THE Government is to take steps to pardon the 300-plus soldiers - some of them just teenagers - who were shot by firing squad in the First World War.

Those who have campaigned for this will be surprised and delighted.

But the decision comes as no surprise to me. Those who opposed pardons were stripped, not long ago, of their last excuse for denying mercy.

No-one except those who led them believed these men were cowards. Many met their deaths with a courage we can't imagine today.

The argument a pardon would do the dead no good rather missed the point.

Remembrance Day services and silent vigils do the dead no good either. These observances are for the benefit of the living.

The last excuse was we cannot apply the legal and moral standards of today to a wartime situation of 90 years ago.

Not long ago I wrote to the authorities pointing out something which no-one else seems to have noticed. About 3,100 men were sentenced to death, and just over 300 of the sentences were carried out - almost exactly one in 10.

If a Roman legion showed cowardice in battle, one man in 10 was executed.

This, it seems, was what the commanders in chief, Sir Douglas Haig and before him Sir John French, were doing. Who lived and who died was a matter of pure chance.

They were applying not the legal standards of 1914-18, but the savage laws of ancient Rome.

Thank goodness we have moved on from such barbarism.

M Reeves
Gravesend