Armistice Day: Centenary

Lord Elton Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I start by echoing what has been said in praise of the Government’s efforts to bring the Armistice and Great War to the notice of the nation. Commemoration has changed very much. In 1938, I was being driven by my father in his car down Broad Street in Oxford. When we got to the join between Trinity College and Balliol, going towards the station, there was the most enormous bang that surprised me greatly. What surprised me more was that, at that moment, all the traffic stopped, all the engines were turned off, all the pedestrians stopped walking and all the men took off their hats and bowed their head. It remained like that, a tableau suspended in time, for two minutes until life resumed.

What happens now is entirely different, but in a way it penetrates more deeply into the consciousness of society—of the people who make up this country and its character and are responsible for its future. One purpose of commemoration, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, put it in an admirable speech, is to learn. The question is: have we learned? We will come to that later.

I want to follow the footsteps of my father a little further. He volunteered in 1914, abandoning his degree course in classics. He had got a first in mods. He went into a territorial regiment from Hampshire and was shipped out with it to India. He trained at Quetta and was put with his unit into four ships which were part of a large convoy heading to the Western Front. The troops were principally Indians, so I entirely agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, on their importance, because throughout the campaign my father was among a principally Indian force fielded by the Indian Government. The delays at the beginning were due to a disagreement between Delhi and Westminster about what the objective was. It finished up being Baghdad.

This is a good time to look at the Turkish campaign, not only because, as my noble friend Lord Cope said, it is somewhat overlooked, but because today is the 104th anniversary of the declaration of war on the Turks by the British—so this is a very apposite moment at which to look back at that extraordinary campaign. It started at Basra, which we got to know again during the unfortunate Iraqi escapade. The British force fought its way for getting on for 100 miles to Ctesiphon, where the advance party, which was the major part of the force, such was the generalship of the day, met a Turkish force. The advance party had met only outposts before as they fought their way on foot. The Turkish force defending Ctesiphon was almost exactly twice the size of the British force and was fresh out of Baghdad. The British force lost two-thirds of its men and then had to make a fighting retreat to a fortified bend in the River Tigris, which it defended against the Turks.

The conditions were appalling. The well-known Arab phrase about the Mesopotamian valley is that when Allah made hell, it was not bad enough, so he invented Mesopotamia and then added the flies. The flies were monstrous in their number. You could not see your horse’s head for flies in bad weather. The ground was alternately baked solid, so you could hardly get a trenching tool into it, or powdery dust which turned to a sort of sloppy treacle when it rained and through which you had to advance.

In Kut al-Amara, where they were besieged for five months, the British force dug three lines of trenches across the two bends in the river that made the loop so they were fortified in the loop. There was a small town there. They had more supplies than they might have expected because the town was an advanced supply dump for the expected advance on Baghdad. By the end of the siege, the troops had undergone various horrors. Apart from constant bombardment, the Tigris flooded the trenches on both sides. They had to retreat to the third lines, and they were waist-deep in water. In the winter months it got so cold that the blankets which were all the troops had to put over their heads against the rain froze to the parapet. In his book, Colonel Spackman records that those who came out from France said that until they had seen Mesopotamia they had no idea what real suffering was. I have seen photographs of the troops at the end of the siege and they exactly resemble the photographs of prisoners in Belsen, to which a noble Lord referred—toast-racks.

Then the horror began. They had surrendered and the officers were separated from the men. I am somewhat confused in my delivery because only this morning I found a long document that my father wrote to his father from the prison camp that he eventually finished up in. I shall give noble Lords an idea of what it was like immediately after the surrender—after they had said goodbye to their scarecrow troops:

“But officers coming later over the same roads north of Baghdad have brought uglier tales than these: of British soldiers found dying naked & alone on dungheaps on the fringe of some Arab town; or straggling from the march & not seen again; of men whose faces were livid dust-masks unrecognisable to close friends; men knocked on the head or buried scarcely dead; a poor death for an Englishman indeed … By October reports said that not more than six hundred of the two thousand three hundred British were alive & they were dying still, incapable of the work given them, diseased & without doctors, unburied often, sometimes buried scarcely dead. Such were facts you may one day know at home as well as we; but the horror of these men’s deaths you will never quite imagine, forgotten, they must have thought themselves, by God & men. I have seen the country, great, lonely, inscrutable; I knew the men & I have a fair imagination for horrors, but I can imagine nothing more horrible than this. Did any soldiers who fell in these wars suffer more or longer for their country, or with less earthly reward?”


That is focused on the British contingent. The same horrors or worse were being undergone by the Indians.

The point I will make very briefly is this: what did it do to my father? He went through part of that horrible march himself and got into officers’ confinement, which was better than the men’s. When he came back to England, he was convinced of something that he later wrote in a book: “I have only two prejudices: one is for democracy and the other is that I am a Christian”. His reaction, noble Lords opposite will be pleased to hear, was to stand as a Labour candidate for a Bristol constituency. He became a right-hand man to Ramsay MacDonald and, after losing one election and very nearly winning the second, was put into your Lordships’ House.

Fast forward to, I suppose, 1947. He took me for a walk in the fields, obviously with some intention. He said, “I know you’ll be interested in what I’ve been doing in Westminster. I thought you’d like to know that now the National Health Act is on the statute book, every objective for which I joined the Labour Party has been achieved. I see no purpose in belonging to any political party and I am going to sit on the Cross Benches”, which he did thereafter. He played a notable part in the interwar years. On the eve of the war, he was foremost among those who said we simply had to stand up to Nazism. All that suffering did not deter him from the necessity of standing up to what he saw as sheer evil.

He went on to say in his book—I will finish in a minute—that we stood at the beginning of another era, and that the decision had to be whether that era would be formed by Hitler and those who thought like him or by us and the Americans and those who thought like us. The question is—and again I go back to the speech by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup—whether or not we stand on the lip of another era. I very much think that we do. We need to look at what is needed to survive, in terms of courage, honesty and self-sacrifice, for any country to succeed. Society must be just, and your Lordships will recognise that there are open questions about how we settle our society so it is at peace with itself and regards itself as being just.

I have gone on for too long, but I was very excited by the document that I found and I feel passionately that we are on the edge of great events that we have to forestall.