Meeting of the Parliament 08 November 2018
I begin by associating myself entirely with everything that the First Minister has just said.
And so, finally, the guns fell silent. In that era, when newspapers were the only source of news, when the pounding of the guns, right up until the appointed hour, could still be heard across the channel, their sudden and longed-for silence spoke volumes. That was 100 years ago.
One hundred years before that were Waterloo and the Napoleonic wars, which were, to those who were emerging from the first world war, a distant memory, but only as distant to them as the great war is now to us—that moment when first-hand knowledge has passed, and when fewer remain with even a strong second-hand recollection. A huge moment in the story of our nation and the world slips into history.
Laurence Binyon’s enduring stanza, which begins
“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old”,
was composed when the war was just weeks old, with all the terror and horror ahead. The poem has served as an inspiration to a nation that is determined to honour and remember the sacrifice of the fallen.
The cenotaph in Whitehall and war memorials across and in every part of the nation and the world will remain at the centre of our collective remembrance this coming Sunday—the centenary of that destructive and desperate conflict.
As the First Minister said, since 2014, we have marked the centenary anniversaries of the key conflicts: Ypres in 1914-15; Gallipoli in 1915; Verdun, Jutland and the Somme in 1916; Passchendaele in 1917; movingly, in April last year, Arras, in which so many Scots perished; and Amiens in 1918. They have been deeply moving events that have been attended, as we might expect, by politicians, members of the royal family, members of our armed forces and, with singular dedication, Royal British Legion veterans. More moving still has been that, as we have contemplated the vastness of the loss, we have witnessed time and again the humility, pride and enduring sadness of the families of those who did not return, and who have themselves returned to where relatives fought and fell.
As a schoolboy at Glasgow Academy—itself a war memorial trust—respect for those who served, whether they fell or survived, was profound. As pupils still do, I passed several times each day two huge memorial plaques that face each other across an atrium, one for each of the world wars, that bear the names of all those from the school who perished. In the 1970s, there were still many veterans and others who knew those names personally. I realised later that there were members of staff and other students who counted family names among those who are listed. It is also true that among those who were teaching us were many men and women who had fought in the second world war.
That proximity to events ought to have been a rich vein of knowledge, but, as we all know, those who survived, in all humility and with respect to those who had fallen, spoke little of their own direct experience. Only towards the end did gallant men like Harry Patch share their stories. He was, at one point, the oldest man in Europe and the last surviving combat soldier of the first world war from any country. He served on the Western Front and died in 2009.
The past four years have seen an extraordinary engagement in communities, in particular through schoolchildren investigating the life histories of the names on local memorials, in order to make vivid portraits of those who died: their families, their lives, where and how they met their end and the legacy that endured. Those creative acts of practical remembrance ensure that the memory of individuals survives.
The past four years have also seen many fine new histories of the great war—none more so, in my view, than Nick Lloyd’s searing account of Passchendaele, which was surely, in that long conflict, the ultimate battle to illustrate the futility of so much of it.
“Between July 31st and November 10th, 500,000 men were either killed, wounded, maimed, gassed, drowned or buried”
he writes, and there were so many Scots among them. Looking at operational maps and seeing the strategic names including Dumbarton Wood, Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, is vivid testament to an engagement in which so many Scots died.
Lloyd George called it
“the campaign in the mud”,
for it rained mercilessly almost the entire time, and the shelling so destabilised the fabric of the ground that it turned literally to a sea of mud. I recall seeing the Deputy First Minister John Swinney at the Menin Gate, where many of those whose remains were never recovered are listed on the memorial.
Basil Liddell Hart, in his 1930 history “The Real War”, quoted a then un-named general, who said,
“Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”
and Siegfried Sassoon encapsulated the death of those who fell at Passchendaele, in his poem “Memorial Tablet”:
“Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight
(Under Lord Derby's Scheme). I died in hell—
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duckboards: so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.”
As the war ended, and in the months that followed, tens of millions more would die from influenza. All too many who had survived battle succumbed and, at home, civilians who had endured died just as suddenly as many who had fought. The first world war was, ultimately, a series of conflicts between nations and nature. Perhaps the American civil war should have given those who were leading it some premonition of what 19th century military tactics could expect when facing 20th century technology—but, if it did, it was ignored.
In commemorating the end of the first world war, in acknowledging its many horrendous conflicts and anniversaries, and in celebrating the heroism of many individuals, we do so firm in our resolve that it is not, and will not be, to glory in that war, in its ambitions or its monstrous indiscriminate slaughter, in its bloody victories or in its defeats.
Were there positive legacies? It was the beginning of the end of deference, certainly—men of all backgrounds who fought side by side in the trenches came home ambitious and confident of their equal worth. There was women’s suffrage, and there was the ambition of those who had stepped up to fight from around the world to move from Empire to Commonwealth.
Tens of millions would die in the decades that followed. It was not the war to end all wars, when in the peace that was finally struck lay the seeds of Hitler, the global war and the Holocaust, which followed just 20 years later. However, in 1918 the guns fell silent.
Presiding Officer, this debate is a salute from the world of today to the world as it was then. It is an act of remembrance of a conflict that now slips into history, of our forebears, of ordinary men and women from across the world who fought or endured at home, but especially, here in Scotland’s Parliament, of the Scots who gave their all.
13:04