Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s nearly 30 years since I was last in Lisbon, then, as I recall, as a Medical Officer in the Royal Navy operating with NATO.
It is a great pleasure to be back, particularly here in this military academy.
On 31 May the UK and Germany came together to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Jutland. On 1 July we marked the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a primarily Anglo-French occasion.
Sandwiched between those two extraordinarily moving full-on State ceremonial occasions, we managed to fit in a referendum on 23 June.
Now, whilst our centenary commemorates a momentous occasion in the course of human affairs worldwide, it is reasonable to reflect at this time on its specifically European dimension.
Because in so doing we are reminded that Britain always has been, is now and always will be a European nation.
Down the centuries the UK and Portugal have enjoyed a particularly close relationship.
In 1373 a strategic alliance was struck between our two kingdoms and it remains the oldest alliance in the world today.
You may have the better climate but we are both outward looking maritime nations on the edge of Europe. Neighbours linked by the great seaway of the North Atlantic.
The UK puts great value on our historic friendship. We have stood side by side in times of crisis and threat. In this period of commemoration we particularly remember Portugal’s response to our call for assistance in support of our mutual interests, at a significant cost to itself, one hundred years ago.
The Great War touched all parts of British society from Lerwick to Londonderry to Land’s End.
In all our communities it casts its long shadow still.
Mindful of this in 2012, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced the programme for the UK’s First World War Centenary Commemorations.
From the outset these were to be commemorations, not celebrations, an easy slip of the tongue. Whilst the cause for which we entered the war in 1914 was surely Just in Augustinian terms, there was and remains no appetite a hundred years on for triumphalism or jingoism.
Half a dozen key dates were identified by the UK government over the four years as centre-points for great national commemoration.
But three themes would run as a constant throughout - Remembrance, Youth and Education. As four of our key dates have now passed we are in a good position to consider what has moved people so far.
Our commemorations began on the eve of Britain’s entry into the war on 4 August 2014. A hundred earlier the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, knowing that diplomacy had failed, stood at the window in the Foreign Office watching the lamplighters igniting the gas lamps in the street below. He was heard to observe whimsically;
The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
A hundred years on, people all over the UK turned out their lights to leave just a single light or candle burning, recalling Sir Edward Grey’s prophetic words.
The spontaneous mass participation in simple, non-hubristic expositions like Lights Out reveal a popular appetite for reflection and quiet contemplation in the face of immense human suffering.
Nation states have and will supervise very grand set piece occasions to mark the waypoints of war. They have been enormously well received and diplomatically have done so much to draw nations together.
And yet, it’s very often the intensely personal that fires the public’s imagination. At Christmas 1914 soldiers on both sides of the Western Front left their trenches and held a temporary ceasefire, meeting in the middle of No-Man’s Land and famously playing football. The Christmas Truce was a moment of no strategic importance whatsoever, but 100 years on it fired the public’s imagination.
The British Council invited schools, football clubs and academies, fans and avid young historians to play a game of football in memory of The Christmas Truce. Around 8,000 games were played. With Foreign Office help, the project became truly international - at least one of the games was played here in Lisbon as you would expect given Portugal’s enthusiasm for the ‘beautiful game’.
During our centenary we have seen the regeneration of national cultural institutions like the Imperial War Museum, spurred on by increasing numbers of visitors. The Imperial War Museum, instituted before the end of the war, co-ordinates the Centenary Partnership, bringing together over 3,000 not-for-profit organisations from 50 countries, including Portugal, in a digital network of local, regional, national and international cultural and educational organisations.
For Britain, marking the start of a war was an innovation. Traditionally we commemorate the end of conflict, not the beginning.
And the UK has never before embarked on a centenary that lasts four years.
The suspicion was that the public’s appetite would diminish with time.
But we have found that, on the contrary, appetite has been increasing.
However, it was always understood that there would be peaks and troughs of interest within the centenary period.
For the UK, the zenith was always going to be the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, a campaign seared into the public’s imagination like Verdun is branded into the French national psyche.
On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle, the British Army experienced nearly 60,000 casualties, of which 20,000 were fatalities. This remains the worst recorded total loss in a single day in the history of the British Army.
On 12 August 1916 a young German Officer called Friedrich STEINBRECHER wrote home. He said;
‘SOMME – the whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.’
There were more than a million casualties during the 141 days of the Somme Offensive alone, many reduced to unrecognisable scraps of flesh and bits of gristle.
On 1 July this year people held services of remembrance and participated in two minutes’ silence to remember the fallen of the Somme. Over a billion twitter impressions were generated and on that day for a number of hours the Somme was the lead twitter trending topic – not just in Britain, but worldwide.
At the end of next week The Royal British Legion will mark the end of the four month campaign at Lutyen’s great Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval on the Somme.
Because of our links with India, British visitors are often drawn to the beautiful CWGC Indian cemetery and memorial at Neuve Chapelle. But they will also note as they enter the site the Portuguese flag flying proudly over the adjacent military cemetery and be reminded of Portugal’s part in the Great War.
In May of this year a Special Evensong was held by the Anglo-Portuguese society in St George’s Chapel, at Windsor Castle, raising funds for a memorial window dedicated to the Portuguese fallen. A Solemn Requiem Mass was held in July at the Guards Chapel in central London marking the centenary of the formation of the Portuguese Expeditionary Force, and to honour the fallen of Portugal, Angola and Mozambique.
There are those who say that commemoration does not matter, who question whether collective memory is helpful and who prefer the oblivion of forgetfulness.
Indeed, the American writer and political analyst David Rieff has written In Praise of Forgetting published earlier this year by Yale University Press. His proposition is that memorialisation and Remembrance are unhelpful in the course of human affairs. He conflates forgiveness and forgetfulness.
In medicine one of the great challenges of our time is to combat forgetfulness. Alzheimer’s disease, the loss of memory and consequent disintegration of personality is rightly viewed as an unspeakable tragedy.
And yet there are those who believe that collective memory is to be actively discouraged for fear that it won’t so much inform the future as distort it.
In fairness, across Europe, from the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in 1389 to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and beyond commemoration of conflict has often been associated with division rather than conflict resolution.
But if a battle divides, its centenary has the power to unite. That was shown so vividly in May when the UK marked the Centenary of the great sea battle of Jutland, shoulder to shoulder with Germany in the grand panorama of Scapa Flow.
I wonder how many of the seamen locked in the mortal combat of leviathans that day – the ships’ companies of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet and Scheer’s High Sea Fleet - would have guessed that their countrymen would be spending most of the ensuing 100 years as the very closest of allies in the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen?
In this place we are, of course, reminded that it is an alliance that has been ably shared with Portugal.
Very early in our preparations for the centenary it became clear that 100 years on, whilst the British public were proud of forebears who did the right thing, they had;
No appetite for jingoism,
None for flag waving,
Plenty for reconciliation.
Indeed, with much talk of division in Europe today, there’s a sense that the centenary’s legacy should be one of amity and concord in our European neighbourhood.
No where has this centenary done more to bring communities together than in the island of Ireland. Remember that during the Great War what is now the Republic of Ireland was an intrinsic part of the UK.
For many years in republican nationalist circles service in the Great War in the uniform of the British crown was not to be spoken of.
Times have changed.
When prominent republicans feel comfortable telling you about their relative’s wartime service in the British army, when members of the nationalist community proudly show you their grandfather’s Great War medals, when the Irish Ambassador lays a wreath at the Cenotaph in Whitehall for the first time and when a memorial to the fallen is unveiled in Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery in the shadow of the tomb of the great Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, you know that something good is afoot.
We should remember that a Somme that saw the Ulstermen’s heroic storming of the Schwaben redoubt also saw the 16th Irish Division’s Guillemont and Ginchy.
The Somme narrative, once heavily partisan, even within the British Isles, is now becoming shared history. If you seek a legacy for the centenary, look no further than that. If you seek a counterblast to David Rieff’s argument on the utility of Remembrance and commemoration look no further.
In the UK it was never intended that the commemoration should be restricted to governments nor narrowly confined to military historians. Ministers were clear – the framework should enable the public to remember and mark the war in ways that were meaningful for them. With the passing of the last of our Great War veterans we have lost the last of our tangible connections with the seismic event of a century ago. My children do not have the benefit that I had of a grandfather who had served in the Navy at Gallipoli. That’s why our programme has deliberately targeted youth and education. The aim is to secure a legacy of understanding for the future.
To help achieve this we have embarked on a publically and lottery funded cultural programme of unprecedented scale. Projects have involved millions of citizens taking part directly in commemorative activities. It has been a massive undertaking with polling data suggesting a greatly improved understanding of the Great War. A survey in 2014 suggested the public’s knowledge of the war wasn’t great. On issues like which countries fought who and who on earth Archduke Ferdinand was, I’m afraid to say, it seemed that contemporary figures like Cristinano Renaldo or Jose Mourinho were much better understood.
Whilst British appreciation of Portuguese football remains undiminished, I’m happy to say that polling data now suggests an improved understanding of the events of 1914-18
In all this community activity, the involvement of young people and groups from non traditional backgrounds has been especially moving. On Wednesday for example I presented an award in London to a project exploring the heavy involvement of Sikhs in the Great War. The involvement of Black and Minority Ethnic soldiers in the events of a hundred years ago has been revelatory to both the indigenous population and more recent arrivals to the UK. For the latter it has given an added sense of equity in the long sweep of British history.
Perhaps the most iconic image of the centenary commemorations to date has been “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” - the artistic installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London. Each poppy signified a British or Commonwealth soldier who lost their life during the war. Many found that stark visual representation brought home the sheer scale of loss in a way that a figure simply could not.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission carefully and respectfully maintains 590,000 graves of Commonwealth servicemen and women of the First World War all around the world, including in Lisbon.
In Britain today a popular perception is that the war was something that took place elsewhere - since our civil war in the middle of the seventeenth century, wars always have. But the Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains 200 large sites in the UK, the majority of which contain the remains of men and women who died of their wounds in hospital or in the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. The latter and the millions of civilian deaths from what in the UK is erroneously called Spanish flu are poignant reminders of the pathos of modern warfare whose consequences extend far beyond the frontline and whose grisly manifestations can scarcely be anticipated. Like the Iraq war in 2003, I submit that they are a standing rebuke to politicians and their advisers who arrogantly suppose they can foresee anything more than dimly the consequences of belligerent action on which they are about to embark.
In the years following the Armistice unprecedented sums were raised by public subscriptions to erect memorials to remember people with a local connection - from local regiments and communities to places of work. One of the features that French and British villages have in common today is the ubiquitous war memorial at their heart, geographically and socially. One is drawn to the lists of surnames, often the same name several times and often of families still resident in those communities.
The centenary has sparked a renewed interest in the restoration and conservation of such memorials so they are good for another hundred years, and a hundred after that.
Stalin is credited with observing quixotically that a million deaths is a statistic but a single death is a tragedy. If the Tower ceramic poppy project attempted to make sense of impossibly large numbers, much of the UK commemorative programme has been geared at the personal and parochial since that’s very often what brings loss home.
The Victoria Cross is Britain’s highest military honour. The government is laying an engraved paving stone recognising each recipient in the town of his birth. The scheme has been so popular that other towns with a strong connection to these men have also laid stones.
Other local heroes like nurse Edith Cavell, Merchant Navy Captain Charles Fryatt and Walter Tull, the first black line officer in the British Army have been commemorated. They have given a human face to raw statistics.
Memorials take many forms. On platform one of Paddington Station in London, there is a statue of a typical British soldier of the First World War. He is reading a piece of paper. What is it? A love letter, a letter from his mother, or the gas bill? On the hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war in 2014, the public was invited to write that letter. In the project’s 37 days, over 21,000 letters were received from the rich and famous to the man next door. A selection was published in a book. Many are wonderfully, beautifully moving.
Fascination with the personal and parochial during the centenary has greatly surpassed interest in the grand and strategic. People today want to know what was going on in the lives of their predecessors.
In 1916 in the UK many of them would not have had the vote. Their families would not have enjoyed the equity in a rich country or public goods that today we assume as our birthright. Lack of equity on the part of those called to arms was probably even more stark in a profoundly agrarian society like Portugal at that time. What then motivated those young men?
Well, if the rallying cry in Britain was King and Country, the glue was loyalty to your mates. If love for country was the headline, the text was written in pride – pride for town, pride for village, pride for neighbourhood, pride for family. But above all, it was the ultimate team spirit, the instinct to do the right thing by fellow creatures united in adversity and a common cause.
That’s why men went over the top.
That’s why they endured unspeakable horrors.
That’s why they fought and died on a truly industrial scale.
Team spirit made ordinary men do extraordinary things. But ask those who have served in the discretionary wars of the twenty first century -they will say the same thing.
A gentler age would have called it love for your oppo – in today’s terms its loyalty to your mates.
In this military academy that will be understood full well.
Also understood in these precincts will be the magisterial work ‘The First World War’ by my late constituent and neighbour the historian and Royal Military Academy lecturer Sir John Keegan. He signs off with these words;
Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life.
Remembrance is hard-wired into our four year centenary. But what does remembrance actually mean now – today – given that its participants would have, in any event, long since deceased?
For me Remembrance means reflecting on loss and missed opportunity. Our societies are the poorer for the fallen not having enriched the last century through the arts, science, medicine, business, even politics. We lost the ‘famous men,’ ‘honoured in their generation,’ ‘the glory of their times’ cited in Ecclesiasticus. Society is the poorer also for the loss of men who would otherwise have lived out their lives in relative obscurity – Ecclesiasticus refers to them to. It is the poorer because of the children that were never born to all those great uncles – children whose names were never etched in stone, whose number are never counted among the casualties.
In all that hopeful, bright, missed opportunity, how bitterly ironic that one participant in the Somme Offensive survived.
The very distillation of evil.
A corporal in the Bavarian Army who would march Europe and our world to an even greater wall of misery two decades later in a war that history will judge to be inseparable from the one we are commemorating today.
STEINBRECHER was right. The Somme has become a byword for tragedy, pointlessness and waste. But we should never lose sight of the achievements of our predecessors. Be proud of them for they were doing the right thing in a just cause. That were acting against Europe’s then general disturber of the peace was nobly and magnanimously acknowledged at the very start of the centenary by the President of Germany, a modern forward-looking country still tortured by its past.
In this military and naval company I will not labour the point but simply say this in conclusion;
Soldiers are often glorious.
War never is.
Anyone suggesting otherwise is a complete fool.
War is sheer bloody, reeking hell on earth.
And politicians like me must do all in our power to avoid it.
And politicians, like me, should use this Centenary to reflect on the mistakes of our predecessors and resolve never to repeat them.
STEINBRECHER survived the Somme, but was killed in action the following year. By then with the Americans entering the war the tide had turned.
Another young German officer Captain Hans von HENTIG described the Somme as;
‘The muddy grave of the German field army.’
And so it was.
But peace came – and Europe’s politicians failed.
A betrayal of the fallen.
And a reminder of our heavy responsibility today.
Thank you.