Remembrance must not be mood music for return of conscription

It is not that I am unmoved or churlish when it comes to personal sacrifice. On Remembrance Day, I shed my own tears for those in my family who did not return from those wars, or who came home the worse for mental wear. And I mourn all those who died in the great conflicts: soldiers, sailors, aviators and innocent civilians.

But there is a great danger – certainly in the British historical context – of forgetting that much of this sacrifice was enforced through state conscription, and often tragically unnecessary. It certainly should not be used to glorify the military, or justify the current global moves towards rearmament and war. And that is what I fear is happening.

My family gave their all in two world wars and a clutch of colonial adventures. My grandfather, Thomas Kerevan, fought in the Boer War then was recalled (unwillingly) to the colours in 1914, at the start of the vicious imperial spasm dignified with the title Great War.

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Sadly, the British and European socialist parties abandoned their pre-war policy of calling a general strike to prevent a European conflict. Within a year, a million or more souls were dead or wounded for no gain whatsoever.

My grandfather was wounded at Ypres and invalided out, which was probably a good thing. He thus avoided being one of the 20 million or so soldiers to die in the four years of massacre. Nobody really knows the true casualty figures. The fiancé of my granny on my mother’s side was one of those who did not come back, and left my grandmother pregnant.

The Great War turned my grandfather into an ardent socialist. We forget that only about 30% of adults in Britain had the vote in 1914. This was never a war for democracy. When the initial source of volunteers dried up after a year of fighting, prime minister Lloyd George brought in conscription.

Many of the “honoured dead” in Flanders Field were unwilling conscripts who had no vote. After the insanity of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, popular support for the war turned to outright opposition.

Throughout 1917, Britain was gripped by a wave of strikes, largely in opposition to the extension of conscription, as the army ran out of cannon fodder. The government responded by closing anti-war newspapers and jailing anti-war protesters.

The madness only ended when the German imperial army mutinied, shot their officers and went home.

In 1919, when Winston Churchill delayed demobilisation so he could send troops to Russia to overthrow the Bolsheviks, the mutinies spread to the British army. You’ll find the odd war memorial that reads “1914-19”. That’s no mistake.

Churchill would have kept the global conflict going if British squaddies hadn’t told him and the War Office to get stuffed. That resistance to more sacrifice is worth remembering when you wear a poppy.

Of course, with the threat of totalitarian fascism, the Second World War proved a different case. My father and uncles went to war with a sense of purpose. Of the Kerevan brothers, two joined the RAF, one was in the Long Range Desert Group, and one became a naval officer.

MY Uncle James did not return home after his Lancaster was shot down over the Rhur; his body was never found. But if working-class Britain supported fighting Hitler, it did not do so in craven manner.

My father led a mutiny in his RAF unit against poor leadership and officer stupidity. My Uncle Robert, my mother’s brother, carried on the Clydeside pacifist tradition by refusing “to shoot Germans for Winston Churchill”.

Instead, he worked on the railways and served in the Home Guard – where he deliberately wore an outsized cap to poke fun at pompous Captain Mainwaring types. As for my mother, she was also in the RAF. To her dying day she disparaged Winston Churchill for “shooting Welsh miners”.

Uncle Jim, my mother’s youngest brother, missed the Second World War but he ended up in Korea while on National Service. Korea was the first great battle of the Cold War, and more than three million were killed. Britain sent 60,000 conscript troops to this sideshow, more than 1000 of whom never came back.

Britain then spent the 1950s and 1960s fighting a host of now-forgotten colonial wars as we retreated from empire – Cyprus, Suez, Malaya, Aden, Kenya and more. The growing hostility and passive resistance of British conscripts in these daft but bloody wars led to National Service being scrapped in 1960. No-one wanted to “be sacrificed” for the flag any longer.

That remains the case. Answering questions in Parliament last month, Labour’s Defence Secretary John Healey admitted that the British army is set to fall below 70,000 soldiers. That’s its lowest size in 230 years, though there are a further 30,000 reservists.

(Image: Graham Hunt)

The reluctance to fight on the part of young Britons led, earlier this year, to a proposal from Rishi Sunak to reintroduce mandatory conscription. The Tories disguised this move by suggesting that most 18-year-olds would be compelled to do a form of community service, but that they could “volunteer” to opt-in to a military training scheme, as an alternative. Keir Starmer rejected the notion and (ostensibly) it died a death when Labour won the election. But Labour have now initiated a new defence review.

While Starmer and Healey have been wary of setting a target to increase troop numbers, that can’t be far off.

With the election of Donald Trump, the world has entered a new and dangerous era. All the major powers have been busy refurbishing their nuclear arsenals for some time. But the bloody conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have opened the prospect of extensive ground wars becoming the new normal. That will certainly cue the expansion of conventional armies as well. For instance, the Ukrainian armed forces have around 1.2 million personnel under arms, with another 2.5 million reservists. Britain is a minnow by comparison. It is difficult to see how the powers that be will allow that to continue.

Which is precisely why I am suspicious of any attempts to glorify “the sacrifice of our honoured dead” for political purposes. That all too easily becomes the mood music for encouraging the return of conscription.

We need to remember our dead and maimed, if for no other reason that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Equally, we should not reduce remembrance to a trite political lesson about the horrors of war.

There is room to dwell on the terrible individual loss, the pain of those left behind, and the mental anguish of those who survived. But we have entered a new, uncertain period in human history. Our war dead would most certainly have chosen life over extinction, if theirs was the decision to make. The best way of honouring their memory is to ensure we end wars. That has never been so urgent as now.