Abstract
This chapter investigates the trauma of the death penalty alongside war trauma, building on Christie Davies’s suggestion that the reform and repeal of military and civilian capital punishment ought to be studied together. The 1920s and 1930s saw a cultural processing of the effect of the uniquely widespread use of the military death penalty by British forces during World War I, spurred in particular by A. P. Herbert’s novel The Secret Battle (1919); throughout the interwar years, forms of death sentence were gradually removed, after parliamentary debates which frequently also questioned the value of the civilian death penalty. The first full parliamentary debate on the civilian death penalty did not take place until 1929, and it is shown how these debates about the military death penalty thus had a huge influence on interwar writing in texts by Herbert, Patrick Hamilton and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Published Version
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