IN A rare fit of soft-heartedness the Government is to take steps to pardon the 300-plus soldiers 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, for those who opposed pardons were stripped of their last excuse for denying mercy not long ago.

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.

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, it was paraded and one man in 10 was executed.

This was call decimation, and this, it seems, was what the commanders in chief, Sir Douglas Haig and 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. Thank goodness we have finally moved on from such barbarism.

M Reeves
Address supplied