To this day, the Ministry of Defence refuses to give a pardon to the 306, convicted of cowardice, though even in 1914 people knew all about 'shell shock' - what the modern world calls Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We shall not remember the poor soldier who confessed: 'I haven't been the same since I scraped my best friend's brains from my face.' He, too, was shot at dawn. We shall not remember the moment when Gertrude Farr went to the local post office in 1916 and was told: 'We don't give pensions to the widows of cowards.' She was left destitute, with a three-year-old and a four-month-old to feed. We shall not remember Herbert Morrison, who was the youngest soldier in the West India Regiment when he was led in front of the firing squad and gunned down for desertion.

The homage of Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay - 'We shall remember them' - was all but sabotaged as a silver Saab revved up and the exhaust of a souped-up superbike echoed across Whitehall. The microphone at the Cenotaph had been turned off, and the traffic kept at bay for only a brief moment by the police. The piper had not finished his lament yesterday when the dragon's roar of London's traffic drowned out the unofficial Cenotaph service for those shot at dawn.Įight decades on from the end of the First World War, the 306 British soldiers shot for desertion are still dishonoured, still shamed, still the subject of the official disapproval of Her Majesty's Government.

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