Abstract
This sermon, preached on Remembrance Sunday 2011 in the Chapel of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, addresses some of the particular conflicts and paradoxes which war, and the commemoration of it as an act of public, annual national remembrance, pose for Christians and Christianity. It considers the often troubling relationship between the ‘big words’ of Christianity – sacrifice, love, body, blood, glory, redemption, for example – and their connections with, or appropriation by, nation states as powerful tools for military or propagandistic ends. It considers, too, some of the implications of the uncomfortable and painful fact that for many serving men war gave them some of their richest and most valued experience, and asks how we square the circle of acknowledging human courage and self-abnegation without glorifying the conflicts which called them forth.
I always think this is one of the most difficult times of the year, this period of national commemoration centred on November 11th, the day when the First World War finally ended, and culminating in Remembrance Sunday, today, with its many services and ceremonies up and down the British Isles, many of them taking their shape and content from this morning’s National Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. It’s a difficult time because it confronts us with so many often powerfully and painfully contradictory emotions and thoughts, some of which become particularly difficult in a Christian context.
By the early 1930s, whether or not the First World War should be commemorated at all, as part of a national act, rather than privately and individually, had become a fiercely contested matter, with many clergy finding themselves under pressure not to hold Remembrance services in their churches. Hostility to such services had many different causes: there were those who thought that remembering that conflict, as a part of an act of institutionalized, official, national observance, kept destructively alive feelings of hatred and bitterness towards the enemy, feelings which inflamed an unhelpful nationalism, and which were seen as fuelling the growing and ever more menacing tensions within an increasingly militarized, increasingly fascist Europe.
Some in the 1930s felt that, on a personal level, such services were an annual disruption to the slow healing work of mourning and grieving, through which survivors struggled to make their way towards some sort of acceptance, some ability to move on and live a life without the men who once gave life so much of its meaning.
And yet others were frankly bored. If you’d been born in 1914, you were only four when the war ended, and by 1932 you were eighteen, already on the cusp of adulthood, and the War was ancient history. Why stay tied to the past when, in so many important senses, it wasn’t even your past? Women still only in their late twenties and early thirties, who had served in the War zone, as nurses or members of the Women's Auxiliary Forces, and who knew that women, like men, were wounded and killed on active service, have recorded their anger, hurt and incomprehension at the attitude of younger women, ignorant or simply indifferent to the losses sustained by those only a few years older than themselves. But, for many of those younger women, the War was just so boring.
Over recent years, we have seen a resurgence, an increasing ‘popularity’ if I may put it that way, for the outward signs of national remembering. Not so long ago, the observance of the Two Minute Silence on 11 November itself, at 11 a.m., the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, had been almost universally abandoned in Britain. Instead, the Two Minute silence was mainly reserved for Remembrance Sunday. Whether or not The Sun newspaper is right in insisting that it was its campaign to reinstate it which saw its return, it is nevertheless the case that, now, on 11 November itself, railway stations, banks, some big retail chains, routinely ‘invite’ passengers and customers, to ‘join the staff’ by remaining silent, and many do.
For the last ten or fifteen years, British troops have again become fighting forces, deployed in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and many have died or been maimed. Their numbers are tiny in contrast with the casualties of the World Wars – but then, as Christopher Isherwood once said to someone questioning whether it was really as many as six million Jews who had perished in the Holocaust, ‘What is it with you? What are you into – Real Estate?’
Television coverage brings us daily – minute by minute if we choose it – reports and images of the consequences of war. And coverage of the repatriations of British dead, and the way in which for years the little town of Wootton Basset has marked them, has also become part of the national consciousness.
And yet, and yet … For people of all faiths and none, War constantly raises agonizing moral conflicts. But those can become particularly acute in a Christian context because so many of Christianity’s ‘big words’ are also constantly present in the language of War and its commemoration. And, as an additional problem, sometimes the reason why both War and Christianity draw on a common language is because aspects of Christianity troublingly appear to share common ground with War. So many of the big words used and made familiar by War – sacrifice, love, blood, battle, might, victory, not to mention life and death – are also embedded in the thought and language of Christianity, whether through the Bible, or hymns and prayers, or, more centrally, at the heart of the sacramental mysteries of the Passion and the Communion Service.
So let us, for example, think for a while about sacrifice.
‘Sacrifice’ is a word so strongly associated in our language and history with War: ‘for those who made the supreme sacrifice’ is a formulation routinely used to describe those who died in combat. Or the notion of ‘the few’, of the Second World War fighter pilots, who suffered an horrific rate of casualties in the protection of the many, as Churchill so memorably declared.
Within a context of Christianity, sacrifice holds a very special place: the religion and its central practices are built around Christ’s ‘supreme sacrifice’ of the crucifixion – a hideous, protracted and ‘excruciating’ [‘on the cross’] death willingly undergone as the price of human redemption. It is not a word to play with, or to debase by overready use.
And it is, of course, always very important to be clear about who's sacrificing what or whom, for what or whom. One short-lived poster of the Second World War, aimed at exhorting the general civilian population to set to and rally round, notoriously read ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory’, and many people were quick to spot the unfortunate though doubtless unintended, implication that the people who were going to be doing the giving weren’t, apparently, the same as the ones who’d be reaping the benefit!
At a much more serious level, during wartime such confusions – who or what is being sacrificed for whom or what – have been frequent, and some of them very horrible. All those white feathers, for example, so prodigally and viciously handed out during the First World War by women who would themselves never be exposed to the danger and suffering they urged upon the men to whom they insultingly gave them.
And so much deeply unpleasant sexual muddle and confusion often going on there, too, which Owen and Sassoon, among others, were quick to see – a pernicious mixture of female excitement at the idea of masculine strength and a female satisfaction at the prospect of that strength destroyed or maimed, men either dead or reduced to the most basic physical, child-like dependency on (usually) female carers and nurses. One famous First World War Poster vividly embodies such an unlovely tangle of emotions. A statuesque, many times larger than life Red Cross nurse, seated, almost ‘in majesty’, with her long official nurse’s head-dress making her look curiously timeless, holds in her arms a miniaturized figure of a bandaged wounded soldier, strapped to his stretcher. The legend below the image reads ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’: here Woman as Mother and Woman as Lover fuse troublingly; but it also suggests that part of the point of bearing a son, perhaps, is to prepare yourselves for the fact that war may claim and kill him as a soldier. And, because behind this image hovers the far more familiar one of the ‘Pieta’, the image of the Virgin Mary cradling in her arms her son, the body of the dead Christ, taken down from the cross, the connection is made between her and all mothers whose sons die violently, and between the meaning of His death and the meaning of the deaths of those who die in War. War itself is implicitly sanctified, and so too is sacrifice, the sacrifice of both those who die and those who mourn.
Connections such as those can make a heady brew, of emotions – some admirable, others pretty murky – and of religious belief, patriotic fervour and a self-valorizing self-abnegation.
Rather unexpectedly, perhaps, depending on your view of him, Rudyard Kipling produced one of the most subtle and disturbing explorations of such a brew in his short story, ‘Mary Postgate’. Here, we encounter a middle-aged governess, a single woman, whose maternal love has been poured out on her boy-pupil who long since left the schoolroom. She is rendered distraught by news of his death in action; and when she is confronted shortly afterwards with a wounded German airman, shot down in England, the savagery and vengefulness prompted in her by her beloved ex-pupil’s death is vented very terribly on this other, young, enemy man.
The story itself is celebrated for the ambiguity of Kipling’s writing – does this really happen or is it the woman’s fantasy, a sort of wishful thinking, an ‘if only’ dream. But whether dream? fantasy or reality, the point of the story is that love may produce hate, that early nurture may trigger present murder, and that a powerful maternity, whether bodily or emotional, may underlie the killing by women of other women’s sons.
A powerful brew, indeed, and some of the finest poetry produced by soldier poets of the Great War springs from the poets’ engagement with the demanding and sometimes toxic confusions such brews may produce. For Owen, as for many combatants of that war –and of many other wars – the wounded, dying, dead Christ becomes a perplexing, often contradictory figure. Christ is, after all, part of a Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost, all of whom are constantly invoked in compulsory Church Parades, and all of whom we ‘know’, whether we’re Allied or Axis Powers, are on Our Side. Was Christ on the side of the ‘Big Battalions’ – the politicians who’d called for war, the military high command responsible for conducting it – or was he down in the mud with the fighting men, one of ‘the poor bloody infantry’… so to speak?
And what sorts of conversations did God the Father have with God the Son when the subject turned to War? Christ’s alignment with soldiers – all soldiers, on both sides – often seemed much clearer to fighting men than his Father’s seemingly rather equivocal position. Owen was not the only poet who sometimes sets Divine Son against Divine Father, just as he also sometimes questions the nature and reputability of the human father–son relation. His Christ is sometimes cheated by his Divine Father, exploited, abused, tortured: and the often battered, shelled and bullet-pocked representations of the crucified Christ, found constantly in France at little wayside shrines and Calvaries, become a rich source of imagery and argument for poems which address such tortuous questions.
At other times both the Son and the Father are cheated, exploited and abused by humans who take their name in vain, impose upon them human failings and desires, seek to co-opt Father and Son for their own human ends. So, for example, in Owen’s poem about Abraham and Isaac, ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, he casts that question on the grandest scale, beginning with the ‘personal’, the Old Testament story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at Jehovah’s behest, then opens the poem out so that it becomes an angry denunciation of the willingness of the World’s Old to sacrifice the World’s Young: Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, And builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him, thy son. Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns, A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
So much of the anger which Owen feels and expresses throughout his work is an anger about love gone wrong. Those who should protect endanger; those who should give take; those who should listen refuse to hear. And love is of course, another very Big Word. Within a Christian context Christians worship a God of Love: ‘Love one another’; ‘Do unto others as you would be done by’; ‘And now abideth Faith, Hope and Love but the greatest of these is Love’.
War has a way of calling into question or overturning what one thought one knew about things, and love is one of the things it often seems to call into question very strongly. There are, after all, so many different kinds of love. Love of man and woman, husband and wife, parent and child, siblings, friends, colleagues, heterosexual love, homosexual love. The intensities of war, the intensity of danger, fear, the prospect and frequent fact of death, the fierce concern for comrades may all foster love, and that love may make possible actions of astonishing altruism and courage, of the sort that make a reality, not just an overfamiliar phrase, of the words ‘Greater love than this hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friend’. Guy Chapman, who served in the First World War and wrote two very fine books about it, writes at one point about the love he came to feel for and to observe in many of those with whom he served. He writes about the two different types of love: that of man for man which he experienced and witnessed during the war, and the very great love he also felt in his long and satisfying marriage to the novelist, Storm Jameson. And, such is his trust in her and in her love for him, he feels able to say that, cherishable though both types of love are, it was the love of man for man which was the stronger and more precious. He was perhaps rather unusual in feeling able to say it so clearly to a woman who may well have felt affronted or rejected (although, as far as we can know, she didn’t), but he’s not unusual in valuing that comradely love so deeply.
And the knowledge that something so fine and precious may come from something as terrible as War takes us into difficult territory: we may, for example, find ourselves trying desperately to adjudicate between the need to distinguish clearly between safe, glorifying, self-excusing, comfortable falsehoods about War, which almost make it seem a blessing in disguise, and having to confront some very uncomfortable truths: for example, that many of those who fought felt they became their best selves under the experience, that they found new capacities, values and truths under the extremity of fear and suffering. And in the Second World War, when aerial bombardment of towns and cities blurred the ancient distinctions between Combatant and Non-combatant, many civilians also found themselves grappling with such paradoxes.
My own father, one of the Second World War’s oldest privates, conscripted just before his fortieth birthday, which was the cut-off date, and who loved my mother deeply throughout their long and happy marriage, would nevertheless often say, rather apologetically in her presence, that his army days, spent fighting in North Africa and Italy, had been the happiest time of his life. (Shades of Guy Chapman.) Such sentiments are very common, as I know from talking to those of my friends whose fathers also served during that war: and what seems to fuel those sentiments is the strong sense of common purpose in extremity, and of the mutual trust and dependency ideally experienced by fighting men: which, in its turn, of course, tends to promote the rueful thought of how very much better it would be if we could in peace time find ways to galvanize and sustain such commendable feelings and relationships. And, disturbingly, such thoughts are also often rapidly succeeded by other extremely unwelcome ones, causing us to wonder, uneasily and unwillingly, if this is indeed something which War makes easier.
It is precisely this sort of consideration which helps to make this time of year so very difficult.
As does our awareness of how frighteningly close the feelings of love and hate are: that it might be precisely because one loves deeply that one is prepared, possibly eager, to kill. So, for example, we might think of Siegfried Sassoon, dubbed ‘Mad Jack’, by his comrades because of the repeated ferocity of his hand-to-hand combat. But Sassoon himself was well aware that he always fought with an added ferocity on those days, or in those weeks, when he felt himself to be avenging the death in combat of individual men whom he had loved.
These are feelings also familiar to Wilfred Owen, at one point Sassoon’s poetic ‘mentee’. Owen would write of the near-transcendental level of ecstatic feeling that he experienced when fighting, and likened himself in those moments to an angel, aflame. Yet another uncomfortable reminder of how much the often bloodthirsty and violent aspects of biblical language and allusion can, sometimes very equivocally, provide the texture of our thought, the content of our imagination, the fabric of our understanding.
There is, of course, an added irony in the fact that Sassoon and Owen, both so often primarily thought of as unequivocally opposed to War and its destruction, were also so familiar with, and swept up in, its powerful and temporarily, at least, pleasurable excitement.
Later, Benjamin Britten would put some of Owen’s poems, especially his ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, at the heart of his War Requiem, written after the next World War, and he would bring Owen’s words into tension with the words of the Latin Requiem Mass. Britten was already a committed pacifist by the early 1930s when he was still only a schoolboy, and he remained one for the rest of his life. Even so, his War Requiem does not manage to keep firmly separate the anti-war passion of the pacifism and the excitement, power and seduction of the ‘Dies Irae’. So, too, his later opera, Owen Wingrave, theoretically another anti-war statement, does not manage to disguise or expunge the sheer bellicosity and belligerence of Owen Wingrave’s pacifism: pacifism, too, may be violent. All war is violent, but not all violence is war: although it may of course, be the precursor to it, and the opera explores those difficult connections.
When we move from a consideration of love as something experienced between individuals to a wider notion of Love as a force, a power, a way of being in the world, War continues to present us with problems. It poses difficult and painful ideas about interconnectedness, individuals who together form a collectivity, in which boundaries between self and other blur or dissolve: something which can be wonderful and lead to acts and achievements far surpassing the possibility of a single person; but which can also lead to hideous and atrocious actions when a communality becomes a mob, individual responsibility is surrendered, and the group commits actions which few of the individuals who make it up would countenance when acting singly. All organized fighting units, whether on the small scale of the platoon or company or the larger units of a regiment, all the way up to a brigade or full army, regularly confront the challenge. Not, perhaps in the heat of battle, but before and often after.
Some seem not to question at all what they may have done, insist they’d do it all again tomorrow, if need be. But some find that rings less true with the passage of the years, and some knew even at the time that they were deceiving themselves. We have plenty of instances of men who went through the First World War, maintaining steadily in public that they felt no cause for regret or compunction but who later, in the 1920s and 1930s, committed suicide, and whose families said the weight of their wartime actions had, in the end, proved intolerable. The conflicting ethical imperatives of the private man and the good citizen soldier in the end proved irreconcilable for such men.
In some senses this is just another formulation of an old and familiar problem: can one serve both God and the State? But when, as so often, God and State seem so entangled, and when the language attributed to God and used of Him is so full of the warlike, separating them can be very hard. ‘The Church Militant’; ‘fight the good fight’; ‘Soldiers for Christ’: the endlessly slippery and unhelpful relation between War as metaphor for spiritual struggle and War as – war.
So, a difficult time of year, this one, and a difficult service.
Christianity, like most of the world religions, is a very ‘remembering’ faith. The Church Year unfolds, with its innumerable feast days and saints’ days, its liturgy and vestments changing during the year, in accordance with the movement through its liturgical seasons. Its central sacrament, the Eucharist, Holy Communion, is a constantly performed act of commemoration: this is my body; this is my blood; eat, drink, do this in remembrance of me. And, etymologically, the very word ‘re-membering’ is of course about bringing back together the things that have been scattered or wrenched apart. To ‘remember’ is ‘to make whole once more’, and remembering that reminds us how important it is that we put the right things together to make a proper whole, not a distorted or grotesquely ill-fitting one where some of the pieces actually belong to something else quite different. And hence, once more, the necessity to try to remember – to commemorate – as truthfully, as accurately, as fully as possible.
Even before the First World War had ended, some of those fighting it were already thinking about and wondering what the War would become, in the minds and memories of those who survived it. They wondered, too, about what sort of sense any of those who had not actually encountered the realities of combat would ever be able to make of it. With remarkable prescience, some of them could foresee the growth of Trench Tourism, guessed accurately that guided tours of the trenches would quickly become Big Business and that although, for some, such tours would be undertaken in a spirit of sad pilgrimage, for others they would be a Tripper attraction, an away break, a holiday that was a little bit different.
Something like this perhaps can be found in an extract from Philip Johnstone’s 1918 poem called ‘High Wood’, site of some of the fiercest fighting of the war. … in the fighting for this patch of wood Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men, Of whom the greater part were buried here, This mound on which you stand being … Madame, please, You are requested kindly not to touch Or take away the Company’s property As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale A large variety, all guaranteed. As I was saying, all is as it was, This is an unknown British officer, The tunic having lately rotted off. Please follow me – this way … the path, sir, please. The ground which was secured at great expense The Company keeps absolutely untouched, And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide Refreshments at a reasonable rate. You are requested not to leave about Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel, There are waste-paper-baskets at the gate.
Although we, presumably, hope that our own ‘revisitings’ of the Great War, and our efforts to see it properly, to ‘remember’ it, are less crude and crass than those, we too encounter similar difficulties in our efforts to negotiate the gaps: between their Then and our Now; between ‘knowing’ – being there, suffering it, living and dying it – and merely ‘knowing about’ it, because we’ve read a lot, we’ve seen the footage, possibly we’ve visited the Western Front and other battle fronts. There is a constant struggle not to falsify – by the imposition of our own anachronistic or partisan ‘readings’ – the experience of those who fought and their sense of what it meant, and why it happened, and what it was for. We have sometimes to remind ourselves firmly that however appalling, possibly meaningless and futile, we find the suffering, maiming and loss of life, we are not entitled to tell those who endured it yet still believed it had been worth it that they were deluded, or victims of false consciousness, or blindly and unthinkingly complicit in someone else’s master plan. We struggle to adjudicate between the many different versions of that war, and subsequent wars, offered by cultural commentators, and historians, and we struggle particularly to recognize our own often unchallenged assumptions: that, by its end, ‘everyone’ agreed, for example, that the First World War had been pointless; and we prefer not to have to acknowledge or take account of more nuanced and unsettling responses of those who fought it, and who never sought to deny its horror, but who also refused to deny that things had come from it which they cherished and which they believed had transformed them, and which they carried into their post-war world.
Some Pacifists in the 1970s understood very well that their loathing of War, and their opposition to it, was only half the story. The other half (and a large part of the reason for their loathing) was their angry compassion for those who’d suffered in war. For them the red poppy was difficult to wear: it seemed far too closely aligned with, and an expression of, the very things they believed made war possible in the first place: nation states defending their not always very admirable interests, for example, or an indecently eager preparedness to let the young pay for the mistakes of the old. And yet, much as such pacifists repudiated War, they did not wish to repudiate the suffering of those who fought it. The white poppy was their attempt to square this difficult circle: how to commemorate and honour the dead without automatically glorifying and endorsing the wider political context of their deaths.
So far I have said a great deal about the First World War, much less about the Second, and made only glancing reference to recent and current conflicts. It seems fitting that the last words should come from a serving soldier. The poem I’m about to read was written in 2009 by James Jeffrey, a thirty-two-year-old Captain serving with the Queen’s Royal Lancers, in Afghanistan, as part of Operation Herrick. It comes from a volume entitled Heroes: 100 Poems from the New Generation of War Poets (Ebury Press, 2011).
As you will hear, the poem is shaped by many of the elements I have been trying to address: service, sacrifice, altruism, the effort to make sense of the apparently senseless, the struggle to put back together again things violently fragmented, the work of memory and commemoration. So here is Captain Jeffrey’s poem. It’s called ‘The Last Supper’. ‘The Last Supper’ A supper when we shared a table Secure beside the bomb-blast walls The ketchup bottle a reminder of home Stands out from many others I remember your humour, the polite bearing, Explaining that insane job with zeal Each day spending hours defusing bombs Lying on dirt tracks, staring through sweat at wires I sat wondering how it must feel Almost asking the unquestionable Might it be a matter of time with the numbers? Perhaps you’d already thought this through. Yet you never deterred in protecting others All the way to where you could not turn back From the blinding hot blast demanding sacrifice Taking away the scruffy cheerful calm Leaving another picture in a morose mosaic
© ‘The Last Supper’ by James Jeffrey; from Heroes: 100 Poems from the New Generation of War Poets, edited by John Jeffcock, published by Ebury Press, 2011. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.