Inglorious Soldier

The author, William Monk Gibbon (born 15 December 1896), claimed that he did not wish to write this memoir of his experience as a soldier in the First World War. He referred to it as “a book which I did not want to write because it would disinter so much that was painful.” While a student at Oxford, he volunteered for the army and was given a commission in January 1916 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Service Corps.

Published in 1968, Inglorious Soldier is perhaps more famous for its account of the author’s role in opposing the Easter Rising and his encounter with Francis Sheehy Skeffington, executed by an army officer without any trial, than it is for its description of military life on the Western Front. His description of winter hardship in northern France is both colourful and miserable:
“We were approaching one of the wettest spells in this harshest and coldest of war winters. As long as the frost lasted, wagon wheels, crashing across ruts and over ancient shell-holes, might crack in half; wagons might need an extra pair of horses traced up to get them up a hill; but at least the air was fresh and the surface of the ground clean: but as soon as the thaw came the roads, patched with Somme chalk, quickly dissolved into a thick glucous cream.”

In the summer of 1917 Monk Gibbon submitted a pacifist letter to his commanding officer in France. His argument was conscientious and rational:
“I have ceased to believe in either the justice or the efficacy of a death peanlty. War is the most monstrous of all death penalties — being indiscriminate. Individual hatred may to a certain extent be logical: collective hatred is well-nigh impossible. So far from being able to condemn a whole nation I would not feel justified in saying of any single individual even that he had forfeited his right to live... To say that I hate a man seven miles away I have never seen and about whom I knew nothing save that he happened to be born in one part of Europe and I in another — is a psychological impossibility. To say that... I should want to kill him is preposterous.”
This letter could have placed him in danger of being court-martialed for cowardice or disobedience; he understood that he might face a firing squad. Instead, however, his concerned parents in Dublin wrote to the War Office asking that he could come home on leave. While there he was admitted to hospital and diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia (a.k.a. shell shock). His family had been appalled by his stance but drew comfort from an article in The Spectator which maintained that one of the ways in which shell shock manifested itself was as “morbid conscientiousness and exaggerated scrupulosity”. The remainder of his service during the First World War was in England and Ireland rather than on the Western Front where his conscience would have interfered with his duties.