Last night I watched the Ian Hislop programme about the 306 allied soldiers who were 'shot at dawn' for a variety of offences - usually desertion - during World War 1.The programme was well made, thought provoking and generally balanced.
Who could not have been moved by the stories of the 'shell-shocked' who were executed for cowardice?
Your heart went out to both them and their families.
But in the case of the true deserters - those who had calculatedly planned the abandonment of their colleagues - you experienced different feelings. There was a certain revulsion inside you and the feeling that they 'probably had it coming'.
Hislop pointed to the words of one man on a firing party who stated 'It had to be done.'
Distanced as we are today from these terrible events, we could never grasp how the majority of men in the trenches regarded their treacherous colleagues.
They were despised and in my life, this issue has often come up with soldiers who did active service in World War 2.
The mainstream soldiers certainly, fully approved of the executions.
Against this rather complicated backcloth, you have to revile the last Labour government for 'pardoning' all of these soldiers indiscriminately.
All the records of 'drum head courts martial' are still extant from WW1. If they wanted to do such a thing retrospectively - they really should have had the decency to filter the sad from the guilty.
But nearly a hundred years on - how can you possibly come to moral decisons from the comfort of a modern office when not lying bathed in mud and in constant fear of death and dreadful injury?
