Private Nelson
Julian Putkowski
When soldiers charged with capital offences made reference to their nerves being poor they generally attributed their overwrought condition to the effects of shellfire or battle stress. However, domestic stress was no less difficult to bear and even if officers believed what they were told by an anguished defendant, the complainant ran the danger of being regarded as innately weak and unmanly.
Private William Nelson, 14 Battalion Durham Light Infantry had been sentenced to 21 days' Field Punishment No.1 by his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel G.F. Menzies, for, "Stealing a pair of Puttees, the property of an officer". However, after a week he was temporarily released on 15 July, escorted back to K camp in order to resume front line duties with his battalion. On rejoining his platoon, his NCO agreed to allow Nelson to visit the canteen accompanied by an escort.
When they reached the canteen, Nelson disappeared into the crowded canteen and did not re-emerge. At 10 p.m. on 18 July, he turned up at 6 Division Stores in Poperinge and asked two junior NCO's who were on duty whether he could sleep the night on the premises. They demanded to know why he was not with his battalion and after a little hesitation he admitted that he was an absentee. His accommodation for the night later turned out to be in one of the cells at Poperinge Town Hall.
He was charged with desertion and tried by a Field General Court Martial held at Wormhoudt. Two of the three officers hearing his case were from the Durham Light infantry and one, Captain B. Rosher, was serving with the defendant's unit.
Facing a possible death sentence, without legal assistance, or the support of a prisoner's friend, Nelson had pleaded "Not Guilty" to the charge. Five witnesses for the prosecution sketched out the chronology of his offence.
Nelson's defence consisted of a brief statement:
"I have had a lot of trouble at home, and my nerves are badly upset. My father is a prisoner in Germany and is losing his eyesight there through bad treatment. My mother died while I was still in England, leaving my sister aged 13 and my brother aged 10. I am the only one left. I had to leave them in charge of a neighbour. I had no intention of deserting. I did not realise what I was doing when I left the camp. When I did so I went and gave myself up. When I went to the store my object was to get a night's sleep and then go and surrender in the morning. I thought it was too late to do so that night. I did not know when the battalion was coming out of the trenches."
The court was unimpressed by his physical and emotional woes. After they had found him guilty, details of Nelson’s service and his disciplinary record were recounted. He had enlisted on 7 September 1914 and arrived with his battalion in France almost exactly a year later. During 1916 he had twice previously faced courts-martial.
On 26 January 1916 he had been sentenced to a year's imprisonment with hard labour for having gone absent without leave between Christmas Eve and 11 January. On 6 February his punishment was suspended. Nine days later he deserted again and did not rejoin his unit for six days. For re-offending, he was punished with penal servitude for life by FGCM on 28 February. Again, his sentence was reviewed, commuted to 10 years' penal servitude but suspended after a fortnight. He avoided any further trouble until 8 July, when he stole the officer’s puttees.
More positively, it was also disclosed that Nelson had enlisted on 7 September 1914 and had been on active service for eleven months. Aside from the brief spells in which he had been in detention, the private had also been hospitalised for two months with a wounded hand sustained on 26 September 1915.
When consulted about his views on the verdict and sentence, Nelson’s battalion commander, "A courtly old-fashioned officer who had served in Tirah and in China", damned him. Lieutenant Colonel Menzies declared that the convicted man's character was "Bad from a fighting point of view" and that the soldier had, "Deliberately absented himself, with the sole object of avoiding duty in the trenches." However, Menzies did not appear to feel that an example needed to be made of Nelson in order to act as a deterrent to other soldiers in 14 Durham Light Infantry because the performance and morale of the unit as "Very Good."
Brigadier General Harold Tew, commanding 18 Infantry Brigade, commented
"I am of the opinion that this man deliberately absented himself to escape doing duty in the trenches. As he has already twice previously absented himself, I recommend that the sentence of death be carried out."
Major General Charles Ross, the commander of 6 Division, also decided to confirm the decision of the court. He conceded that the discipline of 14 DLI was good and that there had been few cases of desertion in the battalion but he added:
"On the other hand this is a bad case of deliberate desertion to avoid duty in the trenches by an old offender. Pte. Nelson is not a good fighting soldier. I recommend that the sentence of death be carried out because if the sentence is commuted in so grave a case as this, it will encourage others to chance it."
The 14 Corps commander, Lieutenant Colonel Cavan, simply agreed with Ross; General Hubert Gough, the Reserve Army commander, concluded Nelson should be shot, "Owing to the seriousness of the offence & the man's previous character."
Never for a moment did any of the officers who confirmed the death sentence appear to reflect on the man's explanation for his offence. Had they been so inclined, a rather different estimate of Nelson's character would have emerged.
His explanation for nervous distress was directly linked to his father's predicament, consequent economic insecurity for his family, bereavement and the well-being of his young sister and brother, Harry.
William was the eldest son of Alice and Henry Nelson. The family lived at 10, Back Adelaide Row, Seaham and were supported by Henry's income as merchant seaman until he was captured and interned by the Germans.
Then, four months after William had joined the army Alice Nelson died of heart disease. William tried to prevent his orphaned brother and sister being institutionalised by arranging for a neighbour to look after the youngsters. As long as his battalion were training in southern England there remained a chance that Private Nelson could intermittently visit Seaham. Once 14 Durham Light Infantry had been sent overseas, direct contact with his brother and sister would have been impossible.
The absence for which Nelson was initially court-martialled coincided with the melancholy first anniversary of his mother's death. His second offence might well have been prompted by the knowledge that in addition to being punished with penal servitude for his offence, his pay would be stopped and the War Office would have halted payment of the allowance to support what remained of his family. It is known that around this time the neighbour who had been looking after William's brother and sister ceased to do so. What happened to the brother was unclear but a doctor took custody of the sister and lodged her in an institution for young girls.
Nelson's third and ultimately fatal absence is easier to understand when conditions in a field punishment compound are taken into account. Soldiers sentenced to field punishment continued to serve in the trenches with their battalion but when out of the line they were compelled to carry out heavy labouring tasks.
When their working day ended, the men were then herded into barbed wire enclosures, where they were marched at the double under eighty-pound packs. Discipline was harsh and the Field Punishment No.1 inflicted on Nelson would have been very similar to what Alan Baxter experienced. Baxter, an anti-war activist, recalled how he was brutally treated by an NCO in a field punishment compound at Ouderdom during early 1918:
"He took me over the poles, which were willow stumps, six to eight inches in diameter and twice the height of a man, and placed me against one of them. It was inclined forward out of perpendicular. Almost always afterwards he picked the same one for me. I stood with my back to it and he tied me to it by the ankles, knees and wrists. He was an expert at the job and he knew how to pull and strain the ropes till they cut into the flesh and completely stopped the circulation. When I was taken off my hands were always black with congested blood. My hands were taken around the pole, tied together and pulled well up it, straining and cramping the muscles and forcing them into an unnatural position. Most knots will slacken after a little time. His never did. The slope of the post brought me into a hanging position, causing a large part of my weight to come on my arms, and I could get no proper grip with my feet on the ground, as it was worn away round the pole and my toes were consequently much lower than my heels. I was strained so tightly up against the post that I was unable to move body or limbs a fraction of an inch. Earlier in the war men undergoing this form of punishment were tied with their arms outstretched. Hence the name of crucifixion. Later they were more often tied to a single upright, probably to avoid the likeness to a cross. But the name stuck... the mental effect was almost as frightful as the physical. I felt I was going mad."
In spite of the arduous nature of their punishment, the men undergoing field punishment were famished:
"Tea consisted of a small piece of bread per man, with a scraping of margarine or some kind of fat on it - and a cup of tea. Breakfast was the same. Dinner was a small portion of bully beef and a pounded-up biscuit with hot water poured over it, the biscuit still retaining its rock-like consistency even after the pounding up and hot water. On this diet men had to do a hard day's work with often pack drill at the end of it and every two or three days two hours of No.1 Field in the afternoon... It was little enough and did not suffice to keep up one's strength under punishment. The whole time we were, all of us, almost mad with hunger."
It is hardly surprising, after experiencing a week's field punishment, that Private Nelson felt the need to visit a canteen before going into the trenches. When, at his final court martial, he declared that he had no intention of permanently deserting his unit, what he meant was that he intended to rejoin them after they had come out of the line - a practice sometimes known as "trench leave". Though a blind eye was sometimes turned by officers serving in Australian or New Zealand battalions, "trench leave" was not tolerated in British units.
Because he was certain to be court-martialled and would be severely punished, reluctance to surrender himself was understandable. However, it was not the duration of his absence which doomed Nelson but his character. The soldier’s fate was sealed by an anonymous pencil-wielding officer who underlined a portion of the transcript of the proceedings that referred to Nelson's combat experience: "He was wounded on 26 Sept 1915 in the hand."
Aside from a query relating to desertion, this remains the only portion of the entire proceedings to which the attention of a confirming officer was drawn in such a manner. The damning inference was that the injury was an SIW, the abbreviation for self-inflicted wound - self-mutilation by a soldier intent on avoiding active service. A soldier who survived an SIW was not only punished but also viewed by officers as behaving in an unmanly fashion.
In the court martial file about Nelson's trial there was no evidence to support the inference that his wound had been self-inflicted but neither did anyone communicate doubt about the SIW allusion with a question mark. Nor could the latter have been a casual oversight because the contents of the file had been carefully checked through. For example, elsewhere in the dossier an erroneous reference to "desertion" had been corrected with "absence".
It is rather ironic that more account was not taken of exactly when Nelson was wounded, as opposed to the nature of his injury. It was actually a souvenir of the battle of Loos that decimated 21 and 24 divisions on 26 September 1915. The men of both divisions had been forced marched for a week, without adequate rations or enough water and arrived at their assembly positions soaking wet from a heavy downpour. The exhausted men had then been ordered to attack the German lines, marching over the carcasses of the dead and wounded from the previous day's unsuccessful assault.
Enemy machineguns, protected by barbed wire entanglements, massacred the oncoming British troops. Nelson's battalion suffered casualties not only from the enemy but were also fired on by panicky British troops who mistook the Durham’s in their greatcoats for the enemy. By the end of the day, 17 officers and 277 NCOs and men of the battalion had been killed or were wounded, including Nelson. Contemporary records confirm that there were no cases of soldiers from the battalion being charged with having inflicted wounds on themselves.
Of the ten thousand or so British troops that took part in the assault over nine thousand became casualties in the space of three and a half hours. German casualties were insignificant; British gains were negligible.
Although the vast majority of injuries were caused by enemy fire, two British senior officers bear ultimate responsibility for initiating the military debacle.
The first was Field Marshal Sir John French, who was sacked thereafter as commander-in-chief of the BEF. The second, who criticised French for failing to mobilise the 21 and 24 divisions quickly enough to exploit the notional gains of the first day's fighting, was his replacement, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. However, it was the latter who had dispatched two divisions, with exposed flanks and without artillery support against a fully alerted enemy occupying well-defended strong points.
Nelson survived Haig's misjudgement at Loos, but was less fortunate eleven months later.
On 7 August 1916 Haig endorsed the view of his subordinate officers and confirmed that Nelson had no further military value. Though the unfortunate soldier's offences had all been occurred in the Ypres Salient, 6 Division was moved to the Somme area before his sentence was confirmed.
The Assistant Provost Marshal, 6 Division was ordered to arrange for the twenty year-old soldier to be executed by firing squad at 4 a.m. on 11 August. For reasons which remain unclear, the fatal volley was not discharged until 5.15 a.m.. Nelson’s remains were later buried in the British military cemetery at Acheux.
