"Is This England?"

One moonlit night in the rolling hill country near Bath, a tall, uniformed figure stopped at a lorry driver's cottage and tapped on the door. A window was raised, a few words were exchanged and presently a woman stepped out with a coat thrown over her nightdress. She walked down the road beside the man in the uniform.

Last week the same soldier, a strapping Negro, stood, solemn-faced, before a court-martial of seven U.S. Army officers. Before the same court-martial had appeared the Bath lorry driver's wife. She said that the Negro had knocked and asked for directions to Bristol. She said that she walked down the road with him to show him the way. She said that he threatened her with a knife, lifted her over a wall and raped her.

The Negro's story: the woman was no stranger to him, he had been with her twice before and each time had paid her a pound note, he had made a date with her for that moonlit night. According to other testimony, her husband had been in the cottage at the time. A civilian police surgeon who examined the woman found no visible signs that she had put up any fight. The Negro said that he had been without food for 24 hours when he signed a confession.

At the trial's end, the Negro shook his head and wept. The U.S. officers found him guilty, sentenced him to death.

Act of Grace? The London Daily Mirror printed the story (with names withheld). Englishmen were shocked. The U.S. Army had Parliament's sanction to deal with its own delinquents in its own way but this time Englishmen could not keep quiet. Pointing out the "reasonable doubts" in the case, the Mirror indignantly editorialized: "In America, which has a color problem peculiar to herself, clemency might not be possible. Here . . . it may not be impossible as an act of grace to take a different view."

Mirror readers wrote: "A put-up job"; "The people that need grilling for the confession are the husband and wife and not the Negro. ... If he is good enough to fight for us then he is good enough for a square deal." Wrote an aroused war veteran: "Is this England? Do we English read that a Negro soldier is sentenced to death for raping a woman who asked for it and do we English sit back and do nothing?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.