First World War: Centenary

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, my wife and I visited the western front battlefields last October. My father served as a young Royal Engineer officer. He never spoke about it, trying to blot out its nightmares. Only recently we discovered that he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre. He never said a word about that either. Of course, he was one of the lucky ones, and that is why I am here. Among the many military cemeteries, we found the memorials of my three uncles killed aged 26, 21 and just 18. So many young lives cut short. So many families bereft. Like many others, my grandparents never fully recovered from their loss.

Faced with row upon row of graves—we also visited Irish, French, Australian, Canadian and German memorials—it is frightening to think that their sacrifice did not achieve the war to end all wars that they thought they were fighting for. That surely must be the tone and the theme of any anniversary. That war was largely pointless, meaningless and avoidable. As others said, we should not be celebrating its absurd origins, however much we may pay tribute to those who fought, were wounded or lost their lives. Instead, we must remind ourselves of the futility of negative nationalism, so sharply distinct from positive patriotism.

The year 1914 marked a terrible failure of common sense and common humanity. Personally, therefore, I will find it difficult to mark the centenary of the war’s outbreak with anything other than a resolve that we should do all we can to reconcile the peoples of Europe in the 21st century, avoiding new “foreigner” scapegoats for our economic troubles, and perhaps also reminding ourselves of the 1914 warmongering populism of the British press, which seems familiar. I do not know where Mr Farage’s ancestors were between 1914 and 1918, but he would do well to revisit the history of that period. Fomenting distrust can so easily lead to hatred.

The Armistice anniversary in 2018 may have more positive messages, but I agree with my noble friend Lord Cope that it also has some hidden dangers that we should remember, in the form of the Versailles peace treaty of the following year. We must also recall that only a generation later another ghastly but surely more justified war became unstoppable. The lessons for 2014, 2018—even 2019—for us all must surely be that the price of peace is eternal vigilance.