Chloe Dewe Mathews's Shot at Dawn: a moving photographic memorial

Screenshot from "King & Country" by Joseph Losey
with Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde (1964)

James Crozier was 16 when he presented himself at his local army recruiting office in Belfast in September 1914. He was accompanied by his mother, Elizabeth, who tried in vain to prevent him enlisting. The recruiting officer, who also happened to be called Crozier, assured her he would look out for her son and "would see that no harm comes to him".

Throughout the winter of 1915-16, Private James Crozier fought on the Somme in the 36th Ulster Division, 9th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles. In early February 1916, he failed to report for sentry duty in the trenches near Serre on the Western Front. A week later, he was found wandering in a daze some distance behind the front line. An army doctor examined him and declared him fit in both mind and body and, on 14 February 1916, he was court-martialled for desertion. James Crozier defended himself, saying that he had not known what he was doing when he went absent and had been wracked with pains throughout his body. He was sentenced to death.

Frank Crozier – the officer who had reassured Crozier's mother – was asked to supply a recommendation as to whether or not the sentence should be commuted. He recommended that it should be carried out. On the eve of the execution, whether out of compassion or guilt, he insisted that the condemned soldier be plied with drink through the night. As dawn broke on 27 February 1916, 18-year-old Private James Crozier, a boy who had defied his mother to fight for his country, was carried, unconscious from alcohol, from a holding cell to the grounds of a commandeered villa nearby. As he was incapable of standing, he was tied upright to a post and blindfolded.

During the first world war hundreds of soldiers, many of them teenage volunteers, were shot by firing squad for cowardice or desertion. Chloe Dewe Mathews's photographs of the mostly forgotten sites of their execution provide a poignant memorial of their tragic fate...

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Source: The Guardian, The Observer, Sean O'Hagan, Sunday 29 June 201

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