Elizabeth Speller: The Return of Captain John Emmett

My novel is loosely inspired by the executions of Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and of Lieutenant Poole of the West Yorkshire Regiment, both shot for desertion. The novelist A.P. Herbert, who had encountered Dyett while himself a junior officer in the same division, wrote a novel based on the case: The Secret Battle (1919). Leonard Selers has produced an account of the Dyett case in Death for Desertion, first published in 1995 as ForGod's Sake Shoot Straight. Further reading in this area includes Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War by John Hughes-Wilson and Cathryn Corns, and Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act by Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes. Ernest Thirtle MP

published a pamphlet in 1929, Shootings at Dawn: The Army Death Penalty at Work. The terrible effect on families of losing husbands and sons in this way is revealed by surviving letters.

There are, of course, a great number of excelent books on the Great War. I am particularly indebted to the folowing: John Keegan, The First World War; Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front; Max Arthur, Last Post: The Final Word from our First World War Soldiers; and Neil Hansen, The Unknown Soldier: The Story of the Missing of the Great War. Gordon Corrigan has assembled a critical look at some of the myths of the war in Mud,Blood and Poppycock. Dominic Hibberd's biography of Wilfred Owen, Jean Moorcroft Wiliams' work on Isaac Rosenberg and Nicholas Moseley's book on Julian Grenfel are among many that I have read, as wel as Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, a vivid account of her experience as a volunteer nurse on the Western Front.

A Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-Poets Killed in France and Flanders, edited by Anne Powel, is superb on the lives and deaths of less famous poets. Diaries, novels, plays and poetry of the period, as wel as some comprehensive websites, have helped my understanding of the varied experiences of those who lived in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Above al, for a wonderful survey of the Great War in the popular imagination, there is Paul Fussel's classic: The Great War andModern Memory.

For the care and understanding of men with shel-shock, I have used several sources of which the most valuable were the papers of W.H.R. Rivers who treated many of these psychiatric casualties, and the publication in 1917 of Shell-Shock and its Lessons by two doctors, Grafton Eliot Smith and Tom Hatherley Pear. Daniel Hipp's The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon was invaluable in providing the connection between poetry and mental fragility. There was a hospital for shel-shocked officers in Fairford, Gloucestershire (now Coln House School), but Dr Chilvers and his son are entirely fictional. Ben Shephard's War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century and Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam were moving accounts of war and mental ilness.

Sir Hubert Gough lived until 1963.

I have taken a liberty in placing the Faringdon Foly within the late nineteenth-century landscape. It was, in fact, built by Lord Berners in 1935, although the atmospheric hil upon which it stands is the site of settlements dating back to antiquity. Other locations al exist, although, as far as I know, Wilmington Priory was never used by a nursing order, and the beautiful 'butterfly' window at the church of St Mary and St Peter was lost in a fire a few years ago.

The Darling Committee (1919) and the Southborough Committee (1920—1922) both existed and examined questions of military courts martial and shelshock, though I have added to their members and to their proceedings. Philip Morrel MP raised questions on these topics in the House of Commons as early as 1918

before standing down for the December election. In 1919 an army officer, Colonel Lambert Ward MP (who had, like Sub-Lieutenant Dyett, served in the RNR), requested that there be no differentiation between the graves of those executed and those kiled on active service. Many individuals volunteered to give evidence to the Southborough Committee.

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful for the perseverance of my agent George Capel and her assistants Abi Felows and Rosie Apponyi in getting the first draft of this book to a state where it could be considered a novel. My thanks too to Lennie Goodings at Virago; her confidence and continued investment in it were hugely encouraging. I also owe a debt of gratitude to her assistant, Victoria Pepe, who read the manuscript first and whose belief in it pushed it forward, and to the sheer stamina of my assiduous copyeditor Celia Levett. George Miler and Katharine Reeve provided technical advice throughout the writing of the book.

The assistance of Richard Holmes was invaluable; he headed off my worst military blunders with patience and good humour. Alwin Hutchinson also advanced my military education. Any remaining mistakes were entirely dreamed up by me.

Lucy Cavendish Colege, Cambridge, has, as always, been an inestimable resource for information and ideas, as wel as providing the enduring friendships that have sustained my writing career.

Finaly, my thanks go to the trustees of the Hosking Houses Trust who provided the 2008 Residency that alowed me to get the bulk of this book written in the peace of the Trust's Church Cottage on the banks of the River Avon near Stratford.