Military deserter

“ A deserter on reaching the lines is put under arrest and conducted to the commanding officer, where he is examined, and it is usual to notify him he will be punished with death as a spy if he gives false information. Though great caution is required in regard to the information given by deserters, great advantage may be derived from their information, as attacks premeditated, the positions of officers, corps, and magazines, and head quarters, of discontents in the army, or disagreements among the superior officers. ”

“ A GERMAN DESERTER'S WAR
EXPERIENCE
I MARCHING INTO BELGIUM
At the end of July our garrison at Koblenz was feverishly agitated. Part of our men were seized by an indescribable enthusiasm, others became subject to a feeling of great depression. The declaration of war was in the air. I belonged to those who were depressed. For I was doing my second year of military service and was to leave the barracks in six weeks' time. Instead of the long wished-for return home war was facing me. ”

“ This story of the young man who tried to desert at Salonika may well have a heartening influence upon all men in uniforms who waver in the path of duty—especially in these days of vast military operations when a whole world is in arms. ”

“ They do not command or authorize any civilian to arrest or detain deserters, but merely direct the payment of a reward for every deserter actually brought in, and justify the military officers in paying the reward and receiving and holding the deserter. ”

“ In all armies desertion while on active service is punishable by death; on the continent of Europe, owing to the system of compulsory service, desertion is infrequent, and takes place usually when the deserter wishes to leave his country altogether. ”

“ And why is a deserter's doom made so awful? Simply because the crime of desertion is so great, its demoralizing effect which it would have on the army so fatal, that it must be punished in the most telling and fearful manner. History, both sacred and secular, has put no deeper brand of infamy than on deserters. Benedict Arnold stands forth as an instance of the one, Judas Iscariot as an instance of the other. ”

“ Desertion, already a frightful evil, will become the order of the day. And who will arrest the deserter, when most of those at home are engaged with him in the common cause of setting the Government at defiance? Organized bands of deserters will patrol the country, burning, plundering, and robbing indiscriminately, and our armies, already too weak, must be still further depleted at the most imminent crisis of our cause, to keep the peace and protect the lives and property of our citizens at home. ”

“ The next words simply take her breath away:
"Sergeant Gower, I arrest you as a deserter and thief! You deserted from F troop, ——th Cavalry, at Battle Butte!"
She sees the fearful gleam on the dark man's face; there is a sudden spring, a clinch, a straining to and fro of two forms,—one tall, black, snaky, the other light, lithe, agile, and trained; muttered curse, panting breath, and then, sure as fate, the taller man is being borne backward against the rail. She sees the dark arm suddenly relax its grasp of the gray form and disappear an instant. ”

“ But mayn't desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we've gone beyond—to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing—? Oh, don't mind my calling you a deserter, Wayne," she added, her eyes full of tears, "for the truth is I'd like to be a deserter myself. But perhaps one deserter is enough for a family—and you beat me to it." She laughed and turned back to the cabs.
He wanted to go on with the argument; show her what it was in desertion that army men despised, make the distinction between deserting and resigning. ”

“ Thousands had been made beggars in a night full of horrors. Women and children, soldiers and citizens were lying just where death had struck them down, mixed together just as the merciless shrapnel and shells had sent them out of life into the darkness beyond. There had been real impartiality. There lay a German soldier next to a white-haired French woman, a little Belgian stripling whom fear had driven out of the house into the street, lay huddled up against the "enemy," a German soldier, who might have been protection and safety for him. ”

“ Deserters from the American Army, having entered the service of the enemy, suffer death if they fall again into the hands of the United States, whether by capture, or being delivered up to the American Army; and if a deserter from the enemy, having taken service in the Army of the United States, is captured by the enemy, and punished by them with death or otherwise, it is not a breach against the law and usages of war, requiring redress or retaliation. ”

“ So will the warrior killed in battle, who is like a conqueror, enjoy all the delights imaginable; while a deserter is despised by all men, and covered with shame and disgrace, because he deserted his comrades in the moment of danger. ”

“ The offence of naval or military desertion is constituted when a man absents himself with the intention either of not returning or of escaping some important service, such as embarkation for foreign service, or service in aid of the civil power. ”

“ After your escape from the savages—at Franklinton, you remember—you told me that Hiram Bradford had confessed all to you. As a spy, I should let him go; for his scheme failed—and his attempt upon my life was in another war. But a deserter once is a deserter forever;”—fiercely—“and the penalty is death! ”

“ He asserts on several occasions the men refused to obey orders to shoot wounded enemy soldiers and helpless civilians, and were more tortured than punished for such insubordination.”
“It will rekindle our determination not to become swamped in the war to the point where we forget our chief purpose—not defeat of Germany so much as defeat of war as an institution. ... ‘A German deserter’s war experience,’ with its directness and almost clumsy sincerity, is a chastening and thrilling book for all of us, but it is as a symbol of revolt that one will not wish to forget it.” ”

“ Many who ran away from one army, went in speculation to another, like the mercenaries in the Thirty Years' War; indeed this changing and deserting had rough jovial attraction for adventurers. An imprisoned deserter was, in the opinion of multitudes, anything but an evil-doer,—we have many popular songs which express the full sympathy of the village singer for the unfortunate, but the happy deserter passed even for a hero, and in some popular tales, the valiant fellow who has been compelled to help the fictitious King out of danger, and at last marries the Princess, is a runaway soldier. ”

“ Sooner than have been ingloriously dismissed; sooner than to have been branded with the name of deserter—a stain never to be washed out, a stigma to mark your remembrance and disgrace your children after you are dead—sooner than this should have ever overtaken you, you have showed by your gallant conduct that you would have preferred to have been riddled by the enemy’s bullets and died on the field. ”

“ The horrors of war no pen can describe, no tongue can utter, no pencil can paint. The demoralizing influence over the soldier is dreadful. No doubt desertion was this fellow's aim, and, to serve his purpose, he fell into this strong temptation and crime. Desertion cost the life of one whom I saw in Mississippi sitting on a white-pine coffin and followed by his armed comrades, who were soon to take his life. ”

“ Now desertion is a great offence in a soldier; in this army it is one of the most common ; for nearly ten per cent, of the American army has deserted in Mexico, not to mention the desertions before the army reached that country. It is related that forty-eight men were hanged at once for desertion; not hanged as you judicially murder men in time of peace, privately, as if ashamed of the deed, in the corner of a gaol, and by a contrivance which shortens the agony, and makes death humane as possible. ”

“ But a number of old and tried warriors, who have inured themselves to thirst as well as hunger, and who look with contempt on all who are less hardy than themselves, are stationed at every point of exit, and, as soon as they see the dusky form of a deserter approach the spot which they are guarding, they unceremoniously attack him with their sticks, and beat him back to his place in the circle. ”

“ It is dreaded, that if they were occasionally moved from one garrison to another, the foreigners in the service, who are exceedingly prone to desertion, might then find opportunities, which according to the present plan they cannot: for however desirous a Prussian [151] soldier may be to desert, the thing is almost impossible. The moment a man is missing, a certain number of cannons are fired, which announce the desertion to the whole country. ”

“ The alarm had spread rapidly among a people still suffering from the wounds of the Seven Years' War. The only refuge was desertion, and although the frontiers were closely guarded, deserters passed daily into the neighboring territories, where, from the people at least, they found a ready reception. ”

“ In every barrack-room there hung unspeakably ghastly photographs of the mangled bodies of Legionaries who had fallen into the hands of the Arabs and been tortured by their women. He had himself seen wretched deserters dragged back by Goums, [#] a mass of rags, filth, blood and bruises; their manacled hands fastened to the end of a rope attached to an Arab's saddle. Inasmuch as the captor got twenty-five francs for returning a deserter, alive or dead, he merely tied the wounded, or starved and half-dead wretch to the end of a rope and galloped with him to the nearest outpost or barracks. ”

“ Many a man who now lies in the deserter's dishonored grave, would have been this day sharing the glory of his country and been looked upon as a patriot, had not his starving wife and children forced him in an evil hour to abandon his post and go to them. It is true, there is no excuse for the deserter, but where the human affections are concerned, it is but natural that the soldier will feel solicitous for the comfort of his wife and children. ”

“ But the deserter's fate was only terrible; suffering without glory, "the pang without the palm." From those dreary fortress prisons where the "refractory" toiled in the garb of convicts, fed on bread and water, with shaven heads and fettered feet, no man ever came forth alive. ”

“ I understand the meeting whose resolutions I am considering to be in favor of suppressing the rebellion by military force—by armies. Long experience has shown that armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? ”

“ I am proud to say not a man embraced the offer. He next addressed the deserters, informing them that they were at liberty to return to their own people. At the same time he reminded them of the severity of the English martial law against deserters. “It is death, as no doubt you are aware. ”

“ And yet, some miles ahead, striving hard to reach the railway in time to intercept this very train, a small battalion of cavalry was struggling through the blasts, officers and men afoot and dragging their own benumbed limbs and half-benumbed chargers through the drifts that lay deep at the bottom of every "coulée." Some few soldiers remained in saddle: they were too frozen to walk at all. Some few fell behind, and would have thrown themselves flat upon the prairie in the lethargy that is but premonition of death by freezing. ”

“ This is what makes the soldier the equal of the civilian. If a name is once selected and the man does not report, being at the time a resident of the State, he is declared a deserter, and [220] punished as such. To their officers these men are obedient and respectful; with the civilian, they are sons of the State, and their duty honorable in the extreme. Desertion is almost unknown; but when it does occur, the offender receives the fixed punishment of twenty years in the government island prison.”
“And the government pays these men?” asked Cobb. ”

“ Thus the setting of the story of "The Deserter" is gone, the author is gone, and who can tell at this moment whether "Hamlin," fighting in the trenches on the British front in Prance, is not also gone. ”

“ From 1708, the English mutiny acts have repeatedly, if not uniformly, contained provisions by which persons reasonably suspected of being deserters might be apprehended by a constable, and taken before a justice of the peace, and the fact of their desertion established to his satisfaction, before their surrender to the military authorities. ”

“ He at once said:
"There's a deserter been killed ... a German deserter."
And the three women were forthwith overcome with a great sense of peace. After the rush of events that had come upon them like a tempest, it seemed to them as though nothing could touch them now. ”

“ Is desertion rare and much abhorred? Or so common that men are no longer shot for it now? So you may go on enumerating until it strikes you that you are simply drifting into an inventory of all the details of the enemy's wartime life, in the field and at home. ”

“ Many of my mates envied the dead soldiers and wished to be in their place in order to be at least through with all their misery. Yet all of us were afraid of dying—afraid of dying, be it noted, not of death. All of us often longed for death, but we were horrified at the slow dying lasting hours which is the rule on the battle-field, that process which makes the wounded, abandoned soldier die piecemeal. I have witnessed the death of hundreds of young men in their prime, but I know of none among them who died willingly. ”