Viscount Colville of Culross
Main Page: Viscount Colville of Culross (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for introducing this important debate. I, too, have been very moved by the extraordinary accounts that I have heard of the First World War. I declare an interest. I make history programmes for the BBC.
In three days’ time, on 28 June, the world will remember the 100th anniversary of the shot which killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. On Saturday, we will be able to feel something of the tension, with well known BBC reporters such as Frank Gardner and Bridget Kendall reconstructing news reporting and analysis of what the assassination would have meant in 1914. Over the next four years, the world witnessed a loss of life and destruction so dreadful that it has coloured our view of war for a century, as other noble Lords have said, and it will continue to loom over us for generations to come. Now, as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, its time for us to reach a true understanding both of what happened and of what motivated the people who took part, and the politicians and the generals who led them.
We in 21st century Britain are confronted by seemingly endless military and political crises, many of which have their roots in the First World War. There are demands for our forces to be involved in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq as violence engulfs those countries. Our view about whether to participate is, of course, coloured by the experiences of our Armed Forces in the past decade and the subsequent outcomes. However, I think that our national psyche is also deeply scarred by the great horror of the First World War and the loss of so many lives.
The legacy of the world war has been polarised between a view of a horrific waste of life, one of “lions led by donkeys”, and the pursuit of a glorious war to protect the principles of democracy and world order as set out by the US President Woodrow Wilson to Congress in 1918. Only by understanding the history will we realise how much more nuanced were the events of 1914 to 1918 and the legacy of those years, and, as a result, how much more nuanced must be our response to demands on our nation to become involved in future military action.
At the outbreak of war, hundreds of thousands of men did indeed voluntarily enlist as a matter of principle. At the end of the dreadful four years, there was a terrible feeling of sadness across this nation. However, it was not really until the 10th anniversary that significant doubts about the justice of the war began to rear their heads following the death of Field Marshal Lord Haig and the publication of his letters showing the generals to be manipulative and political, a view compounded by the publication of Lloyd George’s memoirs. However, the popular disgust at the waste of the war was further ignited by the release of the film “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the author of the novel on which it was based having described a generation who,
“even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war”.
After that, the works of Robert Graves and the war poets were republished and bought in great numbers as the nation digested the implications of these testimonials, and determined that such horror should never be repeated. The view that the war had been a terrible waste—“lions led by donkeys”—had taken hold.
Now, in the coming four years, there will be a wonderful opportunity for us to look deeper at what really happened. Of course, we have this commemoration, which the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, and many other noble Lords have talked about and which is the point of this debate. However, the BBC, the Imperial War Museum, local museums and local authorities have set up multiple projects about the Great War all over the country. Up until 2018, Channel 4 and every BBC radio and television network and many of the foreign language services are putting out hundreds of hours of drama, documentary and debate about the war. The broadcasts and research will be kept online, as a digital archive. Jeremy Paxman’s series “Britain’s Great War” aimed to set out what happened. The nuances of both sides of the war’s legacy were discussed, first by Professor Niall Ferguson questioning our involvement in the war, and then Sir Max Hastings explaining why we fought the war. Now, thanks to the Imperial War Museum, 700 interviews with people who served on the home front, the Western Front and even the Russian front, originally filmed in 1960 but only short clips of which were released, will now be put on the internet in full, so that we will be able to listen to them and understand their experiences for ourselves.
There will be a major drive to connect a younger generation, for whom this is obviously a distant and unknown war, with the great event. On 4 August, the anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war, there will be interviews on BBC Radio 1 with young men and women who are veterans of recent wars to explain the complexities of their experiences, both during military action and in the aftermath. Well known figures, such as the Bosnian pop star Rita Ora, will tell of their experiences of being in a war zone. The message will be that war is not black or white but has many shades in between.
My noble friend Lady Flather will be pleased to hear that thousands of soldiers from India and the Empire will be remembered. Radio 4 is launching a series called “Tommies”, which will use the diaries and accounts of the lives of the Asian signal operators to reconstruct their experiences as they moved not only around the Western Front but throughout many theatres of war, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, setting up and maintaining communications. There is a history of the involvement of the troops from across the British Empire which is in production at the moment. Their sacrifice must be understood and not forgotten. By the end of the four years, the hope is that everybody in the country will have a renewed and nuanced understanding of the legacy of World War I and how it affects our view of the maintenance of world order. However, I suggest to the Minister that we should be even more ambitious in the use of this centenary. It could be used to discover new aspects of the war. We need to find out about the relationships between nationalism and globalisation and the role of religion in the belligerent countries involved in the war. Never have these things been more important with the great debates facing our country in the 21st century.
The Government have talked of £100 million pounds being made available for the commemorations, most of which, rightly, is aimed at increased understanding, especially among the younger generation. However, there is nothing available for new discovery or research. The Arts & Humanities Research Council has given six grants to universities to help understanding of the war in local schools, which of course is quite right, but none of that money has gone towards new historical research. There is an extraordinary project being put together at the University of Oxford and other universities across the world to establish an ambitious four-year programme of research into the global implications of the war and the effect of religion. British research students and post-doctoral fellows will work with colleagues from France, Australia and Germany to carry out new historical, international research. There will be workshops and papers from across the world, in what could be a “cenotaph of war history”. The French, German and Australian Governments are putting money into this programme, but at the moment nothing has come from our Government. It is woefully underfunded on our front.
In all this talk of understanding, should we not do everything we can to support a project like this, which will genuinely shine new light on to the First World War? As the Professor of War at Oxford, Sir Hew Strachan, one of the leading figures behind the project and the commemoration plans, said:
“We need to be surprised by what the centenary of the First World War throws up, not to dismiss the uncomfortable and unfamiliar. We must not be so caught by the rhetoric set by the war’s anniversary that we shut out the messages contained in the rhetoric of a hundred years ago, and so exclude what for us may be new insights and fresh findings. If we are open to the evidence in all its diversity and complexity we shall bring altered perspectives to the phenomenon that we call war, that are, sadly, likely to stand us in good stead as we travel through another century”.