Battle of Passchendaele

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Black, on securing the debate and on his very moving and excellent speech, which set the tone for what followed. All speakers have risen to the challenge to come forward with compelling, moving and very interesting contributions, and it has, in totality, been one of the best debates that I have heard in recent years. As many people have said, it has been a privilege simply to be here and to be part of it.

It is also an important debate, and it has benefited hugely from the fact that your Lordships’ House has the capacity to bring into its discussions military expertise, political knowledge, compassion and understanding from all sorts of experiences that we have had. Bringing those experiences together and allowing them to play into the analysis of the issues before us is what we are good at and is something that I hope we will continue to do. Of course, in so doing, it is rather wonderful that so many people are able to work in contemporary issues and reflect on how some of the lessons of the past can be applied in near real-time. I am sure that the Minister will want to respond to this in a vigorous way.

Your Lordships’ House has debated World War I and the troubling questions of how to commemorate it on a number of occasions. I have taken part in a number of these debates, and the early ones were really about how to ensure that the accent that we placed on the national programmes was focused clearly on remembrance and education and on lessons to be learned, particularly avoiding the danger of glorifying the war. It became clear during that process that the emerging conclusion was that our national programmes should be a commemoration, not a glorification: they should concentrate—as many noble Lords have said—not only on the military aspects of the war, but on its impact on Britain’s social history. They should recall, for example, the way that the industrialisation of death and the devastating scale of the military carnage wiped out a generation of our young men, and all the loss of potential that that implied; the contribution of women; the sacrifice of Commonwealth citizens; the contribution of artists and war poets, who have shaped the way that the war is remembered; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Black, mentioned, the animals that lost their lives as part of that process, which is something that we often forget.

There will, no doubt, be opportunities to reflect on how these years of commemoration have gone after the final event on—appropriately—Armistice Day in November 2018. I certainly look forward to that. I agree with the sentiments expressed widely round the House today that the Government have got the balance about right, and that—as my noble friend Lord Hutton hoped—we have not been divided politically or otherwise over how we have, as a country, commemorated this battle and the war more generally.

Having said that, I hope that it will be of interest to your Lordships’ House if I use my time today to reflect on the process in which we are engaged rather than to detail some of the particularities of the commemoration. My first task is to ask, how certain are we about what happened? In January 1936, nearly 20 years after he took part in the Battle of Passchendaele, the poet was asked to choose a poem to represent all of his war poetry—and there is a great deal of it—he chose this one. In it, he asks himself if he can remember the war and describes his feelings when those memories return, often masked by what he calls “mists”, which, he goes on to explain are,

“spiritual

And luminous-obscure,

Evolved of countless circumstance

Of which I am sure;

Of which, at the instance

Of sound, smell, change and stir”.

The closing lines capture well the duality of these memories:

“And some of sparkling, laughing, singing,

Young, heroic, mild;

And some incurable, twisted,

Shrieking, dumb, defiled”.

My point is that while contemporary accounts are, as we have heard, a brilliant way of reliving the events, they can only be, at best, a partial solution to what we seek to understand and remember. We also need to take distance and time to give substance to what would have been the so-called first draft of history. Explanation of memory is not just simply important as a means of understanding a survivor’s experiences; it is also one of the ways that we have of building our own knowledge of our shared past, complementing the dry histories and challenging art works that flow from these lived experiences. As, inevitably, the distance between ourselves and our children and the events themselves widens, so society’s responsibilities to our past become greater. We must impart, in our very act of learning, an obligation to the young to be inquisitive about this narrative and others.

Secondly, what precisely are we commemorating? As we have heard, Passchendaele symbolises all the horrors of trench warfare. Indeed, it has been described as the worst battlefield in history. We have heard about the loss of life, which is almost unimaginable: in three months, 350,000 allied and 260,000 German soldiers were killed. The conditions in which they fought, lived and died are really beyond contemporary understanding. Major Desmond Allhusen recalls in his diary:

“The mud and water reached our waists and it took us about half an hour to do a hundred yards … It was different from what we were used to. It had lost all form and consistency and all resemblance to the honest stuff one finds in peaceful lands. It was just the shapeless mess that remains when everything else is gone”.


Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, General Haig’s chief of staff, when he reached the edge of the battlefield, exclaimed, “Did we really send men to fight in this?”.

As I have been arguing, commemoration, in particular of a battle such as Passchendaele, must be multidimensional. It must be open to exploring the past not only through the lives of the individuals who experienced it but within broader continental and global contexts. Crucially, while we have a responsibility to seek the truth and to be inquisitive, we must be open to our own prejudices. If we can recognise our own preconceived notions, we will be best placed to get the most out of any commemorative act, whether it be a Paul Nash painting or a local council memorial—I would argue that both are as valuable as each other.

What about fake news, to bring it up to date? In the past few months, the threshold on accuracy and truth has being diluted and this could have important consequences for how we commemorate, if we allow the patterns of the present to impact the way in which we see the past. Perhaps the best antidote to such behaviour is to continuously renew our interest in our own past and not shy away from such debates, by being open to different types of commemoration as they come forward. I will return to that point at the end.

Truth, memory and commemoration are all inextricably linked. It is not just the responsibility of academics, teachers or even politicians to be mindful of this. The responsibility of interpretation should weigh heavy on all our minds. Edmund Blunden, the poet I quoted earlier, was acutely aware of how memory changes our understanding of war. It is therefore very important that we have commemorations that properly reflect that.

We need to interrogate what has worked well in the national programme and build that into our thinking and plans for any future commemorations. We have heard of local and national events and of the exemplary work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which I also salute. We heard also from my noble friend—I am sorry, but I have forgotten her name and she is not in her place but on the Woolsack. She cannot do this to me—she is like a ghost, appearing all around the place. I thank her for drawing our attention to the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has been so important in bringing out the bottom end of the spectrum, including a range of responses and detail from the individuals involved.

However, we need more than this. We need writing, films, plays, art and performances if we are to fully understand it. I used to use a film made by Charlie Chaplin to exemplify this point, and it perhaps works in this context. You can understand history by looking at records and films of, for instance, events in Germany during the time of Hitler. But you will understand it much better if you see somebody taking off that, as Chaplin did in “The Great Dictator”. It is that duality that brings us to the nature of the understanding.

I want to leave the House with this. For me, the most impactful commemoration event I have experienced was the astonishing work by Jeremy Deller, “We’re Here Because We’re Here”. Noble Lords may recall this work. The participants were a volunteer army of non-professional performers who were sworn to secrecy while rehearsals took place across the country without anybody really understanding what was going on. The intention, as laid out by Rufus Norris and Jeremy Deller, was to create the complete opposite of,

“a static memorial that the public went to to be sad”.

It was something completely and unnervingly different and it,

“would take itself to the public rather than the public taking itself to the memorial”.

I picked up a very good explanation of the work by the Guardian arts correspondent, Charlotte Higgins. She recorded the appearance of these people in Waterloo station one morning, saying,

“they were dressed in the dull-green uniforms of the first world war. They were just there: not speaking, not even moving very much. Waiting, expressionless, for who knows what. A small crowd gathered, taking photographs. A woman caught the eye of one of the men. She tried to speak to him. Without speaking or dropping his gaze, he pulled a small card out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Lance Corporal John Arthur Green,’ it read. ‘1st/9th Battalion, London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles). Died at the Somme on 1 July 1916. Aged 24 years.’ There were similar scenes across the UK … There were more than 1,500 men in total. They gathered on the steps of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. They smoked roll-ups outside Bristol Temple Meads and marched … boots ringing, through Manchester Piccadilly. They stood in clumps by the entrance to Queen’s University, Belfast, and sat on the market cross in Lerwick, Shetland”.

It was a silent reflection and it was so moving. In some ways, it said it all.