Centenary of the Battle of the Somme

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

I know that Members from all parts of the House are grateful for the opportunity to mark this important moment of remembrance, and I would particularly like to thank the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) —my hon. Friend—who in his role as the Prime Minister’s special representative for the centenary commemoration of the first world war has done very important work in ensuring that the first world war is commemorated in an appropriate and inclusive way. He and I agree that one of the most important reasons for our country to remember is that our country’s young people—the next generation—cannot. To them, thankfully, a war in western Europe seems a distant prospect and my hon. Friend deserves generous praise for working to ensure that our next generation has been fully engaged in this process of commemoration.

Many of us will be attending commemorative events for the Battle of the Somme in the coming days, but it is absolutely right that in this place we have the opportunity to pay our respects. Organisations and community groups across the country will also be commemorating this centenary. I want to pay particular tribute, as my hon. Friend did, to the work that is specifically being done by the Royal British Legion, the BBC, the Woodland Trust, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Imperial War Museum. They have all made a very significant contribution to this process. Tonight, I want to reflect on the battle itself, the contribution made to the war effort by the country, and the wider implications of the battle and the first world war itself.

On the morning of 1 July 1916, the piercing sound of whistles filled the air as men climbed out of their trenches to advance, and so began 141 days of the bloodiest battle of world war one. Those soldiers were surrounded by their comrades and driven forward by determination, duty and fear. The prospects of reaching the enemy trenches were grim as whole waves of men fell to the storm of oncoming fire that spread across the battlefield.

By nightfall some 21,000 would lay dead and 35,000 lay wounded. It is hard to comprehend the horror. The sound of British artillery guns could be heard across the channel on the south coast of England, mines detonated beneath the German trenches shook the ground, and within moments cries of the wounded were echoing across the bloodied battlefield.

For every yard of the 16-mile front there were two British casualties, and by the end of the battle more than 1 million soldiers had been killed. The terrible price paid by those soldiers reverberated across Europe and, indeed, the world.

In the weeks and months that followed, families would mourn their loved ones who would never come home. This pain was felt in every community across our country. Of the 16,000 towns and villages across Britain which dispatched soldiers to war in 1914, only 40 “thankful parishes” would see the return by 1918 of all who had left for the conflict.

I visited northern France last year to pay my respects to those who had fallen: men who were prepared to face danger to secure freedom for people they would never meet and never know. I stood in the trenches they had defended. I imagined the terror they must have experienced and walked the ground on which they had fought. I knelt in front of their graves. It felt like they were a long way from home.

On occasions such as these, it is customary to talk about one’s own local unit, and I will do so in a moment. I remember being in northern France a year ago, standing in the trench from which the men of the Devonshire Regiment had begun their attack. Those who had fallen now lie buried in the very same trenches from which they had fought. There is a plaque marking the spot, and it reads:

“The men of the Devonshire Regiment held this trench. They hold it still.”

Many of those who lost their lives on the Somme were volunteers—men who put themselves forward after seeing Lord Kitchener’s famous recruiting poster. Among them were the Barnsley Pals. They were miners, steelworkers, glassworkers, clerks, stonemasons and clerics, and many of them were friends and neighbours. They joined up together, they trained together and they went to war together. Ultimately, many of them died together. That story is true not just of the Barnsley Pals but of the many volunteer battalions up and down the country. Some signed up through a sense of duty, others through a sense of adventure, but regardless of their reasons for joining or of where they came from in our country, we stand united today to recognise and remember their sacrifice. We live in peace and enjoy freedom today because of what they and others did for us. That is a legacy that must endure for all time.

We should also take a moment to acknowledge how the Somme and the first world war in general helped to reshape our society. We remember the sacrifice of the men who died at the Somme, but Britain’s war effort would not have been possible had women not become the backbone of the war effort. This ultimately led to the Representation of the People Act 1918, which at long last extended the voting franchise to women. It can also be argued that the conflict planted the seeds for the growth of the trade union movement, the transformation of the state and the fundamental realignment of British politics that has had a profound impact on our country over the last century.

This debate also provides us with an important opportunity to pause, to remember and to pay tribute to those from the Commonwealth nations who fought alongside British troops. There were volunteers from India, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and other countries across the globe. They were thousands of miles away from home but they were fighting with great courage for what they believed to be right. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

In our debate in this place just a couple of years ago, we marked the start of our commemoration of world war one by saying how important it was for it to be a commemoration and not a celebration. In that spirit, I also want to commemorate the men in the opposite trenches at the Somme who lost their lives during the battle’s 141 horrific days. I have read the accounts of both German and allied troops who fought at the Somme. The accounts are eerily similar and similarly tragic. Those in the opposing trenches were not monsters. They were young men, just like their British and allied counterparts, fighting for their country.

We know that, sadly, the first world war did not turn out to be the war to end all wars, as David Lloyd George had suggested. Within two decades, war would again engulf our continent, but it is a fitting tribute to those who died in both world wars that we now pursue partnerships of peace and are enjoying our longest period without conflict in western Europe for nearly 2,000 years. It is comforting to know that what were once fields of war are now fields of peace.

The historian A. J. P. Taylor once said that idealism died on the Somme. I do not believe that that is true, and I do not believe that we can allow it to be true. We must keep working for a better world—a world that stands as a fitting legacy for those who fell at the Somme in those dark days 100 years ago. It is a mark of our common decency that we commemorate a war of history, but it is a measure of our common humanity that we continue our work today to ensure that such an event never occurs again. That is the greatest tribute that we can pay.