The first British soldier to die in the Great War fell in August 1914. The last to die during that conflict was killed about ninety minutes before the 11.00 armistice on November 11th. 1918. That soldier had been on active service since the start of the war and had survived everything that the enemy had thrown, fired at and dropped on him until literally the eleventh hour. Even between the signing of the armistice agreement at 05.00 and the 11.00 deadline it is known that hundreds of men, on both sides, lost their lives. 

 

There is a modest house on a street corner at the foot of a bridge in the centre of Sarajevo that is the site at which the assassination that started the First World War took place. It  is an awful irony that the beginning  of the “The War to end all wars” took place in the same city in Bosnia Herzegovina that was subsequently the location for the genocide that took place between Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo and that saw snipers on the hillside above the city pick off civilians walking the streets below. Asked how he knew who he was killing one Serbian sniper told a friend of mine who was part of the peacekeeping force that “it’s easy. I was at school with them”.  With that in mind the conflict that began on the street corner in Sarajevo and that ended, after claiming hundreds of thousands of young lives, one hundred years ago on Sunday seems remarkably futile.

 

Arguably the First World War and the divisions that arose from it paved the way not for an end to hostility throughout Europe but for the fascist alliances that would generate the climate for the start of the Second World War in 1939.

 

As we rightly remember those that have given their lives in the service of our Country and in defence of the freedoms that we enjoy and hold dear we should surely also consider that for seven decades we have sustained a fragile peace in Europe and that notwithstanding the incursions of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation and the awful events in the post-Yugoslav Balkans, we should work hard to protect that peace and to hand it on intact to our children and our grandchildren.

 

“We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe”. 

 

Winston Churchill was one of the driving forces behind the foundation of the Council of Europe of which, along with, now, forty six other States stretching from Azerbaijan in the East to Spain in the West and from the Mediterranean to the arctic Circle, the United Kingdom is a founding and prominent member. Post Brexit the Council and it’s Parliamentary Assembly will take on, for the UK, a new significance. We owe it to the fallen to maintain the strongest possible relationships with our NATO and other allies and we should never allow parochial and xenophobic influences to damage a coalition of interest that was designed to prevent ,if not  all wars , at least another holocaust. Remembering “ them” is not enough. We have to re- double our efforts to honour their memory and to be prepared to defend, with all the powers at our disposal, the peace for which they gave so many lives.

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