This post isn't a poem, but is the article I wrote for Outlook, the November 2018 Edgehill churches monthly newsletter.
Armistice day - one hundred years on
This year marks 100 years since the end of the First World
War. My great uncle Llewellyn was killed while fighting in France. His younger brother Conway, my grandfather, was
an officer in the army, also in France. He
sent a very sad letter back to his mother saying that his commanding officer
had decided he wasn’t officer material because he wouldn’t swear at his men,
but rather tried to help them. He was about
to be repatriated when he was blown up by a shell and suffered internal
injuries. He was invalided back to England
and was discharged disabled. He then spent four months working as a clerk at
the Ministry of Munitions. On one occasion while walking in Battersea Park with
my grandmother and their baby son, my father, a woman came up to him and gave
him a white feather - the symbol for a coward.
Conway was unhappy working at a
desk job and, as the army already had a record of his injuries, he couldn’t
return to the trenches.
So, he
re-enlisted as ground support crew in the Royal Naval Air Service and was
posted to the Mediterranean. After the war, diagnosed as 'shell shocked', he was
rehabilitated through training as a gardener as RHS Wisley.
He was then called to ordination and served
as a priest for the rest of his life. My grandmother was a strong woman, who
coped with the challenges of the early years of her marriage during the war, bringing
up her son alone, without complaint.
But, it can’t have been easy.
And
after Granpa returned home, the physical, emotional and spiritual scars of war
never left him.
On Remembrance Day, we honour and
remember the fallen, and the ultimate price they paid.
But we shouldn’t forget the cost borne by
those who returned from the trenches, and by all who struggled on at home,
waiting anxiously for their return. This year on Remembrance Sunday, a plaque
remembering those who returned to the village after the First World War will be
dedicated in St Peter’s Kineton.
All wars are terrible, costly in
terms of lives lost, suffering, and the repercussions that echo around the
world for years afterwards. We are right to dread them, and to hope for reconciliation
and peace, and an end to all wars. We are right to long that history will stop
repeating itself.
In the Bible, we read of a future
day when, in the presence of God, justice and compassion will flow out over all
the world, a day when armies will
‘beat their swords (or guns)
into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up
sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.’
That day may be far in the
future, but Jesus Christ, who is the bringer of peace, said, "Blessed are
the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God”.
If all of us who long for the peace of the
world do the small things we can to bring peace in our own communities, and to
speak out against the devastation of war whenever we have an opportunity,
perhaps we can change the world, one small step at a time.
Revd Dr Beren Hartless
