"There were no summary executions in the British Army of WW1."
There were no recorded accounts of summary executions - don't you mean.
There are numerous eye witness accounts of them taking place and the link I provided last time tells of a special group of military policemen there to carry them out when soldiers were reckoned not to have responded quickly enough to orders to go over the top - the writer describes it having been witnessed by to his grandfather (more "lies" I suppose - you fellers seem to get your kicks calling soldiers "liars" when they don't come up with the right answer.
The account that Tommy Kenny gave us was of soldiers being sentenced to death, locked away awaiting execution, then, if there was a push on, being taken out and put in the front line.
If they survived they were then placed back in prison and eventually executed.
Tommy burst into tears (all on tape) when he described how he got to know people in the trenches, fought beside them, then later read the notice that they had been executed - sheer ****** barbarism which sums up that obscene war perfectly.
Lets face it - we have virtually no information of how the ordinary Tommy felt about the war and his experiences.
The officers were the only ones allowed to keep diaries, and the men who defied orders and wrote things down would have been insane to the point of being suicidal had they wrote about how they felt.
It took nearly a century to make available some of those forbidden writingsand those few that are, obviously, censored.
We only have the word of people like tabloid journalist Max Hastings, who cut out his career in Hitler supporter's Daily Mail to tell us that the soldiers knew why they were fighting and that they supported the cause - hardly a reliable source!
Hurrah for the Blackshirts

Jim Carroll