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from The Guardian,
Saturday 19 February, 2000
Executed soldiers honoured
John Ezard
A statue of a young soldier,
blindfolded in front of a firing squad, is to stand at the centre of the
first national memorial to the British servicemen executed during the
first world war.
It will be at the heart of a stand of 306 newly-planted trees at the
National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Each will bear a plaque
honouring a soldier shot at dawn by his own side "as an example to
others", mostly for cowardice or desertion.
The wood will enshrine a growing mood of pity for the soldiers nearly
90 years after their deaths.
"It will mean that they have come home at last in the memory of the
country they tried to serve," said John Hipkin, 73, founder of the
pressure group Shot at Dawn.
The final statue will be eight feet tall, and finished in concrete by
Andy DeComyn, 33, a third year art student at the University of Central
England, in Birmingham.
"Submitting it was a long shot", he said, "I could not believe it when
it was accepted. I was over the moon."
The boy is modelled on Private Herbert Burden, of the First Battalion
Northumberland Fusiliers, who was shot for desertion in 1917.
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