Solved: the Riddle of Executed First World War Soldier

The Times ^ | April 29, 2009 | Robert Digby

[nickcarraway]

Ben Macintyre thought he knew who condemned a fugitive British soldier to death in France in 1916, and wrote a book about it. Now, ten years later, an e-mail out of the blue has convinced him that he had the wrong man. Here, he sets the record straight

History never stands still. Just when we think we understand the past, it moves on. Ten years ago, I set out to try to solve a murder mystery left over from the First World War. Two years later, thinking that I had done so, I wrote a nonfiction book about the case: part war story, part love story and partly a historical whodunnit.

Then, last month, I was contacted by a Belgian historian who had gained access to a forgotten archive in Brussels that contained a trove of information about espionage during the First World War. He had read my book and had uncovered crucial documents relating to the events it described. The new evidence offered an extraordinary and unexpected postscript to my story. The person whom I had suspected of the crime was almost certainly innocent. The culprit, to judge from these long-lost documents, was someone else. A decade after I stumbled across this strange, sad tale, and nearly a century after the death in question, here was an opportunity to answer, once and for all, the question that nagged me for so long: who killed Robert Digby?

I first heard Digby’s name in 1999, when I was Paris correspondent for The Times. One morning, I received a telephone call from a schoolmaster in a little village on the Somme in northern France.

[nickcarraway]

Ping

[SunkenCiv]

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[BattleHymn]

ping

[visualops]

Interesting.

[kenavi]

You have the executed soldier as the “author” of the piece!

[nickcarraway]

My way of trying to bring a little justice.

[PotatoHeadMick]

I don’t get it, how did the Mayor “betray” Private Digby? As I read it the mayor went to the soldier’s hiding place and explained that the Germans would execute everyone in the town if he didn’t surrender, the soldier thought about it overnight and decided to give himself up to the Germans.

I don’t understand how this can be described as the Mayor “betraying” the soldier.

[nickcarraway]

That wasn't the betrayal they were referring to. At that point, the English soldiers were already discovered.

What is being called betrayal is who turned the four soldiers in to the Germans in the first place.