 The next item of business is a debate on motion 14666 in the name of Nicola Sturgeon on a motion of remembrance. I call the First Minister. It is an honour to move this motion today. I suspect that everyone in the chamber will be able to picture the war memorials in their own local communities. The one in Drekhorne where I grew up stands on a hill above the village looking down on the primary school that I attended. It contains just over 50 names from World War 1 from James Andrew to Andrew Wiley. The main war memorial of the Canangate Kirk just up the road from our Parliament contains more than 200 names from John Aitken to John Young. Those are just two of the more than 5,000 memorials across our country. In total, the roles of honour for World War 1 in the Scottish National War Memorial contain more than 130,000 names. They include armed forces from Scotland and of Scottish descent, along with nurses, munitions workers, merchant navy sailors and others. When 134,712 names are projected onto the walls of this Parliament on Sunday as part of the Armistice Day commemorations, the display will take seven hours. That fact on its own gives some idea of the sheer scale of the suffering caused by the First World War. Around the world it has been estimated that more than 15 million people died. Every single one of those was somebody's son or daughter, somebody's sibling, somebody's fiance or spouse. Many millions more were injured often grievously. The psychological impact of the conflict, mainly borne by very young men and women in an age that often did not recognise or talk about mental health, is difficult for us to comprehend or even to conceive of. The Scotsman newspaper called the First Armistice Day commemoration in November 1919, a reminder of vacant niches in our memories of lost heartache in millions of homes. It may be hard for us now to fully grasp not just the intensity but the universality of the grief that must have been evident on those earlier Armistice days. Even with the passage of time, the debt we owe to those who served does not diminish. It is vital that we remember and honour today their courage and their sacrifice. Of course, there are other aspects of World War 1 that are also worthy of reflection. Earlier this year, we marked in the chamber the centenary of the start of women's suffrage. That was partly a consequence of the war. The map of Europe was completely redrawn after the First World War and, of course, the settlement reached at Versailles would ultimately lead towards World War 2. In many respects, therefore, the First World War was instrumental in shaping modern Scotland and determining the world that we now live in. It is entirely appropriate that the last four years have seen a nationwide programme of commemorations to mark the centenary of the war. The programme has been carefully considered and immaculately planned by the Scottish commemorations panel, so ably chaired by Norman Drummond together with their team of advisers. The panel's expertise and hard work has played a significant part in making these events such a success. It is also worth noting that the free books that they produce for each of the commemorations have been hugely and deservedly popular. As First Minister, I want to put on record my heartfelt thanks for everything that Norman, the panel and their advisers have done. It is absolutely right that today's motion gives the Parliament as a whole the chance to demonstrate our gratitude. The panel has worked with a large range of partners, including Royal British Legion Scotland, Poppy Scotland and Government agencies. The armed services have been heavily involved and have supported all of the commemorative events. They have also conducted their ceremonial duties with the professionalism that we have come to expect but which we must never take for granted. At a local level, hundreds of community groups, faith organisations, veteran societies and many others have organised and participated in ceremonies, gatherings and cultural events across the country. For example, on Sunday after attending the national remembrance service here in Edinburgh in the morning and the Glasgow Cathedral service in the afternoon, I am hugely looking forward to seeing far, far from Epress on Sunday night a production that has received warm praise from audiences right across Scotland on its current tour. Our schools have been heavily involved in commemorations. Almost all schools in Scotland have played a part in marking the centenary. I have seen first hand how successfully these different organisations have worked together at each of the commemorations that I have been privileged to attend. For the Quintashill rail disaster, the Gallipoli campaign, the Luz commemorations in Dundee, the Battle of Jutland, the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Amion, at Arras last year, marking a campaign where 18,000 Scots died in little over one month. The beating of the retreat is something that will stay in my memory for a very, very long time. Many of those events have had a strong international element, including rightly, and very movingly, from countries that were opponents in World War I and, of course, are now valued friends and partners. To get back to the point about schools, one of the other things that has stayed with me from the commemorations in Arras is meeting students from Monifith, Allawa, Duncan Rigg, Creeff and many other places besides. Several of them had great grandparents or other relatives who had died or served in the Great War. All of them were learning about the conflict, not just in terms of its geopolitical consequences but in terms of its impact on people and on communities. The opportunity that this commemorative period has provided for that, not just for school students but for all of us, may prove to be its most valuable legacy. Service in World War I has now passed entirely out of living memory. The same will happen before too much longer with World War II. However, as those wars recede further into the past, our obligation to remember them is, if anything, greater now than it has ever been before. After all, one of the lessons of those conflicts is that peace is something no nation and no continent can ever take for granted. It requires constant hard work and continued attention and dedication. When the then Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, addressed the House of Commons on Armistice Day, he famously said, I hope that we may say that this morning came to an end all wars. His words then expressed a universally held hope, which of course has never been fulfilled, but it is one that we must continue to cherish and to work towards each and every single day. One of the ways in which we can work towards peace, not the only way but a very important way, is to remember and understand the cost and the sheer horror of war. These centenary commemorations have given all of us an opportunity to do that. Today, as we do every November, we remember with respect and with gratitude all those who died. We honour all those who contributed to the war effort. We also resolve once again to do everything in our power to promote a more peaceful world. Ultimately, that is the best, the most fitting, and perhaps it is the only meaningful tribute that we can pay to those who lost their lives. I am proud to move the motion in my name. I begin by associating myself entirely with everything that the First Minister has just said. Finally, the guns fell silent in that era when newspapers were the only source of news, when the pounding of the guns right up until the appointed hour could still be heard across the channel, their sudden and long-for-silence spoke volumes 100 years ago. 100 years before that, Waterloo and the Napoleonic Wars, to those emerging from the First World War, a distant memory but only as distant to them as the Great War is now to us, that moment when first-hand knowledge is passed, when fewer remain with even a strong second-hand recollection, a huge moment in the story of our nation and the world slips into history. Lawrence Binion's enduring stanza, which begins, they shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, composed when the war itself was just weeks old, with all the terror and horror ahead, served as an inspiration to a nation determined to honour and remember the sacrifice of the fallen. And so the cenotaph in Whitehall and war memorials across and in every part of the nation and the world remain the centre of our collective remembrance this coming Sunday, the centenary of that destructive and desperate conflict. As the First Minister has said, since 2014, we have marked the centenary anniversaries of the key conflicts, April in 1914-15, Gallipoli in 1915, Verdun, Jutland and the Somme in 1916, Passchendale in 1917 and, movingly, in April last year, Arras, in which so many Scots perished and Amion in 1918. These have been deeply moving events, attended, as we might expect, by politicians and members of the royal family, by our armed forces and with singular dedication by British Legion veterans. Yet more moving still as we contemplated the vastness of the loss, we time and again witnessed the humility, pride and enduring sadness of the families of those who did not return, but who returned themselves to where relatives fought and fell. As a schoolboy at Glasgow academy, it is self a war memorial trust. Respect for those who served whether they fell or survived was profound. As pupils still will still, I passed several times each day two huge war memorial plaques facing each other across a natrium, one for each of the wars, bearing the names of all those from school who had perished. And in the 1970s there were still many veterans and others who knew those names personally. I realised later that there were members of staff and other students who counted family names amongst those listed. It was also true that among those teaching us were many men and women who had fought themselves in the Second World War. That proximity to events ought to have been a rich vein of knowledge, but as we all know, those who survived in all humility and with respect to those who had fallen spoke little of their own direct experience. Only towards the end did gallant men like Harry Patch share their story. He, at one point, the oldest man in Europe and the last surviving combat soldier of the First World War from any country who served in the western front and lost to us in 2009. The last four years have seen an extraordinary engagement in communities and particularly with school children investigating the life history of the names in the local memorials to make vivid portraits of those who died, their families, their lives, where and when they met their end and the legacy that endured. Those creative acts of practical remembrance ensure that many of the memory of individuals survives. Those last four years have also seen many fine new histories of the Great War, none more so in my view than Nick Lloyd's searing account of passion deal, surely the ultimate battle in that long conflict to illustrate the futility of so much of it. Between July 31 and November 10, 500,000 men were either killed, wounded, maimed, gasped, drowned or buried, and so many Scots among them. Looking at the operational maps and seeing the strategic names Dumbarton Wood, Inverness Cops, Glencorse Wood is vivid testament to an engagement in which so many Scots died. Lloyd George called it the campaign in the mud, for it rained mercilessly all the time, and the shelling so destabilised the fabric of the ground that it literally turned to that sea of mud. I recall seeing the Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, at the Men and Gate, where many of those whose remains were never recovered are listed on that memorial. Basil Littleheart in his 1930 history, the real war, quoted a then unnamed general, good God did we really send men to fight on that. Siegfried Sassoon encapsulated the death of those who fell at passion deal in his poem memorial tablet. Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight under Lord Darby's scheme. I died in hell, they called it passion deal. My wound was slight and I was hobbling back, and then a shell burst slick upon the duckboards, so I fell into the bottomless mud and lost the light. Presiding officer, as the war ended, and in the months that followed, tens of millions would die from influenza. All too many who had survived battle themselves succumbed, and at home civilians who had endured died just as suddenly as many had fought, the first of those fatalities in Glasgow. The First World War was ultimately a series of conflicts between nations and nature itself. Perhaps the American civil war should have given those leading some premonition of what 19th century military tactics could expect facing 20th century technology, but if it did it was ignored. In commemorating the end of the First World War, in acknowledging its many horrendous conflicts and anniversaries, in celebrating the heroism of many individuals, we do so in our resolve that this is not and will not be to glory in that war, in its ambitions or its monstrous, indiscriminate slaughter or in its bloody victories, nor its defeats. Were there positive legacies? The beginning of the end of deference, certainly, many of all backgrounds who fought side by side in the trenches came home ambitious and confident of their equal worth, women's suffrage, the ambition of those who stepped up to fight from around the world to move from empire to commonwealth. Tens of millions would die in the decades that followed. It was not the war to end all wars when the peace that was finally struck lay in it the seeds of Hitler and the global war and the Holocaust, which followed just 20 years later. However, in 1918, the guns fell silent. Today is a salute from the world of today to the world as it was then. An act of remembrance of a conflict that now slips into history of our forebears, of ordinary men and women from across the world who fought or endured at home, but especially here, in Scotland's Parliament, to the Scots who gave their all. I rise in support of this motion. It is important that this Parliament marks this centenary with the solemnity that it deserves and with due regard to the commemorative tone of this remembrance. Many of our own families were directly affected by the First World War. My own grandfather, Richard Hopkinson, never spoke of his wartime experiences in France. They were locked away, compartmentalised, never to be released, taken to the grave and little wonder. He volunteered with the Bradford Powell's part of the West Yorkshire Regiment at the start of the war in 1914, at the age of 18. He witnessed, at first hand, the grimest horror of trench warfare. He fought in the Battle of the Somme. Whereof the 2,000 men in the 1st and 2nd battalion of the Bradford Powell's, the Yorkshire Post reported that 1,770 were killed or badly injured as they walked into a hail of German bullets in the first hour of the battle. Over the following 140 days of the Somme, there were a million casualties. We know that those wounds were not simply physical. He served until Armistice Day a century ago. In his world, which I knew of bowling greens, of family, a daughter, grandchildren, an apple tree in the back garden, the snarling cry of the machine gun from half a century before was shut out. That was not the full story of his early life experience. They were also the brothers and sisters, themselves slain, but before the war, lives cut short by tuberculosis and slum housing. That is a generation that suffered much, a generation to whom we still owe an incalculable debt. It is fitting that this Parliament and this country remembers them, those who made it to old age and, more poignantly, those who did not. Those who fell on those cold battlefields a long way from home and those who served on the home front. At times like this, this Parliament is at its best when we stand together across the political divides, not just to remember those who fought in the First World War, but to remember as well those who fell in later conflicts in the 100 years since 1918. Because to the families of those fallen soldiers we also owe a debt and to those veterans who survive, we have a special responsibility. Our duty to them is to provide them with the support that they need when they need it, because, as we commemorate the fallen, we must also speak out and take action for the living. That means that this Parliament must do what it can for those who cannot shut out the trauma, the physical and the mental anguish. We cannot change the past, but we can understand it and so build a better today and tomorrow. We can create a better future and so pay back our debt to those whose sacrifices have been great. By investing as a priority in public health and in public services, by tackling poor mental health and ending the stigma and by working as well to build a future that is founded on peace and not war, which does not lead us into believing that there will necessarily be a war to end all wars. Because, as we commemorate those who laid down their lives, we should recall that the great war poet Wilfred Owen wrote some of the most harrowing poems ever written in the English language, The Old Lie, Dulce et decorum est, Anthem for Doomed Youth. He wrote them whilst being treated for shell shock, now known as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Craig Lockhart War Hospital in this city. We should not airbrush from our history either. Those prominent members of the ILP from James Kear Hardy, John Wheatley, Jimmy Maxson, Tom Johnson and Arthur Woodburn, to those who formed the Women's Peace Crusade in 1916, Helen Crawford, Agnes Dolan, Mary Barber, Agnes Hardy and Annie Swan, who opposed the war on grounds that were at once both moral and political. It was an opposition which, in the words of Maxson, took, I quote, a worldwide humanitarian view. So we must learn all the lessons of all of our history and remember those 135,000 women and men from Scotland who gave their lives and whose names will be projected onto this Parliament on Sunday. Those who are commemorated in every city, in every town and in every village on every war memorial where we will stand in silence and pay our own respects and draw on our own memories this Sunday on the 11th hour, in the 11th month, on the 11th day and resolve as a nation that we shall never forget. I am grateful for the opportunity to add some remarks in support of that motion on behalf of the Scottish Greens. The moment of remembrance in which we mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War armistice is a moment of shared recognition of the horrors of a war that took so many lives, touching every community in Scotland and so far beyond. Every one of those names and the stories behind them is powerful, but the scale of what we are here to remember is breathtaking. Nearly 10 million military dead, twice as many wounded. Most not there as volunteers, but through conscription or under the threat of conscription. Millions more civilian deaths from all walks of life were the direct victims and unknown millions more died as a consequence of the war, as hunger, disease and emotional trauma followed conflict as they so often do. Those two must be remembered. What can it mean to stand in remembrance of such staggering and unnecessary human suffering? What does it mean to honour those lives? It is in part a continued commitment to observe the intention that has been maintained strongly throughout that century, quite simply to never forget. However, it must also be a chance to reflect on the nature of that war, an atrocity committed by the powerful against the powerless, as millions of young men were forced to enlist, marched across Europe, sent into fields and ditches to face mutual slaughter. That was indeed an atrocity committed by the Governments of both sides against the people of both sides. An atrocity committed also by the companies that sold arms to both sides or told lies to both sides to make war more likely and lined their own pockets. Those two must be remembered. It should have stood throughout those 100 years as the ultimate lesson on the futility of war. We must remember and honour those who lost their lives, but to make this act meaningful, we should also remain true to the other sentiment, which was expressed so strongly in the immediate years after the war, not only never forget but also never again. On that second imperative, we have shown far less commitment. As we stand in remembrance of the First World War dead and all the victims of all wars across the world today in places such as Rakhine, Yemen, Palestine, conflict rages on and the war profiteers in this country and around the world carry on their lethal business. Those two must be remembered. On this 100th anniversary of the armistice, Scotland marks the bravery of those who fought but still has no memorial to those other brave people who risked imprisonment, torture or execution by their own Governments for having the courage to say no, they would not kill their fellow human beings. Those two must be remembered. If the proposal for such a memorial becomes a reality, it will offer a place to reflect on the lives of those who have worked for peace in our own history and around the world. We are right to keep in our collective memory the horrors of war and the lives that were so needlessly destroyed, but remembrance is not an end in itself. It matters because human beings matter. It is an attempt to keep us connected with the reality of war that exposed what Wilfred Owen called the old lie when he urged us not to let this be the fate of the next generation to die for their countries and think it noble. If we are to truly honour those who were sent to that fate, we must be faithful to both imperatives. We must have the continued resolve to say never forget, but we must also find the courage to say never again. In the 100th anniversary of the armistice, there is rightly a focus on the First World War. It is, after all, where the poppy symbol comes from. I think that, rather than fading from memory, service in the First World War has been growing in the public mind in recent years. Some of that comes from the work in schools, where new resources have made it easier for children to learn about what life was like for those who served in that war. There are photographs, letters, poetry, art and links through ancestry, which will capture the imagination and make us want to know more. This year, 100 years on, there is a new way of looking at the First World War and the lives that it took and the devastation that it caused. Peter Jackson's film, They Shall Not Grow Old, has been in cinemas and will be on television this weekend. It brings film footage from the First World War to life, repaired and turned to colour. The result is a whole new way of seeing that part of history. The faces of the soldiers look like the faces of people we know, who we see around us today, who might have been us. Those are no longer remote historical people, and the story told through the film is remarkable too. It surprises us in every way, sometimes in uncomfortable ways. We do not expect to learn that men were enthusiastic and keen to join up and go to France, but they did. We do not expect men to say that they enjoyed much of the life in the army in the war, but they do. We are sad, belong, belief to know. When they returned to Britain in 1918, many were devastated that their families did not want to hear their stories and find out what they had gone through—the lives lost and the hell of war. That is the point of remembrance this week, to hear, to listen, to learn of those who serve their country, whether conscripted volunteers and those to remember and their sacrifice. Wilfred Owen described the mechanised slaughter of the western front as being obscene as cancer. The Scottish poetry rivalry ran a public competition to choose whose words should be engraved on a new monument to commemorate the First World War. The lines that will appear on the monument are taken from Neil Monroe's poem, Lament for the Lads. "'Sweet be their sleep now, wherever they lie, far though they be from the hills of their home.'" Can I thank the members for their contributions? That concludes our debate. I suspend this meeting until 2.30.