Re: the discussion of the bayonets, I was about to mention that the rifle M1903, bayonet M1905, one piece fatigue uniform, and flag arm band suggested North Africa, when the caption on the image was published to confirm this. I only mention this to indicate that careful examination of an image can be very useful to determining the place and time the image was captured, and how useful a caption is to understanding the image.

Traditionally execution firing parties are provided with one rifle pre-loaded at random with a blank round. This ostensibly provides a degree of comfort to the firing members that they may not have fired a bullet that killed a human being. With rifle M1icon it would be easy to detect the blank round as there would be no ejection of the cartridge case. With a bolt action rifle supposedly the rifle with the blank round would not be detected, however anyone that has fired live ammunition and experienced the recoil of the rifle M1903 should be able to detect the lack of recoil of the rifle with blank cartridge. I suppose that in the excitement of the moment, with the noise of the discharge of the weapons it might be possible to not notice the lack of recoil. It was the usual practice that the firing party would eject the expended cartridge case before the NCO in charge to demonstrate that the cartridge had been fired, to assure all members of the execution party discharged their weapons, although there was slight chance that a deliberate miss would be noticed.