---

Armed Forces Bill

Perhaps I may be a little personal about this, because this is sensitive amendment which has been introduced in an intelligent way. However, I was always told that history could not be written until the last person who was alive at the time was dead. We can look at past perfect or future perfect, but most of us will have no memory of those times or—I will probably become a little emotional—just a second-hand memory. My grandfather won the Sword of Honour at Dartmouth and was invalided out of the Navy just before the war, and he wanted to fight. He had a brother-in-law, my uncle Sir Stafford Cripps, who also wanted to fight, but he was too ill to do so. The two of them got together with others in a double-decker bus and went off to the front. When they arrived, they asked, ““What can we do?”” They were told that they could be medical orderlies. They then wrote a letter back to their father-in-law, J. C. Eno, who had invented Eno’s Fruit Salts, asking for some help. Eno went to his car-maker and had a special ambulance made, which he sent out to the front, and my grandfather and my uncle both became stretcher-bearers. My grandfather would talk to me at the age of six and seven and tell me what it was like—that he had to go out to pick people up from no-man’s-land, which as a child I called ““nobody’s place””. He had to try to find limbs to match people who had been wounded and bring them back. He took people in to have limbs amputated by surgeons and then buried the limbs, only to find that they had been dug up by wild dogs. He said that this was the most terrible time that anybody could have. Sometimes, they would have to go with a stretcher to collect someone who had been shot at dawn. He said that, on one occasion, a man was standing there whom he heard say that he did not want to be blindfolded in any way. He brought him back and there was his brother, who was still alive. Obviously, you cry as a child sometimes when you try to think as a man. You realise that these were terrible, emotional times. My grandfather and Uncle Stafford—he would never talk about it afterwards—would try to explain that, while these people had been wounded or shot, all people at the front suffered from emotional stress; that mental illness was the same as physical illness; and that there were people who actually prayed that they would be wounded so that they could escape. Whatever the law may have been at that time, and whatever the rules were, you could almost say that the immortal memory of those awful times is more important. We who did not live in those times will never know them, but I will always remember my grandfather. I therefore support this amendment entirely.