Visit to the National Arboretum

In 2014 one of our readers kindly sent us photographs of his trip to the National Arboretum near Lichfield in Shropshire.

At 11 am on 11 November each year the sun shines through two slits in the outer and inner walls of the memorial, casting a shaft of light across a wreath in the centre

Here are some of the photographs he shared with us.

Paving slabs depicting both modern and old Scottish regiments at the Arboretum.

The "Shot At Dawn" Memorial is a particularly poignant one, It memorialises the 306 British Army and Commonwealth soldiers executed after courts-martial for cowardice or desertion during World War I

The memorial portrays a young British soldier blindfolded and tied to a stake ready to be shot by a firing squad. The memorial was modelled on the likeness of 17-year-old Private Herbert Burden, who lied about his age to enlist in the armed forces and was later shot for desertion.

It is alleged that soldiers accused of cowardice were often not given fair trials as they were often not properly defended, and in some cases were minors -they generally chose to speak in their own defence. The usual cause for their offences in modern times is now being put down to post-traumatic stress syndrome and combat stress reaction. Another perspective is that the decisions to execute were taken in the heat of war when the commander's job was to keep the army together and fighting.

Of the 200,000 or so men court-martialed during the First World War, 20,000 were found guilty of offences carrying the death penalty; of those, 3000 actually received it, and of those 346 were carried out

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http://www.thenma.org.uk/ for further details. NOTE: The SEARCH function on the site can be used for WW1 website searches. The Arboretum itself was dedicated more to post-WW2 conflicts .... the correspondent visited it on route to Flanders and his photographs will be included in a later web update.