recently the British Govt granted retrospective pardons to soldiers who were executed in the First World War for cowardice in the face of the enemy and desertion from the front line, after decades of campaigning by the families of these men to have this stain on their memories removed.

Many of these men had served loyally and bravely, until driven to refuse orders due to the appalling conditions and almost certain death facing them in the trenches, spending month after month in sodden, rat-infested trenches with miserable food, riddled with disease, waeary, lacking basic sanitation, sleeping amongst rotting corpses, commanded by imbecilic upper-class officers who, with little or no experience of modern warfare, and complete contempt for the "lower orders" would order them "over the top" into massed machine-gun fire, artillery bombardment, and poison gas attacks. The French army, in the same conditions, suffered large scale mutinies, although there is only one recorded instance of British units committing mutiny en masse (at Etaples training camp in 1917) However there were several hundred individual cases, many of which would nowadays be recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder, which would be treated sympathetically. Back then, it was simply known as "shell-shock" and was mostly a result of the incessant artillery barrages to which soldiers at the front were subjected.

Rather like the Vietnam War for Americans, conditions were so bad that the people at home really had no conception whatsoever of what life was like at the front, and soldiers who did go home on leave found that they were disassociated and alienated from "normal" life to the point that they would actually want to go back to the miserable and brutish existence at the front, where at least they could be with comrades who shared and understood their experiences.

Not all the soldiers who were executed were conscripts, either; many were volunteers, some underage, who'd joined thinking the whole business was a patriotic adventure, and this was what they'd been led to believe at home prior to joining up; this was how the authorites of the day presented the war. The reality proved too much for some, and for others, as I've said, they simply refused to carry on being part of the seemingly endless slaughter of bungled mass offensives and viciously cruel attrition warfare.

However, much as this has been a welcome decision for many, both relatives of the executed men, and indeed to most of the public, it does raise issues. I've already said in another thread that it's wrong to rewrite the past to fit in with modern attitudes, no matter how well-meant, and the fact remains that by the standards of the day these men were guilty. All the other soldiers stayed at their posts and fought, despite the stupidity of the carnage; they did their duty and obeyed orders, even if the orders were given by utter donkeys who didn't give a damn about their men. The courts-martial that condemned these men to death were brief and officious, averaging about 20 minutes, but again, given the cirumstances of the time and that the Command offciers were desperately trying to hold together an army that had been badly mauled as the years dragged on, such apparent cruelty was if not justified then understandable. After all, the Romans used to execute one man in every ten if a unit disobeyed orders, even if the individual men had taken no active part in any mutiny. If you were the tenth man on the count, you were done for, end of story. At east in the Great War, the men who were executed had actually done the things they were accused of. And of course, some were genuine deserters, real cowards who were shirking the fight.

nearly a century later of course, it's nigh on impossible to go through the cusrory legal records of the time and decide who was a real coward and who was suffering from trauma, with all the witnesses now being dead, apart from a few survivors of the war in their 90s and 100s. So that's why the Govt caved in and gave a blanket pardon.

My point is this: regardless of the rights and wrongs of this particular issue, and beleive me, having studied the Great War in depth, I can well understand why they refused to fight - I'd probably have done the same eventually, given the same circumstances - but should we sanitise history in this way? if we allow that most of these men were unjustly killed, regardless of the circumstances of the time, then by the same logic we must allow that many other people in history have been unjustly executed by their own Governments, and therefore should, still following the same logic, be posthumously vindicated and pardoned.

for example

Charles Stuart Parnell, who strived in Parliament for Irish Home Rule, and actually took part in plots to undrmine British rule in ireland; although he was executed not for his part in the Irish Republican movemnt, but because the discovery of his private letters revealed him to be a homosexual which filled the British public with utter loathing.

Admiral Byng, who was court-martialled and shot on the deck of his own flagship in 1757 for losing the Batlle of Menorca during the Seven Years War. He was not shot for cowardice or desertion, but was made a scapegoat for his bungling superiors in the Admiralty and the Govt of the day.

Sir Walter Raleigh, famous British sailor, explorer, and adventurer, former favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, executed under KIng James I at the insistence of the Spanish Amabassador for an attack on Spanish territories in S America that Raleigh was undertaking for the British (on the excuse that he had supposedely been involved in a plot against the Queen some years before, but really it was so
James, never the bravest of monarchs, could avoid a war with Spain)

Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days in 1553, executed again ostensibly for treason but really to make way for Mary Tudor ("Bloody" Mary) Jane Grey was accused of being behind a plot to capture and kill Mary (WYatt's Rebellion) but as was widely known at the time, she had nothing to do with it, nor could have. Jane's claim to the throne, quite apart from her lineage, was partly legitimised by Edward Vi's will naming her as his successor, but she lacked sufficient support in the country amongst men of influence and the public at large, and was nothing more than a pawn who was cast aside while Mary rapidly assembled enough support to ensure her own place on the throne.

And of course, most famously perhaps, King Charles I, the only reigning monarch ever to have been tried, condemned, and executed by his own people in all British history. He may have been a shockingly poor king while he lived, but his comportment to his death was noble and digniied, and truly kingly. Quite how a reigning monarch can be guilty of treason at all has escaped legal experts and historians ever since, for he was of course executed to make way for Parliamentary rule and ultimately Cromwell's republican Commonwealth, and to put an end to the Crown. He did indeed resist, wrongly, Parliament's efforts to limit his power; he did cling to outdated and unworkable ideas of a monarch's divine right to rule; he did invite Irish and French forces, all Catholics, to fight on his side against Parliament, mostly Protestant and increasingly dominated by Puritans; he did have a Catholic French wife, and worshipped in the Catholic