Execution (novel)

Published in 1958, Execution is a war novel by the Canadian novelist and Second World War veteran Colin McDougall. Although it won McDougall the 1958 Governor General's Award for English language fiction, it was his only novel, and after publishing it to wide acclaim he retreated into a quiet life as Registrar of McGill University in Montreal. Nevertheless, Execution remains one of the most significant Canadian novels of the 1950s and shares distinction with Timothy Findley's The Wars as one of the finest Canadian war novels of all time.

Based in part on McDougall's experience as an officer with the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, Execution follows a fictional Canadian regiment called the 2nd Rifles during the Italian campaign of 1943. Led by the flamboyant Brigadier Ian Kildare (a modern version of the miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier of classical comedy), the Canadians land on Sicily where they meet with little resistance from the Italian Army, comprised mostly of hapless conscripts who want no part in the war.

Despite Kildare's strict orders for his men to shoot Italian deserters on sight, the Canadians take kindly to a pair of buffoonish Italian deserters, more notable for their culinary skills than military prowess. Impetuously, Kildare orders the Canadians to execute the Italians, which in light of their childlike buffoonery becomes an act of unspeakable savagery--not to mention a violation of the Geneva Convention. After the bloody and horrific execution of the two Italians, the Canadians are forced to confront ethics of warfare that had rarely concerned them as long as the enemy had remained a distant and faceless "target". Major Bunny Bazin, the most battle-hardened of the 2nd Rifles, surmises that "execution is... the ultimate degradation of man," using the term "execution" in both a literal and metaphoric sense, with war itself as a kind of mass execution.

The novel's main protagonist, Lieutenant (later Major) John Adam (a semi-autobiographical foil for McDougall), is an efficient soldier and leader, who nevertheless finds "the vulture fear" inhabiting his soul after the execution of the Italians (he himself is forced to finished the job with a tommy-gun). Bound to protect and lead his men as they march through Italy, through the Battle of Ortona and Monte Cassino, Adam finds himself struggling to preserve an image of fortitude in the face of a gnawing inner "horror" (Adam's reflections occasionally resemble those of Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness).

Eventually, he and the entire regiment find a chance to redeem themselves when one of their own, Rifleman Jones, a mildly retarded but efficient infantryman, is sentenced to be executed for treason by his own army after blundering into an association with a ring of corrupt soliders who murder an American. Although everyone, including a newly promoted General Kildare knows "Jonesy" is merely a scapegoat for the murder (previous scenes show he cannot be held culpable for his own actions), the execution must go ahead out of political expediency. Led by Adam, the men wage a tenacious campaign to have Jonesy freed, but all efforts eventually fail. When Jonesy is led out to be executed, the officer charged with commanding the execution faints, and Adam is once more obligated to finish the job, which despite its injustice has a kind of redemptive atmosphere as Jonesy's death assumes a Christ-like significance.

Jonesy's execution may be based in part on the real-life execution of Private Harold Pringle, a Canadian private executed by his own army in Italy and given a full historical treatment in Andrew Clark's book, A Keen Soldier: The Execution of Second World War Private Harold Pringle.

The novel ends with Adam and the other men regaining a measure of the confidence they lost after the earlier execution of the Italians, and in the novel's final pages it becomes evident that, although the Canadians inhabit a brutal and unforgiving world, they are not intrinsically immoral or inhumane.

Unlike many other war novels of the period, Execution is less of a hard-boiled realist novel than it is a meditation on the ethics and implications of human actions in war. Like Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny or Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, both of which were key models for McDougall (as his papers at McGill University reveal), Execution is a war novel that combines visceral depictions of combat with a philosophical thesis about the boundaries between good and evil in human conflict and society.

Sources: Colin McDougall Papers (Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University Libraries); Colin McDougall, Execution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958); Warren Cariou, "Afterword" to the New Canadian Library edition of Execution. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005); Andrew Clark, A Keen Soldier: The Execution of Second World War Private Harold Pringle (Toronto: Vintage, 2002); W.H. New, ed. The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).