Having already gone absent without leave (AWOL) from his unit on multiple occasions, he left his post once again the following month—he said to see a friend in the neighbouring regiment with whom he had served in 1913—but he was arrested and accused of desertion.

[2] Confusion has stemmed from the fact that the second Herbert Frances Burden joined up after the war began, on 23 November 1915, at Deptford recruiting office.

But he had previously joined the 1st Northumberland Fusiliers, private number 11012; there he was registered as being 19 years and 240 days old and weighed 8 stone 3 pounds (52 kilograms).

[2] Attempting to clarify the confusion between the two possible Burdens, two recent scholars have suggested that the two men who joined both the East Surreys and the Northumberland Fusiliers were the same individual.

[12] His battalion fought at the bitterly contested Battle of Bellewaarde in June 1915, in which both the British and German armies had suffered high losses.

[14] As he had served on the Western Front before the end of 1915 he was eligible to wear the 1914-15 Star, however, this was forfeited by his conviction for desertion, a detail noted as such in the Medal Roll of the Northumberland Fusiliers.

[15] Burden by now had "undergone the usual nerve-shattering baptism of shelling in the trenches",[3] and having seen friends killed at the Battle of Belwaarde Ridge, was sent to a military hospital.

[3] Discharged on the afternoon of 26 June[17] he was with his battalion when they received orders to head towards the front line,[18] where it was detailed to dig trenches.

[21][note 5] Discipline, though, "was still being applied to the standards of the pre-war regular army": every officer who had subsequently to voice an opinion, as part of the confirmatory process, on the merits or otherwise of Burden's death sentence opted to uphold it.

[15] A number of factors have been subsequently raised in mitigation of Burden's circumstance: "his age, the alleged impact of the casualties suffered by his battalion at Bellewaarde Ridge, the fact that he had no defence at his trial as all who could speak for him were killed, and that his absence had been a classic case of AWOL, not desertion".

It consists of a ten-foot-high (3.0 m) statue, created by Andy de Comyn,[24] surrounded by 306 short stakes to represent the number of executed men.

[27] In 2006 the Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne,[28] announced that Herbert Burden would receive a parliamentary pardon from the British government, along with over 300 others who had also been executed for various offences—excluding murder—during the war.

[18] This was granted after a campaign to recognise that, the Director of the Arboretum said, "over 80 years of medical, psychological, psychiatric and sociological advances gives us advantages denied those who sat on the court-martial boards that passed sentence",[18] and that they were almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, "or shell shock as it was known in 1916".

[29] Such opposing views have been described as "part and parcel of the nationwide debate on the workings of military law during the Great War and the legitimacy of the demands for a posthumous public exoneration of the condemned soldiers".