November 2011

Wandering along row upon neat row of Portland headstones early on a misty late October morning in the ethereal silence that always seems to enfold the vast Tyne Cot cemetery near Ypres, I was startled to hear in the distance the sound of marching and shouted orders. Out of the swirling mist emerged a troupe of armed and helmeted soldiers in First World War battle dress. It was one of those moments when the hairs on your neck stand rigid. Not ghosts, however, but a group of men from many different walks of life who volunteer to keep alive the memory of those whose graves carpet the ground for as far as the eye can see by living for just a week or two in the conditions that those men had endured in the trenches so many years ago.

My mission was to identify the memorials to former parishioners who had died at Passchendaele and whose bodies were never found. It was part of the research that a Reader and local historian in our Church was doing on the lads who never came back. His aim was that each year they should be properly remembered and a permanent record kept in church with as much detail about their all too short lives as possible. More personally for me it was an attempt to understand those cataclysmic events in which my father had found himself caught up as a young Second Lieutenant that left such a deep scar upon the rest of his life.

Remembrance overshadows the month of November and reminds us of the cost paid by so many through the folly of war. It calls us also to support the wonderful work of the Royal British Legion and other bodies that care for the victims of war and the welfare of those who have given, and still give, so much. But above all the fallen are best honoured by our striving with renewed vigour for the cause of peace. The earnest prayer of so many of the fallen was that their sacrifice would mean that future generations should never again have to bear the blood-soaked cost of war.

A little while later on that morning at Tyne Cot a coach party of British school children arrived. The silence was once again shattered by the exuberant shouts and larking about of the youngsters. Part of me was annoyed. My first thought was to shut them up, to remonstrate with their teacher for their failure to show proper respect. But then I thought again of the young men who lay beneath the turf. What would they have made of it all? For only a very few years separated them in age from the visiting school children. And it struck me just how they would have delighted to hear the sounds of those children, their carefree laughter, their disrespectable banter so much like their own. Perhaps the uninhibited freedom of these children of another generation was what it had all been about. Perhaps this made their sacrifice worthwhile. The teacher knew his stuff for as the youngsters gradually dispersed and began to look more closely at the headstones, read the names and the ages of the fallen, took in the scale of it all, the impact slowly dawned on them, and without a word of remonstration they lingered then returned to the coach in thoughtful silence.

I hope we can all find time to reflect on Remembrance Sunday and perhaps come to one of the special services that will be held that day to honour the fallen.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them

Canon Greville Cross