| The popular image of courts-martial during the First World War centers on such fictional works as Herbert’s The Secret Battle and, more recently, Blackadder Goes Fourth. Such depictions resulted in the ‘shot at dawn’ campaign to secure posthumous pardons and commemoration for the 346 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed during the war. The purpose of this lecture, based on a chapter in an edited collection of essays published to consider the British Army in 1918, is not to examine the validity, intellectual or legal, of that campaign’s claims, but to consider afresh wider experiences of courts-martial on the Western Front during the First World War. |
