On 13/02/2012 13:20, Yan wrote:
> I presume that Mr. Putkowsky would be also grateful for any
> examples of Kipling's condemnation of the practice of military
> executions for desertion, mutiny, other military offences.
>
Did he condemn them? The epitaph 'The Sleepy Sentinel' puts words into
the mouth of the man comdemned for sleeping on sentry duty:
Faithless the watch that I kept: now I have none to keep.
I was slain because I slept: now I am slain I sleep.
Let no man reproach me again; whatever watch is unkept—
I sleep because I am slain. They slew me because I slept.
The implication of this seems to me to be that he accepts
responsibility, and recognises the justice of his punishment.
From his contacts with soldiers in India, Kipling would have known that
capital punishment was the penalty for desertion or for sleeping on
sentry-duty. Before the Great War (while the Army remained very small)
such executions must have been very rare indeed. (Danny Deever is hanged
for murder, isn't he?). It was the formation of a huge citizen army that
meant the death sentences became much more numerous.
Presumably every sergeant-major in the training camps made the recruits'
blood curdle with the threat that if they so much as shut their eyes
while on sentry-go they would be shot at dawn. During the Great War some
five hundred-odd men were sentenced to death for sleeping on duty. All
but two of the sentences were commuted, however - and those two were not
on the Western Front, but in the Middle East.
Haig and others in High Command obviously avoided authorising executions
for what was clearly human weakness (At least in the case of the
sleepers - I know that many deserters got an extremely rough deal). Is
Kipling actually going further than the generals when in this poem he
makes the sentenced man endors the justice of his sentence?
George Simmers
George Simmers's research blog is at:
http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com
|