Readings: Isaiah 2. 3-4, Revelation 21. 1-7
‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ Those familiar words were probably first said by the ten year old George Llewellyn Davies. He said them to JM Barrie in one of the author’s conversations with George and his younger brothers. The words were repeated by Peter Pan, when he first appeared on the London stage in 1904. Eleven years later George died near Ypres from a gun shot wound in the head. He had just turned 21. Buried in Belgium his name is recorded on the Llewellyn Davies’ family grave stone across the road.
Many of those who joined up in 1914 thought that they were indeed joining an awfully big adventure, and they seem to have done so with remarkable bravado- at least as far as we can tell from the photographs of the period – ‘grinning as if it were all a bank holiday lark.’ (Philip Larkin) DH Lawrence remembered the scenes on Barrow in Furness station – with soldiers kissing their sweethearts good bye and a woman shouting defiantly ‘When you get at ’em, Clem, let ’em have it’ – as the train drew off. This supposed enthusiasm for war was summed up in the sonnets which Rupert Brooke wrote in December 1914. Though he knew that war would be hell – he thought it was a hell he should be part of. He also, like many others on both sides, thought that war would somehow renew an exhausted civilisation.
Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye and sharpened power,
To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
To us it seems tragically ironic that a poet should be thanking God for the outbreak of war. That irony was, however, recognised by some of Brooke’s contemporaries. So the literary journalist JC Squire wrote:
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout,
‘Gott strafe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’
God this, God that, and God the other thing –
‘Good God’, said God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out!’
For some that war put an end to their belief in God, for others faith was all they had to hold onto. Certainly the war changed the face of the Church of England as it changed so much else. But of course the new world that followed it failed to beat it’s swords into ploughshares and another even more terrible war followed 21 years later. Now, however, we tend to look at that second war as somehow more moral than the first even though in that second war there were about 60 million total deaths as opposed to the 16 million of the first war. But we are not here tonight to argue the morality of war. We are here to remember that first world war and to ponder why we should still remember it and all those whose names are inscribed on our war memorials.
Why should we hold this commemoration? Why should that war be on the curriculum of our school’s so that we will go on remembering it? One recent version of the Key Stage 3 curriculum directed students to look not so much at the war itself as at its causes; and that I think is right, though I also think that through poems and novels and diaries, children should know what the war was actually like. But if you look at the causes of that war you begin to think not so much about who was right or wrong but what extraordinarily complex problems faced those politicians – problems which themselves had a long history. And turning from their complex problems to ours may perhaps make us more wary of jumping to rapid conclusions about the conflicts in the Middle East, for example. Our reaction to violent conflict always tends to make us look for heroes and villains, to make a moral audit. And if it is our war then the propagandists have to show us why we are right to fight.
And yet both the gospels and the best known war poets point in another direction. That direction is not necessarily pacifist though some would have it so – and in that first war it was perhaps as brave to be a conscious objector as a combatant. But certainly the gospel and the poets direct us not to dehumanise our enemy; as Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ Or as Wilfred Owen puts it at the end of his poem Strange Meeting, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’
So we commemorate that war and learn about it, in order to explore the common humanity of those involved, and the reasons why those who were made to be friends, slaughtered one another in the hell of the trenches.
Now of course that question ‘Why?’ is only of interest if you believe that we were made for something better; that question is only of interest if you think that the examples of courage and compassion shown in the trenches, signify something essential to our humanity. It is of course possible to believe that human beings are just good or bad depending on the dictates of self interest as part of an otherwise meaningless evolution of the species. But if you don’t think that, then the question about what human beings are for, is important. If we regard the First World War as a tragedy and not just one of those things human beings do, then it must mean we have a vision of what our humanity might be capable of – we have in Christian terms a belief in the kingdom of God – a way of life in which the human potential for great goodness is realised. So if school children are taught something of the complex reasons why the war happened and if they are moved by the great tragedy of that war then it is just possible that they may begin to ask some really important questions about the real nature and purpose of our humanity.
As perhaps no war had done before, that four year conflict made us aware of the horrors we could inflict on one another, and it made us aware of the individuality of all who died in that war and their personal worth. And that is why it became important to inscribe their names on war memorials. And so we continue to remember them. And if we do so, then we are showing a belief in the worth and potential of every human being – we do not think of humanity as a collective or in the mass. And that too is a sign of faith.
And so to answer that question ‘Why remember?’ – my answer is this; remember because the causes of conflict are never simple; remember because we are all related in our humanity and conflict is always tragic; remember because we believe our humanity directs us to hope for something better – for the kingdom of God; remember because we are each of unique value to God and every life lost in war counts; and remember because if we want to learn anything from the past we must depend not on our own ability but on grace. Who we are depends on what we remember, but our remembering must be guided by the grace of God, which alone can give us, in this life, George Llewellyn Davis’ ‘awfully big adventure.’ Amen