IN A rare fit of soft-heartedness 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 many years, along with bereaved relatives, friends, comrades, descendants, lawyers, scholars and military historians, will be surprised and delighted by this outcome.

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

No-one except the donkeys who led them ever believed these men were cowards.

Many of them met their deaths with a courage we could not imagine today.

Any man who leaves his home and family and risks his life for his country must be something of a hero.

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

Remembrance Day services and silent vigils do the dead of our country's wars 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 past.

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.

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

This was called decimation, and this, it seems, was what the commanders in chief, Sir Douglas Haig, and before him Sir John French, were doing - picking out one man in 10, possibly at random, to be shot as a warning to the rest.

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, which sanctioned crucifixion, strangulation, scourging with lead-weighted whips, throwing traitors from a high rock and dumping paricides in the Tiber tied in a sack with a venomous snake, a scorpion and a fighting cock.

Thank goodness we have finally moved on from such barbarism.

M REEVES

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