DEATH PENALTY for COWARDS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 28 July 1928, Page 24

DEATH PENALTY for COWARDS

■ Where does cowardice These questions have recently been debated in the British House of Commons in connection with the matter of abolishing the death penalty for cowardice in time of war. And some of the most interesting thoughts on cowardice that have ever been produced (writes Gregory Clark ) were advanced during this debate. Are cowards born or made? Isn’t a man who is cowardly born that way, with all the other miserable ingredients in him, part of him and his heritage, like the colour of his hair and eyes, his size, his way of walking, or his ability to sing? And if a man was made that way by God, why shoot him? Can the death penalty prevent cowards from enlisting? Lord Hugh Cecil, speaking from the point of view of the born aristocrat, made the best plea for the.death penalty. “If,” said the noble lord, “you shoot a soldier for cowardice, that makes the whole army think that it. is a shocking thing. The penalty of death has quite the unique quality of setting up a particular offence, and making people think that that is a thing which no one should do. not mainly from the fear of the actual penalty, but because it sets a stigma upon the offence which nothing else can do.” Mr. Duff Cooper. M.P.. Financial Secretary to the War Office, if not. an artistocrat himself, at least married to one, supported Lord Hugh Cecil’s view ingeniously: “During the war,” said he. “at one time it was made a crime for which people could be sent to prison to take matches into a munitions factory. Some careless young employee, some girl perhaps under 20. forgetting the importance of that rule, would take a box of matches into a munitions factory. “No moral turpitude whatever was involved in it. and yet people were sent to prison for doing it, and rightly because it was only by putting upon them some terrible penalty that you could make people realise the seriousness of the act they were carrying out. “In the same way, in time of war, when one man’s action may betray so many others and may lead to such great disaster, you attach a penalty to it such as we are asking the committee to pass to-day.” Whether for these or other reasons and in spite of very strong objections expressed against the death penalty for. cowardice and desertion—which is merely the effect of cowardice —the old-fashioned and time-honoured institution of death for the coward was preserved in ,the British Army. Australia went on record, at the outset of the last war, against the death penalty, and sent her contingent to the war on the understanding that the death penalty w-ould not be inflicted—at least without to the Government of Australia. But since the war nine other army

Does Killing a Mam Make ils Comrades Brave

Climes that were during the war j punishable with death before a firing squad—looting. striking a sentry, sleeping on sentry post and so forth —have been deleted from the army regulations. Only two —cowardice and desertion, are left of the laws that have prevailed in the armies of the world since. you might say, Caesar's time. Those who were opposed to the i death penalty for cowardice in the j House of Commons were soldiers. ! General Sir Frederick Hall was one. ! "I do not know where cowardice starts or inhere it finishes,” said the general, "but I remember that during the war this point was brought home to me most vividly in the case of a schoolmaster upon whom devolved a

rather difficulty duty which required a certain amount of courage to be shown. I believe that that man had as much courage as many of those who did not show any fear under similar circumstances.

“X have yet to learn that there is any man, from the highest to the lowest degree, who served in the important danger zones during the war who did not experience some fear come upon him, not once or twice-or thrice, but very often. It was not a question of the death penalty that kept men from showing fear. The men felt that they had a job to carry out. I do not think that fear of the death penalty affects the soldier at all: he does his job because he thjnks it is his Job, and I do not think any fear of the death penalty enters his head. “When the schoolmaster I have alluded to came to me and told me the condition he was in, I saw the medical officer and I got sent back to the base. A week or two after he came back, and I am sure that man was no more desirous of showing cowardice than any other soldier, but fear was in his nervous system.”

There is a curious punch to tk, ideas Major Hills submitted to ,w----deb.tte. He said:— “You shoot a man for coward*, but you do not make that man braver, for he is dead. Do yoo m , k , his comrades any braver? “Many members of this House know what it is just before the zero hou* —just before going over the top t am perfectly certain that no man s a - to himself, 'I must go forward, or 1 shall be shot,’ and I rather n trust the argument that you m»i[ men brave by that threat. ... w, experience of life, and such ence as i had in the war, have show r me that the greatest men are airof something, and that the great, ■ cowards are brave under some tour lions. ' “Cowardice is a matter of the rr»., est difficulty. Some people, fortur,ately. were not afraid of shells, bv they might have been afraid of sore, thing else; and a man might be'sh just because the special sort of d«ger of which he was afraid was p„ which he could not resist.” It is perfectly safe to say that tfc. death penalty created only pathos »-j bitterness wherever it appeared, that as far as deterring men 'fpir, being cowards, it had no effete wlm. ever. What is cowardice? Is it fear? It is not, because ft per cent, of soldiers in the last experienced fear, and they were m cowards. Is it submitting to fear, surreadtr. ing to fear, so that one fails in on: , duty because of fear? That is about it. There are a great many of us »ba often think that, were it not for i certain occasion when we were tn. ardly for a moment, we would not ns here. It is that fact which makes us very careful about the use of the wont coward even now long after the w». And certainly, during the war, I never heard the word coward used, nor the word cowardice, by any man, thong* something like 200 officers and 3.6*4 men passed through my regiment while I was with it.