DIE HARD, ABY!

… For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe (William Shakespeare)

RECENT BOOKS, many by Pen and Sword such as Shot at Dawn, have highlighted the often shocking cases of young British soldiers in the Great War being executed by their own side. All too frequently their trials were cursory, the evidence flimsy and the defence wholly inadequate. Such scandals has appalled right-minded people of all political persuasions, not least as there is strong evidence that the authorities turned a blind-eye to under-age boys serving illegally on the Western Front.

Die Hard, Aby! is a book that examines in depth the shocking case of a Jewish boy, Abraham Bevistein who enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment at the age of seventeen. By all accounts an exemplary young soldier, Aby was wounded in action and hospitalised.

After what was probably a premature release, his battalion suffered a major bombardment and Aby reported sick. Declared fit for duty, he then made the fatal mistake of not returning immediately to the front-line. The authorities arrested and tried him. The conduct of that trial is examined in close detail and clearly flouts every convention of natural justice.

His execution by firing squad caused horror and utter disbelief to his family and those who knew him and readers who engage this masterly written book will, equally, feel outraged. Aby’s case featured, too, as a major part of the Channel 4 drama documentary Boy Soldiers of the First World War.

This superbly researched and, for many, highly emotive account of a specific case of grave injustice will likely fuel yet further the controversy over such executions. Die Hard, Aby! is sure to appeal to all who feel any sentiment for their fellow humans.

At the end of the book it will be for the reader to decide whether Abraham Bevistein has been afforded fair justice from the country for which he died – even after all these years.

FAIR JUSTICE?

Soldiers who were shot during the Great War have, at times, become an emotive and recurring, national argument and topic. As David Lister, the author of this compelling work ‘Die Hard, Aby!’ writes:

… It is a recurring, national itch that requires scratching at regular intervals.

There is possibly a nagging feeling by some that justice has not been done; others may just wish the subject would fade away, and pretty much feel that justice was done in the first place.

There are several books that address the issue but, even before the first of them had been conceived, interest on the subject has bubbled away under the surface from a time well before the cessation of hostilities in 1919.

The Thin Yellow Line was published in 1974. Its author, William Moore, drawing on questions raised in Hansard (House of Commons), had to make a good as a job of it as possible without recourse to official court-martial papers. Those had been closed to the public: marked ‘not for release’ until the expiration of 100-years.

A decade later, Anthony Babington’s For The Sake of Example was the first book published by an author who had been allowed to see the papers, still not yet, though, within the public domain.

75-years after the executions, the government relenting to public pressure, the war office documents were released earlier than first intended, enabling more research. At the time of the release, another publication Shot at Dawn (Julian Putkowski/Julian Sykes) had been made. This was the first book to report in detail of individual cases, as well as the first to record the names of those executed within the main-body of the text (as opposed to within a table or index).

All of these books lean towards the injustice of the situation, with the latter making a strong case for the ‘pardoning‘ of all those executed for military disciplinary offences, such as desertion or sleeping at post. Recently, though, works by Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson, produced there well-researched (but unsympathetic) publication entitled Blindfold and Alone. Here, the authors take the general stance that the executions were, for the most part, necessary and properly carried out.

For God’s Sake Shoot Straight (recently published as ‘Death for Desertion’) by Leonard Sellers tells the true story of Sub Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, one of only two officers shot for military offences during the First World War.

Die Hard, Aby! follows a logical sequence of events that trails in the wake of publications previously made available. Whilst Moore brought the issue of executions into the wider public domain and Babington examined the case in more depth, Die Hard, Aby! similarly seeks to examine the story of the enlisted men and in particular Abraham Bevistein, who like an estimated 15% of all fighting ‘men’, had signed-up as a soldier, under-age.

Lister sets out to tell the whole-story of Abraham Bevistein: where he was born, where he grew up and what, chain of events brought him to his fate. Abraham was a very ordinary boy amongst the hundreds of thousands of ordinary boys and men who died in the trenches and whose lives have not even left a footnote on the pages of history, other than a name merely scribed on a stone or a memorial panel.

Abraham has been recorded and mentioned in Hansard on occasions, now, spanning in excess of 75-years. His story exemplifies an injustice that has been allowed to endure for far too long.

David Lister’s book considers not that of the 306 men executed for military offences; but of one boy who suffered that end, Abraham Bevistein, who served under the name of “Harris” and whose gravestone even bears the name spelt incorrectly as ‘Beverstein’.

Much of Lister’s work speaks of Abraham’s times and the setting for his life. The writer acknowledges that with the passage of years, there is little to be found in records and archives of the life of one boy who grew-up in a poor part of London.

Abraham is followed from the Russian annexed land of his birth, across Europe and the North Sea and into a new land for which he chose to fight, and for which he ultimately died. A little is learnt of his school life, the regiment he joined and of the events that brought him to his untimely death.

The premise of Die hard, Aby! is a sad-case of an executed boy – taken up in Parliament – based on how letters from the front, scribbled on scraps of paper, were brought to the attention of the nation.

In a carefully choreographed story, based on real-life events, David Lister exposes brilliantly the injustice of Abraham’s untimely death by execution.