First World War

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, for my inability to be present at the winding-up speeches owing to an unbreakable and very long-standing engagement.

I thank the Minister on behalf of all Members of this House for his remarkable, timely and appropriate reference to the huge contribution made to this country in the First World War by the Commonwealth. As he rightly pointed out, literally millions of people from India, Canada, Australia, Africa and the Caribbean served here. There were well over 1 million from the Indian subcontinent alone, as he said. They have not had as much credit or recognition as they deserve for that incredible act of kindness and goodness. Many of them did not even know the country they were serving in when they lost their lives because they had never been to or known anything about France or Belgium. I am very grateful to the Minister, as I am sure many of us are, for making it clear that our long and extended debt is to almost all the Commonwealth countries as well as this country and our allies.

I agree that this is a very particular anniversary not only because it is a centenary but because it is the last anniversary when people will know personally some of those who served in the First World War. The generation of people who are now in their 70s or 80s may still remember the marks of suffering, stoicism, commitment and memory in the faces of their mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. That will not go on for very much longer. We are seeing that last generation pass away. It is important that they are people with first-hand and personal knowledge of those who have passed on from this world and are now in cemeteries all over the world.

Turning to Britain, when we think about the First World War, it is extremely important to remember that there was no conscription until well into 1916. For a year and a half, men died in their thousands upon thousands, having volunteered to serve with no pressure, except moral pressure, on them to do so. If one walks into the Robing Room, it is striking to see on the walls almost all the great Victorian virtues—gallantry, generosity and hospitality—evoked by a plaque or mural based on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. What is so important about that is that many young men who went into the First World War did so with illusions about what war was like but with a passionate sense of gallantry and patriotism.

Noble Lords may recall that one of the first lines written about the beginning of the First World War was written by the great young war poet Rupert Brooke. I quote his ringing words:

“Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour”.

There is in that poem an almost completely unqualified sense of sacrifice as being outstanding and without question.

The war ground to a stop in the trenches of France and Belgium in 1915, and moved hardly at all for the following three years, so that the Western Front of 1918 was only a few kilometres different from that of 1915. In those three years, thousands upon thousands of young men died. It is perhaps understandable that by 1918 the poetry that was being written by people such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon had a very different line, which ran:

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”.

The war had lost much of its sense of gallantry and warrior ethic by the time, after three years, that it had ground itself into dust: blood and dead bodies up and down the Western Front.

Those who volunteered were mostly men. The House will understand that, given that my mother was one of the great chroniclers of the First World War, Vera Brittain, it is worth remembering that many thousands of young women volunteered as well, to serve very often, as she did, as unqualified nursing hands in the war hospitals in France, Belgium and Britain itself. I always remember her telling me what it was like as a girl of 22 to hold the leg of a man that was being sawn off because he was suffering from incurable gangrene. The stories go on and on. Medicine in those days was nothing like what it is today. There were no antibiotics, few anaesthetics and almost no relief from the endless agony of the wounds that they suffered.

I conclude by saying something about what we should do in this memorial, and by thanking again my noble friend Lord Gardiner for his remarkable work and the excellent programme he has outlined. Part of that programme has of course an educational element, to try and tell our young men and women in school and college today what that war was like and what we should remember of it. However, the House will forgive me if I say that it is not only a commemoration of the suffering and sacrifice of the First World War. It is also a recognition that we have to move toward reconciliation to make sure that there are no more such wars. It is worth saying, here and now, that there are reasons to thank God for the fact that for 70 years we have not had a war in western Europe, and that we cannot imagine one happening now; in other words, the political mission of reconciliation has made war, at least here in Europe, close to an impossibility.

I will quickly to tell the House about a remarkable gesture of reconciliation. On Saturday, I shall be going to Hamburg, the most badly destroyed of all the cities in Germany in the last year or so of the Second World War. Hamburg, that deeply destroyed city which was known in Germany as “die Stadt ohne Nazis”—the town without Nazis; there were very few in Hamburg—is going to name the embankment of its great canal after my mother: the Vera Brittain Ufer. I mention that only because we shall not forget that reconciliation is the other great purpose of what we are trying to celebrate here in the coming four years of the centenary of the First World War. I conclude with one other sentence from a modern poet, Wystan Hugh Auden:

“We must love one another or die”.