In 1914, the socialist leaders of the Second International voted in the parliaments of European (mostly) democracies to fund a fratricidal war, betraying the bedrock of socialist principles, international solidarity, in favor of social chauvinism. eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'historylearningsite_co_uk-leader-3','ezslot_19',117,'0','0']));eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'historylearningsite_co_uk-leader-3','ezslot_20',117,'0','1'])); A French military observer witnessed one execution by the French Army: “The two condemned were tied up from head to toe like sausages. . Why should we read yet another account? A thick bandage hid their faces. A new law passed on November 8th 2006 and included as part of the Armed Forces Act has pardoned men in the British and Commonwealth armies who were executed in World War One. I will try my best to get out of it, so don’t worry.”eval(ez_write_tag([[300,250],'historylearningsite_co_uk-large-mobile-banner-1','ezslot_12',116,'0','0']));eval(ez_write_tag([[300,250],'historylearningsite_co_uk-large-mobile-banner-1','ezslot_13',116,'0','1'])); Because of the ‘crimes’ committed by these men, their names were not put on war memorials after the war. of play between them and the fixed object. One of the many reasons that anger the campaigners is that far more men deserted in the United Kingdom than in France/Belgium (four times) but that no-one was ever executed for desertion actually in the UK. He was the first man I ever saw killed. harm, and leave no permanent mark on the offender. Field punishment could be awarded by a court martial or a commanding officer for any offence committed on active service. As we were moving up to our sector along the communication trenches, a shell burst ahead of me and one of my platoon dropped. Then they turned their backs on the bodies and the sergeant ordered “Quick march!”eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'historylearningsite_co_uk-large-mobile-banner-2','ezslot_14',118,'0','0'])); The men marched right passed them, without inspecting their weapons, without turning a head. British Army in 1881. Overhauling Hong Kong’s Judiciary: The Time Is Right, An Immigrant Nation, Defined by Racial Inequality, Ginsberg’s America: an American Poet Describes an Uncertain Nation, Riding With Biden Has Its Consequences Too, California’s Proposition 15 Would Reform Prop 13: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Cultivated Lunacy, Nuclear Deterrence and Banning the Nuke, How Decades of Corporate-Friendly Farm Policies Wrecked Rural America, Trump-Biden II: Dueling Billionaire-Backed Liars, Bighorns From Two Herds are Sick and Dying Due to Disease Spread by Domestic Sheep, More Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch in the Dark, Democracy Calls Us to Fight the Lesser of Two Evils, Diane di Prima:  Poet of the Great American Counterculture. The sight turned my stomach. Darker still than the evidence of collusion of the social democrats with the capitalist bourgeoisie, is Pauwels’ proposition that this price—the mass slaughter of proletarians– was one of the war’s intended results. The indictment of the war as a crime has been etched in the collective memory on the Anglophone side by the words of the English poet, writer, and decorated war hero, Siegfried Sassoon. (“Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration.”). When the condemned had been attached, the men of the platoon who had not been able to see events, responding to a silent gesture. Both his legs were blown off and the whole of his body and face was peppered with shrapnel. To be sure, as Pauwels illustrates, the war was a crime of unprecedented horror as even bourgeois historians, chroniclers, diarists, poets, novelists, painters, and musicians have acknowledged and documented. A most humiliating form of punishment which continued into the late 1920s, Field Punishment No.1 saw the soldier in question attached standing full-length to a fixed object - either a post or a gun wheel - for up to two hours a day (often one hour in the morning and another in the afternoon) for a maximum of 21 days. . 1, with In World War One, the executions of 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers took place. If exposed to open sunshine this form of There is no discontinuity between the aggression on and the coveting of territorial possessions by the Western powers of 1914 and 2018: today the Western powers attack, subordinate, decimate, and even exterminate one group of peoples after another.