Private McColl
Julian Putkowski
Charles McColl was a shipyard plater and therefore exempt from military service but he voluntarily joined the army on 7 September 1914. He was tried by Field General Court Martial on a number of occasions but the final, fatal proceedings took place at Brandhoek on 21 December 1917. One of the two members of the court, Captain C.J.A. Pollock, was from the defendant’s own unit and although they were assisted by a Court Martial officer, Captain F.S.A. Baker, Private Charles McColl was undefended.
The details of McColl’s offence, desertion, were initially described to the court by his platoon sergeant. The NCO testified that on 28 October 1917 at 9 a.m. outside their billet at Marsoin Farm, near Langemarck, he paraded the men, issued rum to them and gave them half an hour’s notice of a rifle inspection. McColl’s rifle never left the camp but he did and remained at liberty for the ensuing nine days later, when the absentee was arrested by a military policeman in the Rue Royale, Calais.
McColl explained to the court:
"I was brought out of the guard room before going up to the line & was in a weak condition. This was about 26.10.17. We marched up to Marsoin Farm. I had complaints brought on by shellfire. I have heart failure & nervousness. I have been with this Bn. 6 months but only reported sick once. I always shake from head to foot when we go into the trenches. I enlisted in Sep. 1914 & went to Egypt in November 1915 & came to France in April 1916. I was buried by a shell at Colin camps in Sept. 1916 with 12th E. Yorks. I was on 2 or 3 raids & then my nerves went. I was invalided home in September 1916 suffering from 'heart failure' & nervousness & was classified A3 at the finish & sent back to France without any examination. Since coming to this bn. I have tried to do my best. When I went off they dropped shells all around me & this upset me more & more & I wandered away. At Calais I was in a weak condition & gave myself up to the M.F.P. I am not fit now. I had a knock on the head from a shell in BUS Wood."
Under cross examination, the proceedings note that McColl added:
"I have been in front line trenches with this bn. on about 6 different occasions. I have been here since July. The trenches I was in were at places I can't remember. One place was Bullfinch trench. I was there 8 days. Another place was Jackdaw trench."
He pleaded, "I am the only support of my mother who is a widow. I have tried to do my best."
Unfortunately, while he had been stationed in Britain, McColl’s best efforts had not been very good. During 1915 he had been found guilty of a series of offences which included: stealing eggs, missing parades, being drunk, failing to buy a railway ticket and three minor absences without leave.
More seriously, on 22 July 1917, McColl had gone AWOL from his battalion. He was arrested at Etaples Camp a month later, court martialled on 13 September and sentenced to 10 years’ penal servitude. The period of confinement was reduced to two year’s imprisonment with hard labour and finally suspended on 2 October. However, while the confirmation and suspension of this sentence was being processed, McColl again went AWOL.
On 22 September, McColl had fled from his company in the trenches but was picked up almost immediately at the battalion details camp, about four kilometres behind the front line. Court martialled on 11 October, McColl was found not guilty of desertion but guilty of absence without leave and had been punished with 90 days Field Punishment No.1.
A more severe punishment for the absence he had committed in December was inevitable and the court sentenced McColl to death.
To be fair, the court had enquired whether Marsoin Farm had been shelled when McColl had fled for the last time. However, the court simply accepted the opinion of a prosecution witness, the platoon NCO’s assurance that Marsoin Farm had been neither heavily shelled nor damaged by enemy artillery when McColl had gone absent.
Also, given the nature of McColl’s explanation for his conduct, expert medical testimony about the state of the soldier’s nerves ought to have been aired during the trial. The issue was raised but the proceedings note that, "Medical evidence, tho' called for by the court, was not available."
Field Marshal Haig did not confirm McColl’s sentence until 21 December but preparations to shoot the soldier were set in motion well before hand. Sergeant Len Cavinder, a devoutly religious NCO, and Private Danby were ordered by the Major H.B. Jackson, temporarily in command of 4 Bn. East Yorkshires, to collect McColl from Brandhoek and transport him in a Red Cross van to Ieper Prison.
Of the doomed man himself, Cavinder later concluded:
"He was subnormal actually. He was unstable. There was something wrong with him… I realised that you couldn’t get him to slope arms correctly, and all that sort of thing. He wasn’t simple but he was slow."
Ten men were also selected from Cavinder’s platoon, withdrawn from the line and rewarded with tots of whisky after practising the execution ritual. They were told that McColl had been living with a woman in St. Omer for six months and ordered to maintain absolute secrecy about their duty.
Meanwhile, Cavinder remembered:
"At Ypres goal, I was given half a bottle of whisky and some tablets, and the injunctions were if you can get him to take them do so… This was about after tea time the day before he was (to be) shot, and the rest of that evening there was Danby and I trying to keep him quiet… well, to stop his questions – why was he being brought to this goal, what were we going to do with him."
McColl’s last supper consisted of tea and white bread and butter from a sandbag in the corner of the cell plus half a glass of whisky and one of the tablets. At midnight the cell was visited by a number of red-tabbed staff officers, one of whom read out the death sentence. Cavinder recalled:
"They trooped out, and he was like a raving maniac for a while. And then he settled down and then I got another drink down him, but he wouldn’t take much. He had an idea that we were trying to bamboozle him. But he got his photographs out, and started to hum …(a popular song)."
The padre then put in an appearance and told McColl that, "He deserved to die and that he would go to hell if he didn’t ask for God’s forgiveness." Cavinder was incensed at the padre’s tone and risked being arrested for insubordination by ejecting the latter from the cell. Thereafter, the sergeant offered spiritual comfort to the condemned man:
"I wasn’t a Parson, no likelihood of being a Parson, but I knew what it was to try to help a chap to lead a better life or ask God’s forgiveness – I wanted it myself. So, eventually I got him to kneel down and say the Lord’s Prayer with me. Now we mumbled through it, but I’m sure that God would understand – I’m sure he would. And then… he was almost raving at times, because he knew what was coming you see, and we had to keep him on the cell bed. Hold him down sort of thing. And then he calmed down… But it was just becoming daylight when in came two Military Police. And they put on a respirator – the bag kind that we used to have in 1915 and ’16… and turned the eyepieces round and the nose piece, so he could see nothing. They fastened that on him. They pinned a piece of paper…on his chest… and before they fastened the manacles (behind him) I shook hands with him and I said, ‘God bless you’… we were like that. Everybody who took part in it was affected. It was a terrible thing, you know, to usher a man into eternity whether it was the law or not."
Cavinder also witnessed McColl’s execution and carried out his burial:
"They took him round the corner of the cell to the wall… They strapped him on a chair, that was it, with his hands behind the back of the chair. And there he sat until one of our officers gave the order ‘Fire’, and that was it…"
A RAMC officer certified that McColl’s death had been instantaneous but the memory of what followed haunted Cavinder for the rest of his life:
"The stretcher bearers who were deputed to put him in the hole that was already been dug in the yard; they wouldn’t do the job. They went, and so it was left to Danby and I to take him off the stretcher that he’d been put on after being unmanacled, and we lifted him into the hole. Dropped him in the hole. It was December and the yard was frost hard, icy, frosty, and… I could only get lumps of clay… we covered him, and I mimicked the parson, saying ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Where was the parson?"
And the men who fired the fatal shots? Cavinder observed:
"None of them knew who’d shot him because five were given blank cartridges, and five were live, and they were given the rifles as they took their place… so they had no… feelings of guilt… ‘cos anyone could’ve shot him."
