Remembrance
Sunday
The world
had been plunged into war when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on the
28th June 1914. Germany
knew that they would need to meet their enemies on two fronts. When the conflict started, the German
military commanders knew that the Russian Army would need to at least six weeks
to mobilise their forces, so they concentrated on their enemies in the west by
launching a strong offensive in France.
The French, Belgian and British forces couldn’t stop them, eventually in
France they forced a stalemate and dug in
for a long winter. Trenches
were dug a few hundred feet apart. Soldiers spent most of their day dealing
with mud and cold, guns jammed and illness was rife. If this
wasn’t bad enough, the trenches were little protection from sniper fire, and
the machine guns on the battlefields were making this conflict one of the
bloodiest in history.
On 17th December 1914, the first Christmas of the
war, Pope Benedict XV called for a temporary truce and ceasefire on the
battlefields. Germany agreed, but
the other powers refused. The war
had been raging for barely five months.
Families had sent packages filled with cigarettes, warm
clothing, gifts and medicines to the soldiers. Some of the German soldiers had also received Christmas
decorations from loved ones. On
Christmas Eve 1914, the German soldiers put candles in Christmas trees and
decorated the edges of the trenches.
Eventually, hundreds of Christmas trees appeared all across the
front-line. British soldiers were
told to watch closely, but not to open fire.
Eventually, the soldiers from both sides joined each other for
football and singing carols. A British soldier Private Oswald Tilley commented in a
letter to his parents;
“They finished their carol and we thought that we ought
to retaliate in some way, so we sang 'The first Noël', and when we finished
that they all began clapping; and then they struck up another favourite of
theirs, 'O Tannenbaum'. And so
it went on. First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would
sing one of ours, until when we started up 'O Come All Ye Faithful' the Germans
immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words 'Adeste Fideles'. And I thought, well,
this was really a most extraordinary thing - two nations both singing the same
carol in the middle of a war.”
Tilley continues his letter;
“This experience has
been the most practical demonstration I have seen of ‘Peace on earth and
goodwill towards men.”
Tilley even empathised with the German soldiers, “We hated their guts when they killed any of our friends; then we
really did dislike them intensely … And we thought, well, poor so and so’s,
they’re in the same kind of muck as we are.” He concludes his letter “It
doesn’t seem right to be killing each other at Christmas time.”
The singing from the trenches eventually turned into something
completely different, as soldiers disobeyed their superior officers and
fraternized with the ‘enemy’, along two-thirds of the Western Front, the 450
mile line of trenches, machine gun nests and barbed wire between the sandy
dunes of the borders of Belgium and the Swiss border.
When news of this reached
the high command it was decided that action needed to be taken. Popular urban legend would have it that
the soldiers stopped fighting to play football, returning to battle the next
day. This was not the case,
soldiers declared their solidarity and refused to fight. On both sides, generals declared the
spontaneous peacemaking as ‘treasonous’ and ‘subject to court martial’. It did however take until March 1915 to fully suppress the
fraternization. The War continued,
and by 1918, fifteen million people had died.
Then 93 years ago - On the 11th
hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 the guns
fell silent and the First World War officially ended.
There was great rejoicing, and
celebrations began, but for many people their lives had been devastated
seemingly beyond repair.
Eventually in 1921 after many calls for the dead and seriously injured
to be remembered the first Armistice day parade was held.
So where was God?
In St Paul’s 1st
letter to the Thessalonians he wrote, "The day
of the Lord is coming, when the heavens will open up and we will see Jesus
Christ descending through the clouds to be with us once again, for evermore. He
will come to gather us up to be together - the living and the dead - and to be
in God's Kingdom. Until that time, take heart, have hope and never stop
encouraging one another."
In other parts of the Bible the
kingdom of God is spoken of as a place of peace and justice. We are told that
God's kingdom will be one in which there will be no war and no suffering. It will be a place where everyone has
enough to eat and drink and a roof over their heads. No one will be a slave to another. There will be no subservience. No one will be oppressed,
persecuted or marginalized.
That is the time toward which
Paul and the early Christians were looking. In the face of pain, the coming
Kingdom was the image that gave the people hope, and reminding people of that
image encouraged the people of Thessalonica to carry on in the face of great
suffering.
In an odd kind of way, I like to
think that the Kingdom of God, was with those brave men in the trenches at
Christmas 1914. They, through the
death and destruction, the suffering and the pain, had created a little piece
of the Kingdom of God, and it shone like a beacon to justice, compassion and
forbearance. It was created in the
simplest of ways, sharing the little they had and enjoying company.
As we reflect on the suffering
and death caused by wars, and give thanks for the freedom for which so many
have died, I like to think that in some ways those who went off to war believed
in a vision of the Kingdom of God.
It might sound odd, but I like to think that those who were lost in the
great battles of the last century, and in the conflicts that have marred this
century, haven’t died in vain, they paid with their lives for the vision of a God’s
Kingdom. A vision of a world that
is a better place for all God’s children
But, as wars continue to rage,
and sons and daughters are sent to war the world is a very dark and bitter
place.
This Festival of Remembrance each
year puts an enormous amount of moral responsibility upon world leaders, those
who make the decisions about sending people to war, but we have
responsibilities too, albeit on a much smaller scale.
That is why we must never forget,
and that is why it is inevitable that sometimes people will have to go off to
war to fight to preserve these things, but war is never good, and we must pray
constantly and act positively to ensure that peace prevails in our hearts and in
the hearts of people everywhere.
As we remember those who have
died or suffered trying to build a better world, may we seek the Kingdom of God
in the smallest things.
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