Remembrance Sunday 2021

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Heb 10:11-14, 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”  British foreign secretary Edward Grey’s most famous words,  as the lights on Whitehall were extinguished on 3rd August 1914,  after Britain declared war on Germany. Just a year before George V, Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany met in Berlin at the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter.  It was the last time the three cousins met. 

The nineteenth century had seen Europe coming together. In 1800 Europe contained 500 political powers; by 1900 it was just twenty. Britain owned a quarter of the world’s land, Russia covered one sixth of it.   Great empires, the Romanov dynasty’s Russia, the Hapsburgs’ Austria-Hungary, Kaiser’s Germany, and the Ottoman empire were in ruins by 1918.  In 1914 there were three republics in Europe.  By 1918 there were thirteen. It’s hard to comprehend the devastation felt by the end of the war. 65 million combattants. Nine million were killed, eight million held prisoner, twenty-one million people wounded.

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Seismic historic change; but what are we remembering for? I once asked a primary school assembly,  “How many of you remember the First World War?” You’d be surprised how many chubby little hands rose in the air.  Children will put up their hands for anything.  But actually here they’re right.  They do remember the War; because every year, as a nation, on Remembrance Sunday we all remember it.  And very visibly by wearing poppies.

We are one of the few countries that has a non complicated relationship with it.
Most of Europe got overrun; then there are those who were defeated, and many have difficult moral questions to ask themselves; Russia pulled out halfway through, and of course Italy is forever changing sides. 

We don’t remember it, though, because we were on the winning side;  We remember it because of the worldwide grief that followed. We remember because, as they say, ‘Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’. Today’s readings, which touch that frequent biblical subject of the apocalypse capture something of what 1918 Europe would have felt when examining its broken and bankrupt reflection in the mirror.  ‘what large stones and what large buildings!…Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’ ‘There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.’ ‘nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.’ And all the images of brokenness that follow must have spoken to countries full of young widows, Vienna where there were no cats left because of a starving population, levelled cities;  and where a grieving, miserable and worn out generation was then overrun by thirty million deaths in 1919 from Spanish flu. Something we can now relate to.

The apocalyptic is also notable for coming by surprise. But, all the same, it’s somewhat surprising that in August 1914 Dean Inge of St Paul’s wrote in his diary of how people had three things on their minds:  ‘their summer holiday, the danger of civil war in Ireland and the abominable outrages of the suffragettes.’ We have become used to the idea that war was inevitable —  but it didn’t seem so at the time. We also remember, then, because peace in Europe cannot be taken for granted. Aside from the political changes, it can hardly be surprising that this confrontation with poverty, mortality and human evil and suffering, forced social change. Our own brushes with mortality usually have the most profound influence on our direction. The public experience of death upturned the staid morals of Edwardian England.

But it’s often assumed that soldiers returned from the dreadful carnage atheists to a disillusioned nation.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Studies of the war and religion show that if anything war returned soldiers with greater piety.  Church attendance steadily increased after the war and through the 1920s. It’s striking how many, Christian or not, spoke of the presence of the ‘White Comrade’ on the battlefield, and the amount of poetry given to finding a common language for the soldiers’ experience and Christ’s passion;  One soldier wrote that in the trenches Christianity had ‘stooped from the sky… It had become incarnate’.  You still hear repeated today the First World War aphorism:  ‘there are no atheists in the trenches’.

For the most part, though, the lasting impact of the war was the relaxing of ‘respectability’.  Binge-drinking soldiers became a problem so drinking hours were shortened and tax on beer increased.  By 1918 illegitimacy rates had also increased by 30%, as Padre Tom Pym remarked at the time: ‘gonorrhoea is a minor discomfort compared to wounds or death cheerfully faced in battle, and is much more pleasurably obtained’.  And the war changed people. One soldier alarmingly remarked: “We’re trained up as murderers — I don’t dislike it, mind you —and after the war we shan’t get out of the habit of it.’

Women also were called in to work to replace all the men from factories and farms who had gone out to fight. Afterwards, to everyone’s surprise, they continued to want to work, and even to vote. The war also, of course, brought socialism to Russia. It could easily have had more of an impact in Britain but, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings’.

But war increased solidarity; it brought communities together; And on our doorstep here we have a great example of homes being built for heroes; We remember today that war sometimes, personally and nationally, can bring out the good.

It’s a dangerous thing to live in a time when wars are only fought far away, and death is kept in hospices and hospitals largely out of sight. This has not recently been our reality — we have become used to daily death tolls, and anyone who went up to Putney Vale last year will not forget the sight of temporary morgues. Remembrance Sunday this year reminds us again of the fragility of life.

But what is most incredible about the British Army of 1914-1918 is that for the first two years they were all volunteers.  Two and a half million, half the total who fought, the second largest volunteer army in history. They were not professional soldiers; But quickly trained and poorly equipped. They fought because they believed in the cause and because they felt it was their duty. In 1916 it was reported that more Church of Scotland ministers were serving as combatants than as chaplains. The Bishop of London claimed that ‘khaki is the garment of the faithful’. It would not happen today, even with a much larger population —  Can you imagine our country agreeing to go to war for the sake of Brussels?

But this day is one way in which we can remember and be inspired by the sense of duty, along with the courage of that generation. We can empathise with all those ordinary people who suffered and witnessed horror. It should remind us to work and pray for a more stable Europe. It’s a time to remember the dire cost of political greed and foolishness; And of the sacrifice of the coming generation by those who should know better.

At the least it should serve to keep those chubby little hands raised in our primary schools in knowledge of what has been done for them and to keep them from the same. Amen.