Cowardice

In military law, cowardice in the face of the enemy has long been treated as a serious offense distinct from ordinary military discipline: United States military codes have defined battlefield cowardice as a crime punishable by death, and other national armed forces criminalized it as well. During the First World War, British, Canadian, French, German and Russian forces all court-martialed soldiers for cowardice, and many were executed by firing squad; British soldiers convicted of the offense were often excluded from war memorials, and their families lost benefits and faced social stigma. The United States prosecuted cowardice-type offenses during the war but carried out no executions for it, while German commanders were comparatively reluctant to impose the death penalty. Britain later reconsidered its own wartime executions, issuing posthumous pardons to soldiers shot for offenses including cowardice under the Armed Forces Act 2006. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/