Welcome back to This Day in Scottish History. I’m your host, Colin MacDonald. Today, we remember a tragic and controversial moment in Scotland’s military past. On the 15th of February, 1916, Private John Docherty, a soldier of the Black Watch regiment, was executed at dawn on the Western Front. His crime? Desertion. His fate? A bullet from his comrades. And with that, he became the first volunteer from Kitchener’s Army to suffer this ultimate punishment.

Docherty’s story is one of many that expose the brutal realities of war, particularly the rigid discipline enforced during World War I. Born in Edinburgh, he joined the British Army like thousands of others, answering Lord Kitchener’s famous call to arms. Britain needed men—volunteers willing to fight for King and Country in what was then expected to be a short, decisive war. But as the trenches of the Western Front filled with mud, death, and despair, the reality of war shattered those illusions.

By 1916, the Battle of Loos had come and gone. The Black Watch, one of Scotland’s most storied regiments, had played a significant role in the offensive. The battle, fought in September and October of 1915, was a costly failure for the British, with thousands of men sacrificed for little territorial gain. The men who survived faced the ongoing horrors of trench warfare—cold, hunger, relentless shelling, and the ever-present specter of death.

It was in this environment that John Docherty’s story took a fateful turn. The details of his desertion remain scarce, but what we do know is that he left his post and was later captured. The British Army’s approach to discipline at the time was unforgiving. Fear of desertion spreading among the troops meant that those caught fleeing were often made examples of. The penalty was death, carried out by firing squad, often consisting of fellow soldiers from the condemned man’s own unit.

Docherty’s execution took place at Mazingarbe, near the front lines in France, in the abattoir—a grimly fitting location for a moment of such brutal finality. He was shot at dawn, a ritual meant to serve as both punishment and deterrent. But instead of reinforcing discipline, executions like Docherty’s have since come to symbolize the harsh and, many argue, unjust military justice system of the First World War.

Docherty was not alone. Between 1914 and 1918, over 300 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed for crimes ranging from desertion to cowardice. Many of these men were likely suffering from what we now understand as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), then called shell shock. The horrors of trench warfare—endless bombardments, the sight of friends torn apart by artillery, the gas attacks—pushed countless men to their breaking points. But in an era when mental health was barely understood, there was little sympathy for those who cracked under the pressure.

It would take nearly a century for justice, or at least recognition, to come. In 2006, the British government granted posthumous pardons to those executed for military offenses during World War I, including John Docherty. The pardon did not erase the history, nor did it bring these men back, but it acknowledged that they were victims of a system that failed to understand the psychological toll of war.

Today, as we reflect on the events of 15th February 1916, we remember John Docherty not just as a soldier who deserted, but as a young man caught in the nightmare of war, punished by an unforgiving military machine. His story, like so many others, reminds us of the cost of war—not just in lives lost on the battlefield, but in the human suffering that often went unrecognized.

Thank you for joining us on This Day in Scottish History. I’m Colin MacDonald, and I hope you’ll tune in next time. Until then, haste ye back.

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