Do we treat our veterans any better today? Afghanistan and Iraq have left Britain with a legacy of injured men and women with physical and emotional scars like the veterans of Waterloo. Parish relief has been replaced by charities such as the Royal British Legion, the Not Forgotten Association and Help for Heroes, which was founded in 2007 by Bryn Parry, a former member of the Green Jackets, and his wife Emma after visiting the Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham and deciding they had to do their bit. The following year David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, claimed that the ‘military covenant’ established by the Labour government in 2000 was ‘well and truly broken’.1 One of the problems highlighted by Cameron stemmed from the phasing out of military hospitals such as the specialist burns unit near Woolwich barracks, London, on the grounds that there were not enough military patients to justify them in the long term. It led to an outcry after reports of soldiers being abused by other patients on NHS wards.
Cameron said injured soldiers should not be treated for their wounds alongside civilian patients in NHS hospitals. He set up a commission under the author Frederick Forsyth to investigate. Forsyth reported there was widespread dissatisfaction over armed forces pensions, widows’ pensions and compensation for injury and illness in the act of duty, which was often far less than criminals could claim for injuries. Forsyth’s report claimed Labour had failed in a number of respects to match their rhetoric with deeds: the failure to provide Service personnel with appropriate equipment – such as flimsy ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers that cost lives in Afghanistan – was ‘lamentable’. Forsyth’s commission also found soldiers were frustrated by ‘the onward march of “lawfare’’’, the legal requirements of the Human Rights courts; this was a problem that never confronted Wellington’s men, though they had a strong moral code.
In 2011 the Commons select committee on defence investigated whether the covenant was being upheld any better under the Coalition government. It still found plenty of failures, but its main concern was ‘whether the support for personnel when they leave the services will be sustainable …’
Have conditions really changed all that much from the time men like Sergeant Graham, Matthew Clay and John Lees were discarded by the army and made forgotten heroes of Waterloo? The cross-party committee, chaired by a Tory MP James Arbuthnot (whose ancestor Charles Arbuthnot helped to deliver Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch to the Cabinet), found many of the same problems that haunted the men when they left the ranks of Wellington’s army:
We are concerned about the number of people who may go on to develop severe and life-limiting mental health, alcohol or neurological problems. We remain to be convinced that the government as a whole fully understands the likely future demands and the related costs.2
The committee won a promise from the government that no injured soldiers would be served redundancy notices on their sick beds, but that was little solace to the men and women who knew that when they got better, they could be sacked.
The reduction in the size of the army over the decade to 2020 from 102,000 to 82,000 – and their replacement by 30,000 reservists – is going to be a continuing cause of grievance and strain for the men and women serving in today’s armed services.
Wellington’s army coped with its bloody victory by enjoying some time in Paris as conquerors. Today, some go through ‘decompression’ for thirty-six hours in an armed forces ‘beach club’ in Cyprus after tours in Afghanistan or elsewhere to help them cope with the stress. Many fail to cope. Men like 18-year-old John Bryant, Britain’s youngest serving frontline serviceman in Afghanistan in 2010, who broke the rules to get out of the Army and six months later was left homeless.3
The MPs returned to the theme of the military covenant in 2013 and recommended that the armed forces should do more to educate its men and women for life outside the forces when they are discharged. Today, after Iraq and Afghanistan, there are nearly 200,000 servicemen and women who depend on the Defence Medical Services, which runs the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, Surrey (to be moved to Loughborough in 2018), the NHS, charities and welfare organisations. The terrible carnage caused on patrols by roadside bombs (they are often so sophisticated that they should no longer be called Improvised Explosive Devices) means that Britain is having to get used to the sight of ex-service men and women without limbs, like Regency Britain did in the peace after the Napoleonic Wars.
Historically, Britons have always been wary of a standing army just in case it was used against them. They have always been ambivalent about the problems of the ‘Bloody Infantry’ until they are needed (as Kipling brilliantly identified in his poem ‘Tommy’). The Royal British Legion and Help for Heroes are making a difference to public attitudes. But we still owe it to the men and women of the armed services that they are not forgotten. They deserve better than to be treated like some of Wellington’s forgotten heroes, the ‘scum of the earth’.
1. BBC online, 4 March 2008.
2. HC 762, Armed Forces Covenant in Action? Commons Select Committee for Defence.
3. Independent, 21 February 2013.