This morning I am going to do something which I have never done before in this church and probably will never do again. I am going to read to you the sermon which my late husband Alex wrote and preached on Remembrance Sunday several years ago. I have made no changes to the original, though there are some things which now are distinctly out of date.
This is not laziness on my part. In this sermon, Alex says all that I could want to say, and he says it far better than I ever could. When I heard him preach this sermon, I was moved to tears. It still moves me deeply, and I hope that I can get through it without choking.
The first two paragraphs of his sermon relate to an incident which took place during World War 1 on a train in Surrey. But it could just as easily have taken place at that time on a train in Scotland. Please remember that.
And above all, recall Alex’ repeated exhortation to all of us to remember, and not to forget.
Remembrance Sunday sermon
In July 1918 the General Manager of what was then called the Southern Railway received a letter of complaint. A husband and wife had been travelling on a train from London Waterloo to Bournemouth for their summer holiday. They complained that the first part of their journey had been spoilt by the conduct of a passenger in the same compartment. She was a middle-aged woman whose behaviour, they said, was noisy, hysterical and distressing. A man was accompanying her who, they said, made little effort to control her loud, disruptive and unrestrained behaviour. When they got out at an intermediate station to move to a different carriage, the guard had been summoned and told that it was his duty to prevent drunk and disorderly behaviour. The names and addresses of all concerned had been taken and an enquiry was held.
The General Manager received the following reply to his letter of enquiry:
Dear Sir, I was accompanying my sister Margaret on the train from Waterloo on the day in question. She and her husband had five sons. Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914 she was widowed, as her husband was involved in an accident at work. By 1917 four of her five sons had been killed or had died of injuries: three on the Western Front and one in the Royal Navy. One month ago she learned that her fifth son had also been killed in France. As a result of this she had a breakdown, lost her reason, and has been certified as insane. I was accompanying her to the Asylum at Brookwood where it is likely she will remain for the rest of her life. I am sorry if her behaviour caused offence to other travellers and hope that they will understand the reason. Yours faithfully, Thomas Grant.
Our first task on Remembrance Sunday is always to Remember and not to Forget. To remember with honour and thanksgiving those who gave their lives in the catastrophes of the First World War of 1914-1918 and the second World War against the evils of Nazism from 1939 to 1945. To remember with honour and thanksgiving those who lost their lives in other conflicts since then, such as the wars in Korea, in the Falklands, in the Gulf and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we should also remember those who lost their lives while striving to maintain order and sanity between irreconcilable factions in Northern Ireland.
The freedoms and the lifestyle which we enjoy and take for granted were won and preserved at a quite monstrous cost of human life and suffering. That suffering took many forms and afflicted the life of millions. There is no memorial to that mother who, after the death of her fifth son, went out of her mind and spent the rest of her life in a locked ward in Brookwood Asylum. Broken hearts don’t show. With the loss of life went a weight of bereavement and grief which can never be quantified. There is no memorial to the millions of broken hearts.
One of the saddest images from the First World War is that of a group of parents, fathers and mothers, attending an Armistice Day service in 1920. They are all proudly holding up their sons’ medals – and tears are streaming down their faces. It is to the credit of the media that, as day by day we are given the names of those who have lost their lives serving in Afghanistan, so we are made aware of the grief caused to their families.
As part of our remembering – and quite rightly – more and more people are nowadays visiting the enormous cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Europe and elsewhere throughout the world. As you walk between the long rows of carefully maintained headstones, you are oppressed by the reality of unlived lives, of talents and potential unfulfilled. Here lie not only the bodies of young men but of all that, in their lives, they might have achieved, in home and family, in business, industry and public service, in works of art and music and science and in the finding of cures for what are still for us incurable diseases.
Remembrance is not just the remembrance of those who died. It is also to remember the human implications of their deaths.
If our first task on Remembrance Sunday is to remember those who gave their lives, our second task is to remember, and not to forget, what the reality of war actually is. Hollywood used to make it all seem very gallant and glorious: John Wayne and the US Marines storming to victory to the sound of trumpets. In more recent years Hollywood has come a lot closer to the truth.
The actual reality of war is indeed courage, unselfishness, commitment to a cause, dedication, laughter, unforgettable comradeship, brass bands and splendid uniforms. It is also squalor, stench, muddle, boredom, fear, injury, pain, terrifying and cruel death, bereavement and loss. I nearly added the words “and waste”. But those men of the British Army who rescued starving inmates from the concentration camps of Belsen and Dachau were in no doubt at all that cleansing our world from the evil of Nazism was no kind of waste.
The historian Arnold Toynbee in his autobiography pointed out that war is the creation of man and it is our task to control it before it destroys us. And in an age when nuclear and biological weapons are in the hands of ruthless fanatics in the grip of perverted religion, war remains by far the worst threat to the survival of humanity. All the religions of the world affirm living together in harmony and cooperation as an absolute divine imperative, but the Creator and Sustainer of our universe leaves us free to live harmoniously or to destroy ourselves. A poet of the First World War wrote these words:-
Here dead lie we
because we did not choose to live
and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is
And we were young.
As we move onwards in the 21st century, and as we recall the sacrifice of those whom we remember this day, perhaps, while there is yet time, humanity will grasp the saving truth of those words spoken on a Galilean hillside 2000 years ago: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God”.
