I commend Murdo Fraser for lodging a very solemn and fitting motion and I endorse everything that he said. Passchendaele was known as the battle of the mud. Indeed, one soldier, Private Richard W Mercer said:

"Passchendaele was just a terrible, terrible place. We used to walk along these wooden duckboards—something like ladders laid on the ground. The Germans would concentrate on these things. If a man was hit and wounded and fell off he could easily drown in the mud and never be seen again. You just did not want to go off the duckboards."

As for the battle itself, by spring 1917, the British had placed 21 huge mines totalling 450 tons of the high explosive, ammonal. At zero hour—03:10 on 7 June 1917—after the most intense bombardment of the entire war, the allied mines were detonated, killing an estimated 10,000 German troops in moments. The explosion was said to have been audible as far as London and Dublin and was possibly the loudest man-made noise that had been made up to that point.

The battle spared no one. After three months of fighting, the Australian, New Zealand and United Kingdom casualties—wounded and killed—numbered 448,000 and the Germans suffered 260,000 dead or wounded. The Canadian corps finally took the village of Passchendaele on 6 November 1917.

As for what life in the trenches was like, I will quote Siegfried Sassoon's poem, "Suicide in the Trenches":

"I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go."

I do not want to end on a sour note, but I do not think that we have learned the lessons of the past. I want to read another passage—again from Siegfried Sassoon—that could well have been written today. He said:

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed."

I am sorry, but I think that we could say that of some of the wars that we are engaged in today, such as the war in Iraq. I fully support the proposal that the Minister should put funding towards a commemorative memorial to the men who died at Passchendaele, but the greatest commemoration to those men would be not to go into any more wars.