Remembrance Sunday 2018
I want to begin by recounting two
very different memories of Armistice Day.
The first is a letter home sent by Jock
Crawford, an officer who had served all four years of the war on the Western
Front. Years later he would become the father in law of Diana Allison, whom
many of you remember fondly and who lived until earlier this year just across
the street in Glanville Road
He writes (it’s a long letter, so
I’m quoting just part of it): -
“My
dear Mother,
How
can I possibly express my feelings! I never dreamt that I would live to see
this day. Yesterday I was the first British Officer to come into a town of
15000 in Belgium – I was kissed by everything between nine and ninety and
taking it alround it was most harassing. The civilian have gone mad…Needless to
say the troops got pretty ‘happy’ last night so I was kept busy seeing they
kept quiet and never had a single drink!...My men are all decked up with the
inevitable three colours Red, Yellow, Black (NOTE). Love to Mrs Wallis (NOTE) –
I cannot help but think how hard it must be for her with the thought of the one
who will never return.”
The second is the memory of Ruby
Ord who was serving in France
“I think it was a bit of an anti-climax.
Suddenly you thought about, you see, all the people you had known who were
killed, etc. They were just in the war zone, and they could come home in your
imagination. But the Armistice brought the realisation to you that they weren’t
coming back, that it was the end. I think that it was not such a time of rejo icing
as it might have been. You were glad the fighting was over and that not more
men would be killed. But I do think it was dampened down very much, in France England
Joy and Relief and Sadness and Exhaustion all mingled together must
have been a common feeling one hundred years ago.
I wanted to begin with these
stories because in many ways this is a day that belongs to Jock Crawford and
Ruby Ord and the many millions who lived through those four years, those who
served and those whose lives were affected by the Great War; those who had the
stories to tell, and, on this day which bears the weight of remembrance, those
who never returned to tell them.
And incidentally, if you haven’t
already done so, please do go down to the Village Hall after we have finished
here and spend time at the exhibition put together by Tim
Moreman . For there are plenty more stories told there – of
those who died far too young and of those who lived on and were changed.
There is another reason for
emphasising the idea of story. It is because who we are is fashioned by the
stories that we tell about ourselves. The story of those four brutal years that
changed so many of the old certainties and the struggle twenty years later
against National Socialism, together
with the heroism and the cost that this brought out has become part of our
national consciousness. It has become a story owned by us all, not just by the
participants. The fact that we continue to tell these stories long after memory
has become history is evidence enough of that.
For there is a connection between
our self-identification as members of particular communities and the stories we
tell about the past. I am who I am partly because I am a member of a country
that has a particular story to tell about those four years and about those six
years. It is by the things that we remember, and the way that we remember them,
and by the things that we fail to remember, that we identify ourselves as
belonging to this or that group. What we remember, or do not remember, moulds
our reactions and our behaviour towards others at a deeper level than that of
conscious reflection.
In itself it is quite natural and
proper that that the various groups and societies we belong to should be
characterised by their own particular myths and stories – that the story of Britain France Germany
So this morning is quite properly a
service of thanksgiving for this day, a day which has come to be a symbolic
representation of all the relief and euphoria brought out by that end to an
epic conflict and the cost which it involved.
At the same time we make our Act
Commitment in the hope that never again will the different stories that
different communities tell be allowed to divide us to the extent that they
divided Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey from France and Great Britain and her
allies. At another time of great upheaval and uncertainty in Europe ,
we commit ourselves to our own ongoing stories that recognise our differences
but will not allow them to become divisive again.
For when we assemble to give thanks
for the Armistice we cannot but remember also the catastrophe that Europe
suffered while that victory was being fashioned. The figures are familiar and
easy to reel off – 20 million dead across all theatres, half of those
civilians, the world’s first genocide in Armenia
That is, to an extent, why I wanted
to choose a bible reading that is full of hope. For services of remembrance and
commitment such as today can only have any real and long lasting value if they
impinge on how we go about our lives in the future. We heard from the last book
of the bible and a passage that is often read at funerals – another occasion
that bears the weight of both remembrance and hope. And the book of the
Revelation of John is most certainly about the future. It is about the end of
all things. The author looks forward to that new Jerusalem, to nothing less
than the kingdom of God
