate in Suffolk, where he'd had his run of the female servants and the men were subservient to his every command.
He dyed his hair in the mistaken belief that red hair made him an object of ridicule amongst the men, in fact it was his reputation for sleeping with any woman that worked for him, his weak will and lack of leadership that made him an object of ridicule. That and dying his hair.
The accused prisoner's plea was non-existent, the charges were foul and the evidence unassailable. The clerk of the court read a summary.
"You have been found to be serving under a false name, and whilst so serving have been found guilty of looting and pillaging the private chapel of Monsieur Lecomte D'Alban, of stealing precious artifacts from said chapel, of murdering two of his estate workers and of the rape and murder of his cook, his housekeeper and an eighteen-year-old boy in the stables. I will now pass over to the Brigadier for sentencing."
The Brigadier stood and rather than put on his peaked cap he reached into the desk and took out a black wig.
"You have constantly refused to give your true name, so I sentence you under no name. The crimes of which you have been found guilty are so heinous, so terrible that I have no alternative but to issue a death penalty. In fact, they are so unspeakable that I relish the penalty, in the firm knowledge that the world, despite the hell hole in which we serve, will be a cleaner and purer place without you.
You will be taken from here to a place of execution where you will be shot by a squad of volunteers, and I assure you there will be no shortage of volunteers. Get him out of here Sergeant Major."
The Regimental Sergeant stamped his feet and turned to the prisoner. He had a voice that could carry across the battlefield so from a range of two feet it was deafening. "Prisoner, Prisoner 'Shun. Prisoner 'Shun. I said PRISONER FUCKING 'SHUN"
The condemned man turned slowly towards the red-faced NCO, fury at his subject's immobility etched across his being. For the first time in the entire proceedings, he spoke. "Or fucking what? Come on you pompous prick, let's get it over with." He stuck his hands pointedly in his pockets and shambled towards the door.
His shuffling was surprisingly quick making the RSM have to jump to catch up, "Guards, escort that man" he shouted in a vain attempt to restore his punctured dignity, but by then it was too late, and the prisoner was already on his way to the firing range where he spoke again.
"I'll have me fag and some booze now then."
Brigadier the Honourable Lord Aubrey-Hinshelwood reached the door in time to see the prisoner expertly rolling a smoke one handed and swigging from an enamel mug of rough navy rum, he paused mid gulp and pointed towards his judge.
"Know this, all of you. You ain't heard the last o' me. Kill me now and I'll chase you down the corridors of time. I'll find you, or yours, and I'll have my revenge. If it's tomorrow or a hundred years from now or more. I will fuckin' 'ave you."
With that he took a mouthful of rum, picked up and struck a Lucifer, and spat the rum upwards across the sputtering flame.
Navy Rum is over 50% alcohol, so it ignited in an incandescent ball that burst upwards, the heat taking it twenty feet in the air where it caught the eye of a German Observer, suspended in a wicker basket below an observation balloon. He took a bearing with his compass, gave an approximation of distance over his field telephone handset and called in a fire mission.
The prisoner was tied to the post, a final roll up cigarette hanging from his lips, he refused a blindfold, swearing again and telling the firing squad he wanted to look them in the eye as he was shot, the photographer loaded a glass plate in his camera, he was trying a new process that differed from the Daguerreotypes of the earlier war years by using a mix of rare earths and, in a testament to ignorance of the potential consequences, Radium.
It was an expensive system so he wouldn't use it for more than a month or two before the Silver Nitrate process was developed giving cheaper and more consistent results.
He wasn't employed by the Army or the War Office, Lord Aubrey-Hinshelwood had retained him personally, most of his time was spent getting images of His Lordship looking authoritative, or heroic, or just distinguished. As part of his service, he was given a cottage on the Hinshelwood estate which he filled with experimental photographic equipment.
The firing squad loaded their Lee Enfield.303 rifles with one round each and in a synchronised movement born of too much practice they all prepared to shoot.
A split second before the rifles fired the photographer pulled opened his shutter and in that instant the barrage landed. The Observer and Mortar crew were among the best in the German army, dropping eight 71.8mm mortar rounds in a square no more than a dozen feet across, turning the firing squad, the prisoner and the two colonels into a fine pink mist mixed with mud and shrapnel.
The photographer was slightly luckier, in as far as he took a steel splinter through his abdomen that he survived but robbed him of any sensation below his chest for the next twenty years. His instinctive release of the shutter caught the instant of the first bomb exploding and silhouetted the prisoner and the three other shells in mid-flight.
The Brigadier was knocked backwards by the initial blast and suffered no more than a bruised shoulder and a superficial cut to his cheek, for which a grateful King later pinned a medal to his chest for bravery in action.
The picture was saved, but as it involved the deaths of many innocents as well as a criminal it was decided not to send it to the front, instead it was left with the photographer who took a morbid delight in developing it onto glass and mounting it in a frame so he could hang it in the window of his estate cottage and see the final moment of the prisoner's life and the final moments the photographer could walk, projected onto his wall.
Brigadier the Honourable Lord Aubrey-Hinshelwood returned to England shortly after his decoration by the King to take a role in the recruitment of more young men to be slaughtered in foreign mud, prior to departing for Rajasthan to take over the Northern Command of the British Indian Army, a post he held until his death in nineteen twenty-eight.
Lady Aubrey-Hinshelwood spent many happy days standing alongside her hero husband, basking in his reflected glory while encouraging mothers and wives to send their men off to die, both in England and India.
Both took to life in the twilight days of the Raj as if born for it, which of course in some ways they had been, she had never been interested in the intimate side of married life and was grateful both for her husband's long absences visiting remote parts of his command and the traditional arrangements of separate sleeping quarters for the couple. She also chose not to ask what he got up to in the hot Indian nights, but both parties would take advantage of female Punkah Wallahs throughout the night.
