We needed no urging to get away. I did not recognize any of the men on the firing squad, even the officer was a stranger to me.
The victim's relations and friends in Blighty will never know that he was executed; they will be under the impression that he died doing his bit for King and Country.
In the public casualty lists his name will appear under the caption "Accidentally Killed," or "Died."
The day after the execution I received orders to report back to the line, and to keep a still tongue in my head.
Executions are a part of the day's work but the part we hated most of all, I think certainly the saddest. The British War Department is thought by many people to be composed of rigid regulations all wound around with red tape. But it has a heart, and one of the evidences of this is the considerate way in which an execution is concealed and reported to the relative of the unfortunate man. They never know the truth. He is listed in the bulletins as among the "accidentally killed."
In the last ten years I have several times read stories in magazines of cowards changing, in a charge, to heroes. I used to laugh at it. It seemed easy for story-writers but I said, "Men aren't made that way." But over in France I learned once that the streak of yellow can turn all white. I picked up the story, bit by bit, from the Captain of the Company, the sentries who guarded the poor fellow, as well as from my own observations. At first I did not realize the whole of his story, but after a week of investigation it stood out as clear in my mind as the mountains of my native West in the spring sunshine. It impressed me so much that I wrote it all down in rest billets on odd scraps of paper. The incidents are, as I say, every bit true; the feelings of the man are true, -- I know from all I underwent in the fighting over in France.
We will call him Albert Lloyd. That wasn't his name, but it will do; Albert Lloyd was what the world terms a coward.
In London they called him a slacker.
His country had been at war nearly eighteen months, and still he was not in khaki.
He had no good reason for not enlisting, being alone in the world, having been educated in an Orphan Asylum, and there being no one dependent upon him for support. He had no good position to lose, and there was no sweetheart to tell him with her lips to go, while her eyes pleaded for him to stay.