Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 11 November 2021
It gives me great pleasure to speak for the Liberal Democrats in the debate. I pay tribute to the speakers who have gone before me and give them our thanks. Each of them is a veteran and I am profoundly grateful for the service that they have given to this country.
In France and Belgium every year, farmers unearth from their fields barbed wire, shell casings, shrapnel and bullets. The “iron harvest”, as it is referred to, is the product and material of a war that was fought more than 100 years ago. Although the memories of the men who served in that war have now passed, it has always been very striking to me that the land still gives up the product and material of that war. It has almost been metastasised into the very ground on which that war was fought. The word “metastasised” is very appropriate, given that Wilfred Owen described the mechanised slaughter of the western front as being “Obscene as cancer”. It is from Wilfred Owen’s words that we learned much of what life was like in the trenches in that difficult time. He also wrote that not even poetry was “fit to speak” of the sacrifices made and the lives lost.
As we know, Wilfred Owen was one of his generation’s finest poets. He was treated for his injuries not far from this building, at Craiglockhart hospital, where he wrote some of his most famous poems and discovered his immense potential as a literary master. That potential was tragically dashed shortly after he returned to the front line, only a week before the armistice was signed. He was only 25 years old, and therefore typical of many of the young men who lost their lives in that conflict. He was not alone in having his life cut so tragically short.