Two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth soldiers were court-martialled during the First World War. Of those, twenty thousand were found guilty of offences that carried the death penalty. Three thousand and eighty actually received a death sentence from the court. The huge majority of those sentences were commuted - by senior officers, by commanding generals, by King George V himself. But 346 of them were carried out, taking 346 lives in front of 346 firing squads across the muddy hinterland of the Western Front and the other theatres of that war. Of those 346, 306 were eventually pardoned by Parliament in 2006, when the Defence Secretary Des Browne announced that injustices had clearly been done. The remaining 40 had been executed for murder or mutiny, and those convictions stood. The memorial commemorates the 306. After 2016, three additional men - executed for mutiny - were added to the count, after long campaigning by their descendants and historians.

Modern medicine has a name for what most of these men were suffering: post-traumatic stress disorder, or its more acute form, combat stress reaction. The men of 1914-1918 had no such name. Their officers had a word - cowardice - that placed the failure inside the soldier, not inside the war. A man who could not stop crying after a shell-burst, who could not raise his rifle when ordered, who walked away from the front and was found three days later in a barn shaking and confused, was treated as a man who had chosen to fail his country rather than as a man whose mind had been broken by what he had been ordered to endure. Some of these soldiers were, by every modern psychiatric standard, profoundly mentally ill at the time of their offence. Private Harry Farr, executed in October 1916, had been hospitalised multiple times for what we would now diagnose as severe PTSD. His daughter Gertrude spent decades fighting to clear his name. She unveiled this memorial in June 2001, eight years before the pardons came through.

Not everyone agrees that the executions were wrong. Some historians - the most prominent being Gordon Corrigan, whose book Mud, Blood and Poppycock argues a revisionist line - contend that the commanders of the time were doing a near-impossible job under unimaginable pressure: keeping a million men in the trenches, holding the line against an enemy who would advance the moment discipline collapsed. From this perspective, the executions were not malice but command necessity, the cruel arithmetic of holding an army together. Des Browne himself acknowledged this when he announced the pardons in 2006. He said he did not want to second-guess the decisions of commanders in the field, who were doing their best to apply the rules and standards of the time. But he added that it was better to acknowledge that injustices were clearly done in some cases, even if we cannot say which - and that all of these men were victims of war. The memorial does not pretend the question is simple. It just refuses to forget the men.

The British public artist Andy DeComyn made the memorial in 2000 as a gift to the families of the executed. He worked at his own expense and donated the finished sculpture to the National Memorial Arboretum, which had opened the year before. The unveiling on a June morning in 2001 was attended by Gertrude Harris, daughter of Harry Farr, and by Marina Brewis, the great-niece of Lance Corporal Peter Goggins - one of the men executed at Étaples in 1917. The choice to model the central figure on Herbert Burden carried symbolic weight: a teenager who lied to enlist, who never reached an age where his name could legally appear on his enlistment papers, executed by the army that should have sent him home. The semicircle of stakes around him was originally wooden, requiring periodic replacement. In 2024, during a major renovation, the stakes were replaced with recycled-material posts intended to last.

The memorial faces east. The semicircle of stakes opens toward the sunrise. The sculpture is positioned so that the first light of every morning falls on the figure of the blindfolded soldier - the hour at which all of these men died, repeated every day, never finished. The Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act passed in 2006 was supposed to bring closure for the families who had carried, for nearly a century, the stigma of having a relative executed for cowardice. Closure may be too strong a word. What the memorial does, what the pardons did, what the dawn does, is acknowledge: these were boys and men who failed under conditions that broke whole armies, who were killed by the country that had sent them out, and whose names belonged on a national memorial alongside those who died at the hands of the enemy. They were victims of the war. They have been waiting a long time for the country to say so.