Yorkshire and Humber Green Party members have taken exception to the proposal for Lord Kitchener, Britain’s First World War military leader to be the new face on the £2 coin.

Andrew Cooper of Yorkshire and the Humber Green Party said: “Like so many of the statues of military men to be found around Westminster, Kitchener is a reminder of the days of industrial warfare and of the military and political leaders who made huge blunders costing millions of lives.

“This was a case of ‘lions led by donkeys’ as has been described by several historians of the First World War. Shouldn’t 2014 be about remembering the monumental folly of war?

“A different, progressive choice for the £2 coin could have been a war poet, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, or Siegfried Sassoon. Or, better still, Vera Brittain, showing the female side of service and loss and working for a better world.

“Instead, the Government chose Kitchener – a man whose driving force was putting a million men more in the field than the enemy. We really ought to be commemorating the end of World War One, not the beginning.”

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener was an experienced military commander with many titles and honours to his name.

On the outbreak of war, Britain’s Prime Minister Herbert Asquith appointed him Secretary of War. Kitchener’s task was recruiting a large army to fight Germany and its Central Powers allies.

The late historian A J P Taylor pointed out: “He startled his colleagues at the first cabinet meeting which he attended by announcing that the war would last three years, not three months, and that Great Britain would have to put an army of millions into the field.

“Regarding the Territorial Army with undeserved contempt, he proposed to raise a New Army of 70 divisions and, when Asquith ruled out compulsion as politically impossible, agreed to do so by voluntary recruiting.”

Kitchener asked for an initial 100,000 recruits – 175,000 men volunteered in the single week ending September 5, 1914.

With the help of a war poster that featured Kitchener and the words: ‘Join Your Country's Army’, 750,000 had enlisted by the end of the month.

After that, the average ran at 125,000 men a month until June 1915 when the number of volunteers began to slow down.

Interestingly, 100 years ago, a man who was later to become MP for Bradford North and win the Nobel Prize for Peace instigated an anti-war publicity campaign.

On Wednesday, August 5, 1914, the day after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Norman Angell’s Neutrality League published an entire broadsheet page protest in the Yorkshire Observer calling on people to resist what he called a “wicked and stupid war”.

Contrary to the reported enthusiasm elsewhere for what many thought would be a short glorious adventure, over by Christmas, the Neutrality League (with offices in Leeds and Halifax) declared that the impetus to war was in the hands of small but powerful cliques trying to rush people into it.

In 1909, alarmed by Britain and Germany’s race to build ever bigger and more powerful warships, Norman Angell had published a pamphlet entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion.

He maintained that national interest was not best served by military conquest and war. Prosperity among civilised nations depended upon commercial co-operation.

Angell’s opinion was widely shared. In only three days he reportedly raised £2,300 (worth more than £220,000 today) to fund the Neutrality League’s publicity campaign. The League’s members included the bishops of Hereford and Lincoln, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Lord Welby, Sir Richard Garton and C P Scott, editor and publisher of the Manchester Guardian.

Norman Angell’s re-titled book, The Great Illusion, sold more than two million copies.

Although the Neutrality League ran out of steam by the end of 1915, Angell, who briefly served in the ambulance corps in France, returned to this country to work with Liberal Government Minister Charles P Trevelyan, Labour Party chairman Ramsay MacDonald, and journalist E D Morel.

They founded the Union of Democratic Control, opposed to censorship and to conscription, which came in during 1916. By 1917, the UDC had reportedly attracted 10,000 members in 100 branches.

From 1929 to 1931, Angell represented Bradford North in the House of Commons for the Labour Party. In 1933, Angell, a supporter of the League of Nations, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.