Qualla: Shot at Dawn Memorial

Shot at Dawn Memorial: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Hogg, CC BY-SA 2.0. The figure is young - barely a young man - blindfolded, hands tied behind a wooden stake, waiting for a sound that he knows is coming and cannot see. Behind him, a semicircle of more than three hundred stakes stretches away through the trees, each carrying the name of a British or Commonwealth soldier executed by firing squad during the First World War. The central figure was modelled on a real seventeen-year-old: Private Herbert Burden of the Northumberland Fusiliers, who lied about his age to enlist, served at Ypres, ran from the front line, was caught, was court-martialled, and was shot at dawn near Poperinge on 21 July 1915. He was a child. His army shot him for being unable to keep doing what no child should ever have been asked to do.

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Image: Graham Hogg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shot at Dawn Memorial: The Numbers Behind the Stakes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 m...

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Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shot at Dawn Memorial: What the Soldiers Were Suffering

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Angella Streluk, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ins...

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Image: Angella Streluk | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shot at Dawn Memorial: The Other Side of the Argument

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alf Beard, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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: ke...

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Image: Alf Beard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shot at Dawn Memorial: Andy DeComyn's Gift

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harry Mitchell, CC BY 4.0. 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 200...

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Image: Harry Mitchell | CC BY 4.0

Shot at Dawn Memorial: Dawn, Forever

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew Rogers, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Pardo...

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Image: Matthew Rogers | CC BY-SA 3.0