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Deserters of the First World War: The Home Front
by Andrea Hetherington
Th deserters who were shot at dawn and pardoned a century later is a familiar one. But alongside these 306 UK soldiers are the stories of another 80,000 men charged with desertion and absence and tried at courts martial on the home front. Andrea Hetherington has researched these stories to describe those men who disappeared from camps and barracks within Britain, hiding from the authorities, sometimes turning to crime to survive, or enlisting the help of family and friends to evade detection.
The author paints a nuanced and compassionate picture, showing us through many different examples that there was usually much more behind a desertion than cowardice or shell shock – boredom, protest, troubles at home and mental or physical issues could all play their part. It was very interesting to
