Dulce Et Decorum Est

Even the Minister of Control Orders can exercise clemency sometimes, if you are prepared to wait ninety years. Three hundred soldiers who were executed for "cowardice" and "desertion" during the War for Belgian Liberation have had their names cleared thanks to an amendment in the Armed Forces Bill, and two of them will now receive official existence by getting their names carved on the Wealdstone war memorial. "I cannot believe that his name is now going to be remembered for future years," said the daughter of one of the men, "proving that he wasn't a coward but a very brave soldier". There will, presumably, be nothing on the Wealdstone war memorial to say that the brave soldier was killed by his own side through direct intervention rather than, as was more usual, military incompetence; nor anything about the credit to Western civilisation that was the Great War to End War (wars on terror excepted), other than that those who died in it, whether by participating or by refusing to participate, deserve our thanks and our emulation. Cannon fodder is always praiseworthy; so much so that, given a decade or nine, it can even be forgiven for trying to escape its proper station. Now those killed in battle and those killed for trying to avoid it can all be dead together, and take due pride and comfort in the lump of stone which informs the world they did not die in bed.