Deserters of the First World War

Australian Forces Field Court Martial

By Andrea Hetherington

Pen and Sword Books Ltd., 2021

Matthew Barrrett, Reviewer

Originally Presented at Canadian Military History, Vol. 33, #2

In Deserters of the First World War: The Home Front, Hetherington delves into this intriguing and neglected topic by investigating the experiences and motivations of British and Dominion soldiers who for one reason or another, at one time or another, rejected military duty. By turning our attention away from offenses on the battlefield to the situation in the United Kingdom, Hetherington explores the social lives of ordinary soldiers-turned deserters as they navigated precarious fugitive status on the home front.

From the perspective of working-class civilians in uniform, she argues, “Desertion was a small strike against the monotony of the military machine, a brief holiday from routine. It was a tactic for a man to negotiate or manoeuvre his way through a war which was mostly beyond his immediate control and it was a tactic utilized by many thousands of men” (p. 172). Frustrated with poor living conditions, inadequate compensation or unfair discipline, soldiers, especially those with trade union backgrounds, often interpreted absenteeism as another form of worker protest rather than a wholesale mutiny against the military system.

Army authorities nevertheless responded with all the legal and disciplinary tools to catch and punish the offenders, setting a deterrent for any who would overstay leave or abscond from a reserve depot. Between 1914 and 1920, over 82,000 courts martial in the British Army and Dominion forces were held for charges of desertion and absence without leave in the United Kingdom (p. 1).

Although the distinction between the two crimes was not always clear cut in practice, desertion required evidence that the soldier did not intend to return. The courts sentenced most convicted of either offence to periods of detention in barracks or imposed prison terms on habitual offenders. To prevent the prospect of misconduct and confinement from becoming perverse incentives to escape military service, authorities used suspended and commuted sentences to send convicted soldiers to duty and danger at the front.

Hetherington’s study proceeds roughly chronologically from the earliest examples of desertion shortly after the declaration of war in August 1914 through to the enforcement of conscription under the Military Service Act of 1916 to demobilisation and the postwar treatment of wartime deserters. Thematically, the chapters also explore interesting aspects of deserters’ lives on the home front, such as domestic issues, employment challenges, criminality, ethnicity and the depictions of desertion in the popular press. 

Desertion not infrequently resulted from marital rather than strictly martial problems, and a wayward serviceman could burden families with economic and emotional uncertainty. Some discarded their uniforms for more lucrative munitions work and others managed to evade military justice for years in the countryside working for farmers. Some runaway soldiers impersonated serving officers and veterans to exploit false military glory for profit while more nefarious individuals turned to vice and violence. Attitudes toward deserters could reflect ethnic prejudices with the problem of shirking disproportionately and unfairly associated with Jewish and Irish communities. In her analysis, Hetherington points out that the negative perception of deserters was balanced to some degree with public sympathy for volunteers-turned absentees who had at least served for a time at the front. Greater press hostility toward the problem of shirking was reserved for the deserter’s civilian counterpart—the conscientious objector (p. 51).

Deserters of the First World War relies on a range of War Office archival files but with much of the British Army court martial record long since destroyed, Hetherington turns to contemporary newspapers and other periodicals, such as the Illustrated Police News and John Bull, for accounts of deserter prosecutions. Mining these sources reveals public reactions to the problem of desertion and offers a valuable if partial window into deserters’ motivations and experiences. As the author notes, the accusations of prosecutors, judgements of court members and testimony of the accused raised questions about credibility and truth behind each story recounted in newspaper columns. Furthermore, the popular press would tend to have featured stories about the more unusual and extraordinary examples of desertion. Despite the loss of most British Army court files, the chapter on the “Wild Colonial Boys,” about desertion among Dominion forces, makes good use of the far more complete and accessible Canadian Expeditionary Force court martial records held at Library and Archives Canada.

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Perceptions of wartime desertion tend to evoke scenes of panicked or worn-out soldiers fleeing the trenches before battle, perhaps traumatised by shell shock after unbearable frontline service. The Shot at Dawn Memorial, which commemorates the 306 British and Dominion soldiers executed for cowardice and desertion, captures this popular image of the deserter—a young boy-soldier blindfolded and tied to a post awaiting the fatal bullet. While these deaths galvanised a public and political campaign twenty years ago to secure posthumous pardons, a singular focus on execution cases can distort a deeper understanding of desertion in less extreme circumstances as well as its broader legal, social and cultural implications. 

Associating desertion primarily with a genuine medical problem like combat stress or shell shock further removes the agency of some absentee soldiers who may have seen their action as a deliberate choice or protest rather than an inevitable consequence of psychological breakdown. As Hetherington persuasively demonstrates, those accused of desertion responded to a variety of internal and external factors, and telling their fascinating stories provides an essential new perspective on the wartime experience and especially about the home front environment.

Matthew Barrrett