This is the text of an interview with the author, Tony Matthews, on his new book:
A Dawn with no Birdsong.
(The video of this interview will be online shortly).
An interview with Tony Matthews on his new novel:
A Dawn with no Birdsong
An interview with Tony Matthews on his new novel:
A Dawn with no Birdsong
1. Tony, what was it that first drew you to this story?
Well, it really all began in the mid-1980s when I wrote and produced a television documentary called Crosses which dealt with the experiences of Australian soldiers in the First World War. I later wrote a book which was released under the same name, and during my research for that book I discovered, firstly, that a total of 121 Australians had been sentenced to death during the war but not one of them had been executed, because the Australian Government very wisely refused to allow it.
This led me to look into how many soldiers serving with the British, and its allied armies, had actually been executed, and the number quite staggered me. A total of 346 men serving either in the British Army or its Dominion or Imperial forces had been placed before a firing squad and shot for 'crimes' that today would be regarded as mere misdemeanours. Many of those shot had been suffering from shell-shock or what we today would call post-traumatic stress disorder, and rather than being shot they should have received proper medical and psychological care and have been treated compassionately. That's why I really became involved in this story. I was appalled by the injustice of the entire system and wanted to tell the story in a way that reached out and grasped the emotional sharp edge of it.
2. What do you mean by the emotional sharp edge?
Well, when we look into the past generally, into history, into events now largely lost to us in time, there's a tendency by just about everyone, I think, to become somewhat distanced from those events. We can't really help that because we are actually distanced, both spatially and by time. But if you try to imagine what it was like during that period, not only for the men who were fighting in the trenches, or those who had been condemned to death and were awaiting execution, but also for their families, and even those men who were being forced to carry out the executions - the members of the firing squads - then you might begin to feel the raw emotion of what was happening.
Imagine, for example, being sentenced to death after a court martial that had lasted only about twenty minutes, which was a fairly average time for a trial under those circumstances. Defence counsel officers, generally speaking, were completely incompetent. In most cases the defence was usually undertaken by officers with little or no actual knowledge of the law. More than three thousand men were sentenced to death by British Army courts martial during the war. There was no appeal, it wasn't allowed, although many sentences were subsequently commuted to penal servitude, but the condemned men, those whose sentences had been confirmed by the commander-in-chief, were simply shot the following morning, or within a day or two.
There was one case where a man had been sentenced to death, the sentence had been confirmed, the unfortunate soldier was told that he was to be shot and just forty-five minutes later he was led out and executed by a firing squad. These were powerfully emotive events, lost now and distanced in time, and I wanted to bring back the terror of what was occurring to those men and tell the story of the injustice of it all.
3. But your book is fiction. How does that relate to what you've just been telling me?
There have actually been several history books written about the executions of British and Empire soldiers during the war. I should add that some civilians were executed too - those who had been subjected to military law, so it wasn't just soldiers who were being killed. I've even read a few academic theses while conducting research for my novel, but histories and theses, while important and extremely valuable as instruments of preservation and research, rarely have the capacity to demonstrate what such events might mean for the ordinary soldier who had been condemned to death, or for those he loved — his family and close friends. The families had to live with the shame for decades afterwards and this type of shame, brought about solely by injustice, was a terrible thing to have to endure.
My book, A Dawn with no Birdsong, will, I hope, help to rectify this because it deals with the deeply emotional aspects of the issue. I hope I've told the story in such a way that people today who read it will be able to connect not only to my characters, but also to the history of events upon which the story is based. I always like to say that non fiction books can show you the black, white and grey of history but a historical novel can also bring out the colour and the emotion of the past in much the same way as a well scripted film brings a story to life.
4. Can you tell me a little about your characters?
Yes, of course. The two principal characters are Alex Ray, a Welsh soldier serving with the British army in the trenches during the war and a young woman named Lisle Raimond, daughter of a French woman, Madame Raimond, whose husband had been killed at Verdun. Madame Raimond owns a small farm behind the lines which is constantly under threat of attack. Alex makes a promise to Madame Raimond that in the event of a sudden German attack that might overrun her farmhouse, he - that is -Alex, will do what he can to help the family. He keeps his promise and during all the terror and confusion of a major German attack he's able to get to Madame Raimond's farm and assist in saving the family. However, this brings him into conflict with the military authorities who charge Alex with quitting his post, a capital offence in the trenches, and it looks as if Alex will be tried and shot. The story is really about the injustice of it all, but also about the growing bond between Alex and Lisle Raimond, the young woman, just seventeen years of age, who becomes firstly his close friend and then his great love. It's really a race against time and a desperate struggle for survival as the British military authorities do their best to hunt down Alex, who has had to go on the run, and to place him in front of a firing squad. It's really quite a simple story but with, I hope, powerful characters and deep emotional connections.
5. Who are some of the other characters in your book?
Oh well, we have so many. I think one of my favourites is Monsieur Cereoux, the village undertaker, who takes Alex under his wing when Alex is in hiding. Monsieur Cereoux is full of apparently wild and highly improbable stories of the years he had spent as a sailor on the old sailing ships, going around Cape Horn. The interesting aspect of his character and the amazing tales he tells, is that the stories are all true, however improbable and unlikely they may seem. I've researched them myself.
6. Can you let us in on one or two of these?
Well, without giving away too much I can tell you that Monsieur Cereoux recalls a number of stories including the time he watched a Chinese man, suffering from late stage leprosy, volunteering to be buried alive at the local cemetery because his gravediggers had been summoned too early, in error, and he didn't want to have them sent home without their pay. Monsieur Cereoux is a highly colourful character, absent-minded and a bit doddery most of the time but a man who always buries his clients with the utmost respect and care even when the region is under German bombardment. He's just a lovely old man who will do anything to prevent Alex from going in front of a firing squad.
7. I believe that the character of Alex has some personal connection with your own life.
Well only in that I've made him a Welsh soldier who comes from the same city, Swansea, where I was born and even the same region of the city, St Thomas, where I grew up. There are some scenes in the book that reflect back to Alex's past as a young lad, and later when he first volunteered to serve in the British Army, and I've always believed, both as a novelist and historian, that descriptions of past events are stronger when they are based upon real life, upon actual facts, so in that respect Alex's own life does mirror mine — just a little. I've drawn on my reality to construct his fiction.
8. But it's more than that too isn't it? I understand that you have a kind of emotional connection with the war?
Yes, I guess in one respect I have. When I was a very young child, about four or five years of age I had, for quite a few years, terrifying recurring nightmares which appeared to be scenes from what I later recognised as possibly being a World War One battlefield. There were mud-filled holes, I guess shell-holes, barbed wire entanglements and horrible two-legged creatures wearing strange helmets. These creatures were chasing me with the very clear intent of doing me considerable harm. It was all quite alarming to a young child. In fact it was my first experience of real terror and I'd awaken from the dream literally shaking with fright. The horror of it would stay with me for hours afterwards. I couldn't really make out the faces of the creatures who were chasing me but I now believe they were soldiers of some kind, faces covered in mud or blood, or both, but it was all quite horrifying. I had no idea what the dreams meant and was too young at that time to know anything about the First World War. It was only in later years that I was able to connect the dreams to scenes from the war. I don't know if that actually qualifies as any kind of personal connection but it's certainly a strange phenomenon.
9. You mentioned earlier that this is, as you say, a very emotional story but the tragic events didn't just affect the condemned men, they affected others as well. Can you tell us more about that?
Actually, it took a lot of people and a vast military organisation to execute just one man, so the human involvement in events such as this was considerable and many people were affected. Some men could never really get over what they had seen or done in relation to these executions.
You have to remember that the judicial killing of a man is a dreadful, cold-blooded affair and the soldier who is to be shot was often known to those who were being forced to watch him being executed. The executions were being carried out for the 'sake of example' and were usually very public affairs, the troops being forcibly paraded to watch. Some of the condemned soldiers were as young as seventeen years when they were shot, and watching a young lad like that being coldly put to death is something which even the most hardened person would probably have trouble dealing with.
10. What about the men who had to form the firing squads. How did they manage to handle it all?
I can't speak for all of them, of course. But I know of men who were bitter that they had been forced to form firing squads to execute their comrades, and there are instances on file where members of firing squads have, in later life, committed suicide because they had to live with the guilt of it all.
11. I understand that the men who were executed on the Western Front were later pardoned by the British Government?
That's correct. Of the 346 men executed by the British Empire military authorities during the war a total of 309 were subsequently pardoned.
12. Why were the others not also pardoned?
Those were men who had actually committed crimes for which there was never any hope of a pardon, murder, for example, so their guilt stands. The remaining men, all 309 of them, are today honoured by a very special and significant memorial, known as the Shot at Dawn Memorial which forms part of the National Memorial Arboretum near Alrewas in Staffordshire, England. The memorial was designed and created by the well-known and particularly talented British sculptor, Andy DeComyn. The centrepiece of the memorial is a hauntingly poignant statue of a soldier, blindfolded, and waiting to be shot. It's surrounded by a total of 309 wooden stakes, one for every man who was executed and subsequently pardoned posthumously.
13. Tony, thank you.
You're welcome. Thank you so much.
1. Tony, what was it that first drew you to this story?
Well, it really all began in the mid-1980s when I wrote and produced a television documentary called Crosses which dealt with the experiences of Australian soldiers in the First World War. I later wrote a book which was released under the same name, and during my research for that book I discovered, firstly, that a total of 121 Australians had been sentenced to death during the war but not one of them had been executed, because the Australian Government very wisely refused to allow it.
This led me to look into how many soldiers serving with the British, and its allied armies, had actually been executed, and the number quite staggered me. A total of 346 men serving either in the British Army or its Dominion or Imperial forces had been placed before a firing squad and shot for 'crimes' that today would be regarded as mere misdemeanours. Many of those shot had been suffering from shell-shock or what we today would call post-traumatic stress disorder, and rather than being shot they should have received proper medical and psychological care and have been treated compassionately. That's why I really became involved in this story. I was appalled by the injustice of the entire system and wanted to tell the story in a way that reached out and grasped the emotional sharp edge of it.
2. What do you mean by the emotional sharp edge?
Well, when we look into the past generally, into history, into events now largely lost to us in time, there's a tendency by just about everyone, I think, to become somewhat distanced from those events. We can't really help that because we are actually distanced, both spatially and by time. But if you try to imagine what it was like during that period, not only for the men who were fighting in the trenches, or those who had been condemned to death and were awaiting execution, but also for their families, and even those men who were being forced to carry out the executions - the members of the firing squads - then you might begin to feel the raw emotion of what was happening.
Imagine, for example, being sentenced to death after a court martial that had lasted only about twenty minutes, which was a fairly average time for a trial under those circumstances. Defence counsel officers, generally speaking, were completely incompetent. In most cases the defence was usually undertaken by officers with little or no actual knowledge of the law. More than three thousand men were sentenced to death by British Army courts martial during the war. There was no appeal, it wasn't allowed, although many sentences were subsequently commuted to penal servitude, but the condemned men, those whose sentences had been confirmed by the commander-in-chief, were simply shot the following morning, or within a day or two.
There was one case where a man had been sentenced to death, the sentence had been confirmed, the unfortunate soldier was told that he was to be shot and just forty-five minutes later he was led out and executed by a firing squad. These were powerfully emotive events, lost now and distanced in time, and I wanted to bring back the terror of what was occurring to those men and tell the story of the injustice of it all.
3. But your book is fiction. How does that relate to what you've just been telling me?
There have actually been several history books written about the executions of British and Empire soldiers during the war. I should add that some civilians were executed too - those who had been subjected to military law, so it wasn't just soldiers who were being killed. I've even read a few academic theses while conducting research for my novel, but histories and theses, while important and extremely valuable as instruments of preservation and research, rarely have the capacity to demonstrate what such events might mean for the ordinary soldier who had been condemned to death, or for those he loved — his family and close friends. The families had to live with the shame for decades afterwards and this type of shame, brought about solely by injustice, was a terrible thing to have to endure.
My book, A Dawn with no Birdsong, will, I hope, help to rectify this because it deals with the deeply emotional aspects of the issue. I hope I've told the story in such a way that people today who read it will be able to connect not only to my characters, but also to the history of events upon which the story is based. I always like to say that non fiction books can show you the black, white and grey of history but a historical novel can also bring out the colour and the emotion of the past in much the same way as a well scripted film brings a story to life.
4. Can you tell me a little about your characters?
Yes, of course. The two principal characters are Alex Ray, a Welsh soldier serving with the British army in the trenches during the war and a young woman named Lisle Raimond, daughter of a French woman, Madame Raimond, whose husband had been killed at Verdun. Madame Raimond owns a small farm behind the lines which is constantly under threat of attack. Alex makes a promise to Madame Raimond that in the event of a sudden German attack that might overrun her farmhouse, he - that is -Alex, will do what he can to help the family. He keeps his promise and during all the terror and confusion of a major German attack he's able to get to Madame Raimond's farm and assist in saving the family. However, this brings him into conflict with the military authorities who charge Alex with quitting his post, a capital offence in the trenches, and it looks as if Alex will be tried and shot. The story is really about the injustice of it all, but also about the growing bond between Alex and Lisle Raimond, the young woman, just seventeen years of age, who becomes firstly his close friend and then his great love. It's really a race against time and a desperate struggle for survival as the British military authorities do their best to hunt down Alex, who has had to go on the run, and to place him in front of a firing squad. It's really quite a simple story but with, I hope, powerful characters and deep emotional connections.
5. Who are some of the other characters in your book?
Oh well, we have so many. I think one of my favourites is Monsieur Cereoux, the village undertaker, who takes Alex under his wing when Alex is in hiding. Monsieur Cereoux is full of apparently wild and highly improbable stories of the years he had spent as a sailor on the old sailing ships, going around Cape Horn. The interesting aspect of his character and the amazing tales he tells, is that the stories are all true, however improbable and unlikely they may seem. I've researched them myself.
6. Can you let us in on one or two of these?
Well, without giving away too much I can tell you that Monsieur Cereoux recalls a number of stories including the time he watched a Chinese man, suffering from late stage leprosy, volunteering to be buried alive at the local cemetery because his gravediggers had been summoned too early, in error, and he didn't want to have them sent home without their pay. Monsieur Cereoux is a highly colourful character, absent-minded and a bit doddery most of the time but a man who always buries his clients with the utmost respect and care even when the region is under German bombardment. He's just a lovely old man who will do anything to prevent Alex from going in front of a firing squad.
7. I believe that the character of Alex has some personal connection with your own life.
Well only in that I've made him a Welsh soldier who comes from the same city, Swansea, where I was born and even the same region of the city, St Thomas, where I grew up. There are some scenes in the book that reflect back to Alex's past as a young lad, and later when he first volunteered to serve in the British Army, and I've always believed, both as a novelist and historian, that descriptions of past events are stronger when they are based upon real life, upon actual facts, so in that respect Alex's own life does mirror mine — just a little. I've drawn on my reality to construct his fiction.
8. But it's more than that too isn't it? I understand that you have a kind of emotional connection with the war?
Yes, I guess in one respect I have. When I was a very young child, about four or five years of age I had, for quite a few years, terrifying recurring nightmares which appeared to be scenes from what I later recognised as possibly being a World War One battlefield. There were mud-filled holes, I guess shell-holes, barbed wire entanglements and horrible two-legged creatures wearing strange helmets. These creatures were chasing me with the very clear intent of doing me considerable harm. It was all quite alarming to a young child. In fact it was my first experience of real terror and I'd awaken from the dream literally shaking with fright. The horror of it would stay with me for hours afterwards. I couldn't really make out the faces of the creatures who were chasing me but I now believe they were soldiers of some kind, faces covered in mud or blood, or both, but it was all quite horrifying. I had no idea what the dreams meant and was too young at that time to know anything about the First World War. It was only in later years that I was able to connect the dreams to scenes from the war. I don't know if that actually qualifies as any kind of personal connection but it's certainly a strange phenomenon.
9. You mentioned earlier that this is, as you say, a very emotional story but the tragic events didn't just affect the condemned men, they affected others as well. Can you tell us more about that?
Actually, it took a lot of people and a vast military organisation to execute just one man, so the human involvement in events such as this was considerable and many people were affected. Some men could never really get over what they had seen or done in relation to these executions.
You have to remember that the judicial killing of a man is a dreadful, cold-blooded affair and the soldier who is to be shot was often known to those who were being forced to watch him being executed. The executions were being carried out for the 'sake of example' and were usually very public affairs, the troops being forcibly paraded to watch. Some of the condemned soldiers were as young as seventeen years when they were shot, and watching a young lad like that being coldly put to death is something which even the most hardened person would probably have trouble dealing with.
10. What about the men who had to form the firing squads. How did they manage to handle it all?
I can't speak for all of them, of course. But I know of men who were bitter that they had been forced to form firing squads to execute their comrades, and there are instances on file where members of firing squads have, in later life, committed suicide because they had to live with the guilt of it all.
11. I understand that the men who were executed on the Western Front were later pardoned by the British Government?
That's correct. Of the 346 men executed by the British Empire military authorities during the war a total of 309 were subsequently pardoned.
12. Why were the others not also pardoned?
Those were men who had actually committed crimes for which there was never any hope of a pardon, murder, for example, so their guilt stands. The remaining men, all 309 of them, are today honoured by a very special and significant memorial, known as the Shot at Dawn Memorial which forms part of the National Memorial Arboretum near Alrewas in Staffordshire, England. The memorial was designed and created by the well-known and particularly talented British sculptor, Andy DeComyn. The centrepiece of the memorial is a hauntingly poignant statue of a soldier, blindfolded, and waiting to be shot. It's surrounded by a total of 309 wooden stakes, one for every man who was executed and subsequently pardoned posthumously.
13. Tony, thank you.
You're welcome. Thank you so much.