Centenary of the Battle of the Somme

Debate between Andrew Murrison and Julian Knight

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Murrison]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I suspect he will have closely followed the programme over the past two years and will continue to monitor it closely over the next two years, leading up to armistice in 2018.

As I was gazing over Scapa Flow a few weeks ago, I wondered how many seamen in Jellicoe’s grand fleet, or in Scheer’s high seas fleet, would have guessed that their countrymen would be spending most of the ensuing 100 years as the closest of allies, united in the most powerful alliance that the world has ever seen. On Friday, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with another friend and ally at a very special Anglo-French place, the Thiepval monument on the Somme, in the lee of which there are 300 French and 300 British graves. It is a special place; a haunting place. It was Lutyens’s great triumph—a monument to the missing, but more than that: an enduring monument to the unity, I think, of Europeans, and particularly our unity with our closest continental neighbours.

At this time of historic opportunity and risk, let us make the centenary’s legacy one of amity and concord in our European neighbourhood. Here at home, too, we are desperately in need of a coming-together moment. The Somme vigil on Thursday night, and the silence at 7.30 on Friday morning, will, I hope, facilitate such moments of quiet reflection.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, which is worthy of this occasion. Does he agree that one of the most encouraging developments of the last few years is the greater respect that is shown to our armed forces, and, in particular, the armed forces covenant? Is our country not coming together to a greater extent than ever to mark the dedication and service of our armed forces?

[Dr Murrison]

I agree with my hon. Friend. One of the things that has struck me while I have been doing this work is how much added value there is in the presence of a serviceman from today’s Army on the battlefield tours that we have been running, and in seeing the faces of the young people for whom the tours were principally designed. One understands that they get it—in that moment, they get it—and there is a bridge between today’s servicemen and those who served 100 years ago. That is very powerful.

I am very pleased to see that so many colleagues from Northern Ireland are present. As I was preparing my speech, I asked myself, “Who can I reasonably expect to see in the House during this debate?” I am not surprised, and I am not disappointed. May I pre-empt some of the remarks of Northern Ireland Members by saying that there is nowhere in these islands where the force of the Great War is more keenly felt, or, indeed, where I have felt that more value has been extracted as a result of this centenary commemoration? The way in which communities have been pulled together by sharing history that is so often complex and nuanced has been a joy to behold.

When prominent republicans feel comfortable telling us about their relatives’ wartime service in the British Army, when members of the nationalist community—as guests of the Somme Association at the Somme Museum in County Down—proudly show us their grandfathers’ Great War medals, when the Irish Ambassador lays a wreath at the Cenotaph for the first time, and when the Commonwealth War Graves Commission unveils a Cross of Sacrifice in Glasnevin cemetery in the shadow of Daniel O’Connell’s tomb, we know that something good is afoot. If this is a centenary looking for a legacy, it need look no further. We should remember that a Somme that saw the Ulstermen’s heroic storming of the Schwaben Redoubt also saw the 16th (Irish) Division’s Guillemont and Ginchy. The Somme narrative, once heavily partisan, is now becoming a shared history. On Friday, President Higgins will occupy a place of honour before the Thiepval monument, which carries the names of so many from what were, by the time it was built, two separate polities on the island of Ireland.

Remembrance is hard-wired into the four-year centenary, but what does remembrance of the Somme actually mean now, today, given that its participants would have been long since deceased in any event? I look forward to hearing the views of young people the length and breadth of the country who will be taking part in the series of Great War school debates that were successfully opened last night in Manchester.

The perspective of youth on the causes, conduct and consequences of conflict is so important to our future, but for me remembrance means reflecting on loss and missed opportunity. Our society now is the poorer for the fallen not having enriched the last century through arts, science, medicine, business, even politics. We lost the famous men honoured in their generation, the glory of their time, cited in “Ecclesiasticus”, which many of us will have read out on Remembrance Sunday. Society is the poorer also for the loss of men who would otherwise have lived out their lives in relative obscurity. “Ecclesiasticus” mentions them too. It is the poorer because of the children who were never born to all those great uncles, children whose names were never etched in stone and whose number was never counted among the casualties. In all that hopeful, bright, missed opportunity, how bitterly ironic that one participant in the battle survived—the very distillation of evil, a corporal in the Bavarian army who would march the world to an even greater war of misery two decades later, a war that history will judge to be inseparable from the first.

Steinbrecher was right. The Somme has become a byword for tragedy, pointlessness and waste, but we should never lose sight of the achievements of our predecessors. Be proud of them. Be proud of Britain’s first citizen army. The butcher’s bill may have turned out to be impossibly high, but they were doing the right thing in a just cause. That they were acting against Europe’s then general disturber of the peace was nobly and magnanimously acknowledged at the start of the centenary by the President of Germany, a modern, forward-looking country still tortured by its past.

What was going on in the heads of Kitchener’s young men? In 1916, many of them would not have had the vote. Their families would not have enjoyed the equity in a rich country or public goods that today we assume as our birthright. What then motivated them? If the rallying cry in 1916 was “King and Country” or “Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland”, the glue was loyalty to your mates. If love for country was the headline, the text was written in pride—pride for town, for village, for neighbourhood and for family. But above all it was the ultimate team spirit, the instinct to do the right thing by fellow creatures united in adversity and a common cause. That is why men went over the top in July 1916. That is why they endured unspeakable horrors. That is why they fought and died on the Somme on a truly industrial scale. But ask those who have served in the wars of the 21st century, the sort of conflict that we will be debating, again and at last, next week. They will say the same. A gentler age would have called it love for your oppo. In today’s terms, it is loyalty to your mates.

Nowhere is that better shown than in the Pals battalions of Kitchener’s volunteer army, a phenomenon that is a byword for the pathos of the Somme. That magisterial work, “The First World War” by my late constituent and near neighbour Sir John Keegan, ends with this:

“Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life.”

Steinbrecher survived the Somme, but was killed in action the following year. By then, with the Americans entering the war, the tide had turned. Another German officer, Captain von Hentig, described the Somme as

“the muddy grave of the German field army”

and so it was. But peace came, and Europe’s politicians failed, a betrayal of the fallen and a reminder of our heavy responsibility.