I
have been doing some reading on the spirituality of World War One and the
lasting effects on people of that conflict. We have just marked Remembrance
Sunday and Armistice Day.
This
year we gathered to remember especially 100 years ago, when folk went to war,
facing the unknown. None of them knew what was to come. Many of them sacrificed
their lives. Today communities will stand by memorials all over the world with
their names on them. The past few months have seen thousands of people view the
poppies at the Tower of London, in half term there were so many people, many
were turned away. People, and encouragingly, young people, are keen to remember
what happened, and to tell the stories, so that they are never forgotten.
Harry
Patch, the last fighting tommy, died in 2009 at the age of 111. His
autobiography is worth finding and reading. He wrote “What the hell we fought
for, I don’t know.” Where was God in that war? What place had God in it?
Certainly we shall see in this reflection a shift as war progressed in
theological thought. At the beginning God sent people to war, a God of divine
justice, needing young men to be sent off to possible slaughter. A God appropriated
to narrow nationalist causes. I like this poem from J C Squire written in 1916:
“God
heard the embattled nations sing and shout “Gott strafe England” and “God save
the King” God this and God that, and God the other thing. “Good God,” said God,
“I’ve got my work cut out!”
Later
the writing is about God in the mud and mess and death and God weeping rather
than sending.
Take
the poem “Christ in Flanders” – “this hideous warfare seems to make things
clear. We never thought of you much in England- but now that we are far away from England,
we have no doubts, we know that you are here.”
Let
me begin in 1914 and a poem by Philip Larkin: "MCMXIV"
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were
stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the
sun
On moustached archaic
faces
Grinning as if it were
all
An August Bank Holiday
lark;
And the shut shops, the
bleached
Established names on
the sunblinds,
The farthings and
sovereigns,
And dark-clothed
children at play
Called after kings and
queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist,
and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not
caring
The place-names all
hazed over
With flowering grasses,
and fields
Shadowing Domesday
lines
Under wheats' restless
silence;
The differently-dressed
servants
With tiny rooms in huge
houses,
The dust behind
limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to
past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens
tidy,
The thousands of
marriages
Lasting a little while
longer:
Never such innocence
again.
In
my home chapel, in Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire, there was a memorial window
to World War One soldiers which I used to sit in front of every Sunday as a
child. The names on it were mostly my distant relatives. In 2004, the chapel
closed and it was later sold with the windows in it. It was demolished in 2006.
There is no record when the window was installed, it was after the war as one
of the men who died from war injuries, did not die until April 1921.
If
you watch Downton Abbey they were discussing where to put memorials well into
1924 if Julian Fellowes writes accurately. It was unveiled at the end of the
last episode last Sunday. The windows at Folly chapel in Wheathampstead were
bought for £120 by a lady who thought it an absolute tragedy that these men,
who had fought so bravely, and of whom the windows said that 'their name liveth
for evermore', were obviously not being remembered. She held on to them for
some years, trying to find an appropriate home for them, and eventually gave
them to St. Albans City Museum where they now reside. I went to find them the
other Monday and found seeing them again deeply moving. A book has been written
about all the fallen in the village. Rereading it, I was moved remembering I
used to be given sweets by Cecily Odell and Mrs Gray. Both their husbands’
names are on the window. Both were sweet elderly ladies. I never knew the pain
they carried with them into old age.
A
husband that never returned. None of us can know what those men on that window,
on memorials all over the place really went through.
It
is only rediscovering their own personal stories that memories become alive.
They were real people like us. The Imperial War Museum in London and the
imperial War Museum in Salford are both worth visiting if you haven’t. Both are
important places to keep the stories alive.
My Grandad,
Harry Smith was from that little community. He went off and fought in the
Battle of the Somme. He survived it… more about him later.
We remember with gratitude. We remember real people.
Usually on Remembrance Sunday I am in Ore Village.
This morning though I was in Rye which was a huge do. Never seen so many people
with chains round their necks! Over 500 people were at St Marys of all ages,
which was really great. I got to preach to my MP, a new experience. She told me
afterwards, “you are so right!” The most moving bit of this morning apart from
being told “you are so right” was watching over 40 wreaths being laid by all
the communities in Rye, including one from the Kingdom of Norway. I turned to
David Frost the Rector and said “do you always have Norway here?” He hadn’t a
clue who the man was! Then we had children lay little crosses around the war
memorial which one with a name of someone who had fallen in World War One. Last
year after our act of remembrance in Ore I went to lunch at the Miller's Arms.
The veterans in Ore Village invited all the clergy, the councillors and the
police to join them after the service this morning. Sadly only a few police
officers and me accepted the invitation.
The man who did the "when you go home"
line was slightly worse for wear by the time I got to the pub. But it was
important for him to raise several glasses to his comrades!
Let’s think about the two minute silence we took
part in on Sunday and then on Tuesday. I had a meeting in London on Tuesday and
was passing through Baker Street Underground station at 11am. The two minutes
silence in a busy place was very moving. Most people stopped where they were. First
observed on Tuesday 11th November 1919, the first minute to give thanks for
those who survived, and the second minute to remember the fallen. The Times
carried a message from King George V on 7th November where he requested, “for
the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal
activities at 11am on Armistice Day. It was widely observed, the police stopped
traffic, pedestrians stood still, and trains delayed departure or stopped
(unless in tunnels) According to the central switchboard, no telephone calls
were made in London during the silence. The Church Times had an article which
said in no previous two minutes had “so many and so fervent prayers for the
dead been uttered by men’s hearts and lips.
I like what the Times reported about it,
“Thereafter, a new gentleness seemed abroad, people moved respectfully.”
Perhaps that story reminds us about moving on from
remembering – being different.
We remember with thanksgiving. At the going down of
the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.
In August 1914, those who rushed to recruiting
offices were full of pride and patriotism – they saw a cause and were
encouraged to fight to do God’s will and rid the world of evil.
To fight was a duty to sort out the wrong and
it would all be over by Christmas. Churches were full of it being your
Christian duty to go. Once shooting started in the summer of 1914, each of the
major warring powers wound up embracing the language of holy war. This was more
than a little ironic, given that World War I was effectively a civil war among
Christians: With the exception of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, all of the
leading warring nations shared a common religious ideology. Rather than
wrestling with that unsettling irony, however, all sides rushed to condemn
enemy nations as ungodly and to "proclaim fellow believers as de facto
infidels."
Russians denounced Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm as
the Antichrist. German writers equated Britain with the great whore of Babylon
described in Revelation. English bishops informed their countrymen that they
were God's "predestined instruments to save the Christian civilization of
Europe."
The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram was
a very vocal supporter of the war effort. He saw the war as a ‘great crusade to
defend the weak against the strong’, and accepted uncritically stories of
atrocities perpetrated by German troops.
In 1915 he toured the western front, in 1916
the Grand Fleet at Rosyth and Scapa Flow, and in 1918 Salonica. His skill at
public speaking made him a successful recruiter of volunteers early in the war,
and he took great delight in his position as chaplain to the London rifle
brigade; later in the war he encouraged his own younger clergy to enlist as combatants.
Everyone that loves freedom and honour he said,
are banded in a great crusade – we cannot deny it – to kill Germans; to kill
them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill them lest the
civilisation of the world itself be killed.
Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, called him “an
intensely silly bishop.” And Methodists were equally controversial. The President of the Primitive Methodist
Conference Arthur Guttery called for young men to enlist declaring, “Our
chapels are not the refuge of dissent, they are the citadels of liberty, and
they train men who will break all tyranny in pieces.”
What was the mood of the nation as war was
declared? Margot Asquith kept a diary while her husband, Herbert, was Prime
Minister. It has just been published. It is worth reading
Even songs expressed the duty over the pain of
separation, initially. Today songs are reissued after a period in a new
context. There was a song written during the previous Boer War, which was very
popular in 1914.
I have come to say goodbye, Dolly Gray,
It's no use to ask me why, Dolly Gray,
There's a murmur in the air, you can hear it
everywhere,
It's the time to do and dare, Dolly Gray.
So if you hear the sound of feet, Dolly Gray,
Sounding through the village street, Dolly
Gray,
It's the tramp of soldiers' true in their
uniforms so blue,
I must say goodbye to you, Dolly Gray.
Goodbye Dolly I must leave you, though it
breaks my heart to go,
Something tells me I am needed at the front to
fight the foe,
See - the boys in blue are marching and I can
no longer stay,
Hark - I hear the bugle calling, goodbye Dolly
Gray.
If you want a good evening out tonight, Calvert
Choir are doing about two hours worth of these songs, 7.30pm – including a
guest soloist – well, you can put your hands over your ears for that bit!
Please come if you would like to. I thought I was only going on the stage to do
my little bit, I have, after choir practice last night, ended up being in the
whole thing! But it was quite a spiritual exercise singing the lyrics of the
songs of the time, imagining who was singing them 100 years ago.
Shortly before war was declared on 4 August
1914 the Labour MP Keir Hardie led an anti-war protest at Trafalgar Square
attended by several thousands of people.
There was little interest for war in the weeks
leading up to the declaration. Yet after war was declared Hardie’s anti-war
stance was reviled and his speeches met with heckling as the country came
together in support for the war effort.
Public attitude towards the war is perhaps best
shown in statistics. Only 16,000 people,
known as conscientious objectors, refused to serve in the army during the war,
four times less than in World War II.
Yet, over two and a half million men
volunteered to fight between August 1914 and January 1916.
Conscientious objectors were often labelled as
‘conchies’ and the rest of the country had little time or sympathy for them.
Those that stayed at home were viewed as ‘shirkers’ or cowards.
This lack of sympathy was perhaps
understandable, especially from people who had just lost relatives at the
front. Indeed many volunteers were motivated by the sense that if men were
needed to win the war, why should they stay, while others fought for them?
Clement Attlee, future Labour leader, reflected
in his memoirs that ‘it appeared wrong to me to let others make a sacrifice
while I stood by.’
This sense that those who refused were harmful
to the war effort increased negative feeling towards objectors. Up before a
conscription tribunal in Oldham an objector was described as ‘a deliberate and
rank blasphemer, a coward and a cad, and nothing but a shivering mass of
unwholesome fat’. God had already been conscripted.
Soldiers killed fighting in the war would, in
the words of one German pastor, be promoted from lower to higher service.
Suffering, sacrifice, redemption were words much used in the early war years to
justify it.
David Lloyd George, later to be Prime Minister
on the resignation of Asquith, declared “the stern hand of fate has scourged us
to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things which matter for
a nation – the great peaks we had forgotten of honour, duty, patriotism, and
clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a
rugged finger to heaven.”
The
mood soon changed as the war went on and on and stories of death and carnage
and despair were heard. William Temple, then the Bishop of Manchester and later
Archbishop of Canterbury, said “in a world gone pagan, what is a Christian to
do? For the world has gone pagan. Members of the body of Christ are tearing one
another, and his body is bleeding as it once bled on Calvary, but this time the
wounds are dealt by his friends. It is as though Peter were driving home the
nails, and John were piercing his side.”
Pope
Pius X was so worried by the opening battles of the war it is thought the worry
contributed to his death on August 20th 1914.
His
successor, Benedict XV appealed throughout the conflict for peace. He condemned
“the appalling spectacle of this war that has filled the heart with horror and
bitterness.” War was to him “the bane of God’s wrath.”
One
helpful book I discovered in my reading has been “The Great and Holy War” by
Professor Philip Jenkins. He writes about the supernatural on the battle field.
He writes about the “Comrade in White”, a figure who appeared in the worst of
the battle to assist wounded and dying soldiers, in no mans land. Was the
Comrade Christ or an angelic figure? Christ extending his aid to human fellow
sufferers who shared his Calvary. The Comrade was understood to be a comfort to
soldiers who dreaded being abandoned to a lonely death.
I
lived in West Sussex before I came here in 2012, and served Steyning, a
beautiful town below the South Downs. Above Steyning in Chanctonbury Ring, and
there is a lane to walk to get to it which I walked a lot. There is a stone on
the lane erected in the year 2000. The words on it are a poem written by a
soldier in a trench half an hour before going over the top. Letters and
thoughts of home were written to loved ones, the mind went back to calm and
peace and better times. This poem was first printed by the Daily News in June
1916. The name of the poet was given as Philip Johnson. A young officer in the
5th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment serving in France.
“I
can't forget the lane that goes from Steyning to the Ring
In
summer time, and on the downs how larks and linnets sing
High
in the sun. The wind comes off the sea, and oh, the air!
I
never knew till now that life in old days was so fair.
But
now I know it in this filthy rat-infested ditch,
Where
every shell must kill or spare, and God alone knows which.
And
I am made a beast of prey, and this trench is my lair -
My
God, I never knew till now that those days were so fair,
And
we assault in half-an-hour, and it's a silly thing:
I
can't forget the lane that goes from Steyning to the Ring.”
Perhaps
the best person to turn to is the Rev Geoffrey Studdart Kennedy at the end of
my reflections. He was a chaplain at the front, who become known as Woodbine
Willie, for comforting the soldiers and handing out cigarettes to them.
I
leave you with this story from his writing “The Word and his Work” – his views
on the war changed dramatically as he witnessed the sights around him and he
resolved to live differently.
In
1917, he saw a boy’s body in a wood and he thought “what is this to do you?”
He
later wrote, “It seemed to me that the boy disappeared and in his place there
lay the Christ upon his cross and cried “inasmuch as ye have done it unto the
least of these my little ones, ye have done it unto me.”
From
that moment on, I have never seen the world as anything but a crucifix. I see
the cross set up in every slum, in every filthy overcrowded quarter, in every
vulgar flaring street that speaks of luxury and waste of life.
I see him staring up at me from the pages of
newspaper that tells of a tortured, lost bewildered world.” Christ is with us
even in the mess of war and in sacrifice.
One
of his meditations on ‘God and Prayer’ begins by evoking a scene in the
trenches: ‘I wish that chap would chuck his praying. It turns me sick. I’d much rather he swore like the
sergeant.’ So is prayer useless? Is God truly absent and powerless? Studdert-Kennedy simply answers that prayer
won’t save us from suffering any more than it saved Christ from his cross.
But
it is the only thing that makes us able to fight against evil in the only way
that will actually transform the situation as Christ did – by selfless
compassion, with all the risk that carries.
In
all his work, in his sermons, his meditations, his astonishing poems, so many
of them cast in the voice of the ordinary soldier in the trenches, full of
protest and apparent blasphemy, Studdert-Kennedy argues against the bland
problem-solving God. His commitment is to the God who is discovered in the
heart of your own endurance and pain – not a solution, not a Father Christmas
or a fairy godmother, but simply the one who holds your deepest self and makes
it possible for you to look out on the world without loathing and despair.
In
a lecture on Studdert-Kennedy, Rowan Williams says this: “Shocking and stark as
it was, the way Studdert-Kennedy talked and wrote was pretty well the only
religious response that was at all credible to those who were living through
the daily nightmare. And this may
explain just a little how those who did come through were able to find some
deep foundation for surviving the rest of the century with courage and a kind of
faith. In the heart of the terror and
butchery, they had found that they were still there – they were real to
themselves and each other; and if there was any God, he was what helped them be
real in that darkness. Maybe the simple
fact of being real was what kept that generation faithful and more than
faithful, creative and brave in a century of yet more darkness.”
I
wonder what Grandad, Harry Smith, and his mates were thinking as they set off
over 100 years ago, into the unknown.
I
wonder what people have been thinking this last week as they have gathered
around war memorials and have laid poppy wreaths.
As
the last episode of the Passing Bells, which was on the BBC every night the
other week said, “I wonder what they will make of this 100 years on.”
Let’s
now bring in another Methodist into this reflection. Donald Soper was only 11
years old when the First World War began. His Sunday School immediately
prepared and performed a patriotic pageant. Stirring martial hymns were
regularly sung. At weekday school ‘I was very soon drafted into the cadet
corps, issued with a uniform and a wooden rifle, and required to polish brass
buttons as a preparation of drill every Wednesday’.
Donald
Soper remembered his confidence in what he believed was ‘the unconquerable
power’ of Britain, and how putting on his cadet uniform gave him a personal
sense of that power. ‘No-one suggested to me even the possibility that the
power of conducting mass violence did not necessarily confer moral approval on
its practice.’
He
first began to think critically about war and violence after he had trained as
a bayonet-fighting instructor for his school’s cadet corps in 1918. At first he
saw it as a splendid sort of ‘knightly prowess, involving skill, guts and
spirit’.
But
then he began to grow uneasy about what it meant in real terms. When he went to
Cambridge University in 1921 to study history, he concentrated on one of his
first loves: sport. At school he had excelled at boxing, cricket, football and
swimming.
At
Cambridge he concentrated on cricket - and many of his fellow players were
young men who had fought in the recent war and carried its scars and disablements.
‘I began to hear at first hand the realities of war....
The
martial exercise I had enjoyed became part of an obscenity of which I was
ashamed.’ What’s more, he began to see that ‘War was not only a filthy
business, it was an unintelligent one’.
‘Peace on earth,’ on the other hand, was
entirely reasonable. It was a cricket match that brought home to Donald Soper
just how important it was. A ball he bowled hit the batsman above the heart,
and the young man died instantly. Donald Soper never forgot this tragedy. It
was indeed, he said, ‘traumatic to be responsible for killing someone’ even
unintentionally. For a while afterwards he suffered badly from depression and
also experienced doubts about his religious beliefs.
And
what of afterwards? What happened after the war?
For
some there was great thanksgiving, like in Thankful Villages.
A Thankful Village was said to be one which
lost no men in the Great War as all those who had left to serve 'King and
Country' came home again. I found one while on holiday in Rutland. In Teigh,
twelve men went from the village, twelve returned. Out of 16,000 villages in
England, 24 were named by the historian Arthur Mee as thankful villages.
Most
communities in this country were blighted with loss and bereavement. For many
returning soldiers, the world had changed and many faced unemployment and
uncertainty. The class system had changed as well, and the role of women in
society for the better.
My
Grandad never talked about his experiences until much later. The majority of
those who saw indescribable things came back with little support, indeed many
of them were unemployed, society had changed in their absence. On his Diamond
Wedding in 1979. Only then did I discover a bullet at the Somme went through
Grandad and out the other side. He was perhaps lucky, but he lived with the
pain of it all for the rest of his life.
What
about those who never saw their loved ones again? There emerged a great
campaign to have some sort of permanent memorial. The tomb of the unknown warrior
in Westminster Abbey became a symbol for people to remember – it could have
been any of their loved ones I guess. The inscription is very beautiful:
BENEATH
THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY
OF
A BRITISH WARRIOR
UNKNOWN
BY NAME OR RANK
BROUGHT
FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG
THE
MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND
AND
BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY
11
NOV: 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF
HIS
MAJESTY KING GEORGE V
HIS
MINISTERS OF STATE
THE
CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES
AND
A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION
THUS
ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY
MULTITUDES
WHO DURING THE GREAT
WAR
OF 1914-1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT
MAN
CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF FOR GOD FOR KING AND COUNTRY FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND
EMPIRE
FOR
THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND
THE
FREEDOM OF THE WORLD
THEY
BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD
DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD
HIS
HOUSE.
And
then, of course, there were the men who returned and who feared the future.
Where was God in it, through it, and after it? How does God sustain you after
tragedy? I find these words from All Quiet on the Western Front very moving.
Remember that was a German book, and it was banned in 1933. What is war for,
and what happens after it? In that book a soldier, towards the coming of the
Armistice worried that we might all forget one day. “If we go back now we shall
be weary, broken down, burnt out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no
longer be able to cope. No one will understand us – because in front of us
there is a generation of men who did, it is true, share the years out here with
us, but who already had a bed and a job and who are going back to their old
positions, where they will forget all about the war, and behind us, a new
generation is growing yup, one like we used to be, and that generation will be
strangers to us and will push us aside. We are superfluous even to ourselves,
we shall grow older, a few will adapt, others will make adjustments, and many
of us will not know what to do – the years will trickle away and eventually we
shall perish.”
At
the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them.
And
what of us 100 years on?
I
was moved by the editorial in the Church Times of 7 November. “The numbers of
dead and injured were so vast, the impact on whole nations so great. In 1915,
the nation did not mourn the dead of the Battle of Waterloo, 100 years earlier.
Total casualties suffered by both sides in 1815 were 47,000. The British alone
lost 60,000 in one day on the Somme. The installation at the Tower of London
works because it reminds spectators of the great cost in lives. Acts of
remembrance help to ensure that disregard for human life on such a scale will
never recur.”
Perhaps
100 years on we need to finish with some Siegfried Sassoon. This is a poem
called “Have you forgotten yet?” Sassoon was an officer whose views on war
changed as the thing went on.
He
sent a letter to his commanding officer entitled Finished with the War: A
Soldier’s Declaration. Forwarded to the press and read out in the House of
Commons by a sympathetic member of parliament, the letter was seen by some as
treasonous "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military
authority" or at best as condemning the war government's motives "I
believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation
has now become a war of aggression and conquest”
Rather
than court-martial Sassoon, the Under-Secretary of State for War, Ian
Macpherson, decided that he was unfit for service and had him sent to
Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was officially treated for shell
shock.
Have
you forgotten yet?
For
the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like
traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And
the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like
clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking
your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But
the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have
you forgotten yet?...
Look
down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.
Do
you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The
nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do
you remember the rats; and the stench
Of
corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And
dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do
you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'
Do
you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And
the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As
you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do
you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With
dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks
of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have
you forgotten yet?...
Look
up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.
Almighty
Father, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of
all: govern the hearts and minds of those in authority, and bring the families
of the nations, divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin, to be subject to
his just and gentle rule; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the
Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
God,
our refuge and strength, bring near the day when wars shall cease and poverty
and pain shall end, that the earth may know the peace of heaven through Jesus
Christ our lord. Amen. Common Worship
Shorter Collect.
Eternal
God, in whose perfect realm no sword is drawn but the sword of justice, and no
strength known but the strength of love: guide and inspire all who seek your
kingdom, that peoples and nations may find their security in the love which
casts out fear; through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.
