It's a Battlefield by Graham Greene

Graham Greene can be relied upon to tell a good yarn. Once again, the basic story is a promising tale; a man will be sentenced to death for political reasons when he has led a pretty innocuous life and his crime was unintentional. Yet the characters never truly come alive, Greene had not fully developed as an author when he penned this little tale and while it remains a reasonable read it leaves no real impression in the way that much of his later books do so successfully and effortlessly.