Minister's Message

minister's blog: November 2008 - quietly remembering

Dear Friends

This year our Remembrance Season brings with it a special anniversary. On 11th November it will be exactly ninety years since the day that the First World War ended. Only a very few people will be able to recall that day in 1918, when at 11am the Armistice was signed.

I watched the news report of the soldiers of the 2^nd Parachute Regiment arriving home from their six month tour of duty in Afghanistan. The relief on the faces of family and friends waiting to greet them, and on the Paras themselves, was tangible. That particular tour had been hard on the men with a large number of their fellow soldiers having been killed or seriously injured. A few days later they paraded in their base town of Colchester to attend a memorial service for their fallen comrades.

Unless we are particularly involved, or have close family who are or have been serving in the armed forces in areas of conflict, those of us who are younger will have no real idea of what the experience of being in the forefront of battle is really like. We can only rely on the stories of our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents, many of whom, if they had lived through it, may not want to talk about it.

Hollywood doesn’t help either. Early war films have tended to glamorise war, and only recently, since “Schindler’s List” for example, there have been films released which set out to show the true horror of the atrocities.

As a teenager I well remember reading some of the war poets for my ‘O’ Grade and Higher Exams, and I can still probably reel off some of the lines of their poems from memory, but even then we didn’t get the full extent of the horror that the writers were trying to convey.

In July 2005, my family and I were on holiday in London the week after the 7/7 terrorist bombing (Cherie was on the ‘tube’ that morning, just a few stations behind the train which was blown up, having arrived in London for a training course at Marie Curie Headquarters that day). On the Thursday of that holiday week, exactly seven days after the event, we were visiting the Houses of Parliament and being shown round by our MP, when he asked if we would accompany him to the steps outside where there was to be a two minute silence for the victims. As we stood there with him on the steps, it seemed possible to reach out and touch the quietness, it was so tangible.

A year after the end of the First World War, on 11^th November 1919, the first two minute silence was held in London. This is how it was reported in the Manchester Guardian, 12th November 1919 –

'The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect.

The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition.

Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still ... The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain ... And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.'

As we stand quietly on Remembrance Sunday, either at your nearest War Memorial or in a Church, or wherever you may be, there will be two emotions – joy that for many of us, the world at least around us is at peace, because of what our brave soldiers sailors and airmen have done, and are still doing in many parts of the world; and sadness at the appalling cost in human lives which have been lost or spoiled, not just in the two world wars, but also in the many other conflicts in the world. There are still thousands of victims, and hundreds of heroes, and in any consideration of war we must remember them too, pray for them, and press for solutions to be found.

Let us give thanks for their service, for their sacrifice, and for the freedoms that we can enjoy today because of what has been done for us.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning

We will remember them.”

from “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon (1869 – 1943)

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