[jambutty]

A blanket pardon is better than no pardon at all but regardless of cost or complexity the MOD should judge each case on its merits. As someone has already pointed out to give individual pardons would expose the real truth of warfare. The men from lieutenants downwards were just numbers to the generals as they sat well out of harms way and pushed wooden blocks around a map in between sips of sherry. They, of course, got the medals whilst the real men represented by those little wooden blocks did the fighting, dying and getting maimed for life on the whim of a Colonel Blimp.

Like many young men of the day my dad volunteered to fight the Hun on the 14th August 1914 when he was just 19 years old. His service number was 1138, which indicates that when the call came he was one of the first.

He had the good fortune to join the 5th East Lancs Battery of the Royal Field Artillery, 1st East Lancs Brigade, thus was not one of the front line trench troops. After suitable training he was posted to Cairo, Egypt and took part in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 where shrapnel wounds saw him get a break from the fighting until he recovered. His next break came courtesy of a bullet and then a longer break after being gassed. After each recovery he was sent back to the front to do his duty with distinction until the end of the Great War. In spite of all that he considered himself as one of the lucky ones – he survived. Many of his comrades in arms did not.

Not that his survival did him any real good because he got caught up in WWII and spent the next 5 years in a German concentration camp. Only to die on the 5th November 1948.