Centenary of the Armistice

Debate between Lord Watson of Wyre Forest and Stephen Pound

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tom Watson]

I do join my hon. Friend in that. In remembering them and knowing their lives, we honour their sacrifice. These events are taking place up and down the country.

To take just one of many more examples, on 1 July 1916, the opening day of the battle of the Somme, 235 of the Accrington Pals—the 11th (Service) Battalion East Lancashire Regiment—were killed, and 315 wounded, in the space of just 25 minutes. The fighting continued right up until literally the last few seconds before the Armistice was signed. More men died in 1918 than in any previous year of the war. The last British serviceman to be killed, Private George Edwin Ellison, died just one and a half hours before the Armistice, on the outskirts of Mons in Belgium, almost exactly the same place where British forces had first seen action in 1914. Indeed, George Ellison’s grave now faces that of John Parr, the first British soldier killed during the conflict. Between the deaths of John Parr in August 1914 and George Ellison in November 1918, 1.1 million British service personnel lost their lives—more than in any other conflict before or since.

Almost every city and town and village in Britain has a war memorial listing those who never returned from the great war. Thanks to the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the brave men and women who lost their lives during the war are remembered with gravestones and memorials across the world. I know the whole House would like to thank the gardeners and staff of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who do so much to ensure that our service personnel are honoured in fitting resting places. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

Yet perhaps the bitterest element of this bittersweet commemoration, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said, is that almost all of those war memorials have another plaque or another set of carvings listing those who never returned from the second world war, less than three decades later. The Armistice Day hopes of Lloyd George were dashed. Whatever else we might want to say about what was described as the war to end all wars, it turned out not to be the war to end all wars.

The great war was perhaps the last war in which people signed up to fight out of deference and patriotic fervour. We have all seen the photos of lines of young men, some of them perhaps lying about their age, desperate to join up and see action before the end of a war they believed would be over by Christmas. But in quite a short time, those deferential and patriotic sentiments were not enough to meet the needs of the military in a war on this scale, which is why conscription had to be introduced in 1916. The horrors of the western front made many in Britain doubt whether the war was worth it.

It was not only in this country that the success of the war effort relied on popular support. Russia’s experience on the eastern front, the gradual breakdown of its economy and the Russian people’s discontent with its leadership was a direct cause of the Russian revolution, which shaped global politics for the rest of the century and beyond. The mutinies of 1917 crippled the effectiveness of the French army. America’s entry into the war, which contributed so much to the allied victory, might not have been possible at all without the popular outrage generated by the German U-boat campaign sinking US civilian shipping, and the final German collapse owed much to the suffering of its population under the British naval blockade.

Leaders and generals do not operate in isolation, cold-bloodedly moving around blocks of troops, disconnected from the societies from which those troops are drawn. Political leaders have to earn and secure support for any military action, not just at the start but on an ongoing basis. That lesson has had to be learned again and again, from Algeria to Vietnam to Iraq.

The great war changed Britain forever in so many ways. This year we have also been celebrating the centenary of many women getting the vote—another momentous event in the momentous year of 1918. The achievement of women’s suffrage had many causes. The movement long preceded the great war, and achieving the vote was just one step on a path towards equality that still stretches before us. But the contribution of women to that war effort, in filling roles previously reserved for the men now fighting overseas, helped to solidify the argument that women were just as capable as men and had just as much right to political representation, making progress faster than it might otherwise have been.

In some ways—I realise that this could be controversial—Britain was lucky in 1918. Unlike France and Belgium, it was not scarred with bomb craters and ruined towns. Unlike Russia, it had no revolution or civil war. Unlike Germany, it had no reparations to pay or territory to concede. But its people bore the scars of war on their bodies and in their minds. They deserved and needed what Lloyd George promised them—a land fit for heroes. Instead, they got nearly two decades of economic slump, unemployment, poverty, poor housing and the great depression.

Both then and now, Britain has not always treated its service personnel with the respect they deserve. As a Defence Minister, I met Gertie, the daughter of Private Harry Farr, and her daughter, Janet Booth. They campaigned tirelessly for a pardon for their father and grandfather, who was shot at dawn for cowardice. Harry Farr was no coward. It was the dignity of his family and their tireless campaign that led to the pardons for the “shot at dawn” generation.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

As vice-president of the Greenford branch of the Royal British Legion, I am sure I speak for the whole House when I express gratitude for my hon. Friend’s words about the Royal British Legion.

Harry Farr was one of 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed for what was then called cowardice or lack of moral fibre. I would like to thank publicly my hon. Friend, who was then the Minister, on behalf of my constituent Joannie Farr, one of Harry Farr’s granddaughters, for the pardon that he was so instrumental in gaining, along with Des Browne, now Lord Browne. Will he put it on the record once and for all that if, God forbid, we ever face such a situation again, we will look to offer compassion, not condemnation, to young men who buckle and sometimes crack in the face of horrors that we in this House cannot begin to imagine?

[Tom Watson]

I can, and we should. I thank my hon. Friend for the work he did on the campaign to ensure that Gertie’s dying wish was met.

I am proud of my role in righting what I saw as the injustice of the 306 soldiers that my hon. Friend mentions. Many of them had clearly been suffering from what was then called shellshock and what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Their families were not entitled to a military pension and often faced great hardship. Granting them a pardon did not change what was done to them, but it eased the stigma felt by their loved ones over the generations. Anybody who has ever visited the National Memorial Arboretum to see the commemoration to those who were shot at dawn cannot fail to be moved.

We should pay tribute to the work of the National Memorial Arboretum in the west midlands, which allows so many to pay their respects to the men and women of our armed forces. As a young Minister, newly in post, I remember feeling my heart in my mouth when I had to give what is called a ministerial direction to underwrite the cost of the magnificent armed forces memorial that was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in October 2007 to honour the sacrifice of those who, in more than 50 operations and conflicts since the second world war, lost their lives in service. Today, we understand the impact of war better than we did 100 years ago.

With a smaller professional military, we do not have to face the challenge of reintegrating millions of ex-service personnel into the civilian economy. However, we do owe a duty of care to veterans and their families that lasts beyond the last echo of gunfire. That has to include physical and mental health support, as well as efforts to ensure that they have the skills they need to find civilian employment.

Both the great war and what came after it show us the need for internationalism. It was rival nationalisms that caused the war—rival imperial ambitions, rival insecurities and the escalation of responses to perceived threats until it was easier for the great powers to go to war than for them to back down from it. There can be no greater failure of diplomacy than the resort to armed conflict, even if armed conflict sometimes is the right response to a failure of diplomacy.

One of the causes of the failure of the Armistice to hold was the disastrously punitive terms imposed on Germany by the treaty of Versailles in 1919 and its insistence on German war guilt, which both crippled its economy and fed the resentment that the Nazis were able to harness so effectively. As Marshal Foch prophetically said, Versailles was

“not a peace treaty, it is an armistice for twenty years.”

After the great war, the world failed to build a sustainable peace.

The post-war League of Nations was a well-intentioned attempt to stop such a thing happening again, but it proved inadequate to the task of responding to the nationalism, fascism and territorial ambition of Hitler and Mussolini, Soviet expansionism, or indeed America First isolationism. The failure of the League of Nations showed the need for stronger international institutions, and since the second world war, for all their flaws, institutions including the United Nations, NATO and the European Union have helped us to avoid any repeat of war on a global scale, even if they have been unable to prevent myriad smaller conflicts.

Building lasting, sustainable peace is not easy, but it requires a commitment to internationalism, development, diplomacy and the fostering of economic ties between nations. Where necessary, it requires conflict resolution, but also a strong defence posture and a willingness to countenance military intervention as a last resort, not as a first step, as well as a framework of international laws and justice. Too many of these were absent in the aftermath of the great war, and the whole world paid a terrible price for the fragility of the Armistice.

If ever there is a time to forgive and reunite, it is 11 November 2018. This year, of all the articles written on the great war, the one that moved me the most was that written by Lord Michael Ashcroft, who made the case that courage is something displayed by service personnel on both sides of war and conflict. We should never forget that. He made a strong case for reconciliation in his tribute to the courage of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

There was some controversy last month when the Government revealed their plans to invite the German Head of State to the Cenotaph. However, it strikes me that in this year—100 years after men and women of courage gave their lives fighting for their countries—we should, in the spirit of reconciliation and peace, honour the valour and sacrifice of our opponents in the great war by inviting the German President to share in our remembrance. The Secretary of State was absolutely right to make that commitment.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate, and to colleagues for their thoughtful and humane interventions. We owe so much to all those who served and to all those who gave their lives in the great war that ended on 11 November 1918. One hundred years later, they still have much to teach us. As the Bishop of Lambeth said in his address to us in that very moving service: “War starts in the hearts and minds and souls of men and women like us. And peace, too, starts in the hearts and minds and souls of men and women like us.” Let us not just speak of peace, but let each and every one of us be the peacemakers.