One hundred years on

Harold Smith was a Sergeant in the 9^th Brigade, Field Artillery, when he was killed on Friday, October 26, 1917 in Belgium.

John and Elizabeth McGonegal mourned for their son, also called John, a private in the Light Infantry. He was 20 years old when he died on Friday, August 30, 1918, and was buried in France. He was the second one from his village to die in service of King and Country. 

William Robert Muckle, 87^th Battalion, had been killed in France on Saturday, October 21, 1916. His body was never found, lost in the mud and shells of the battlefield.

Sergeant Frederick James – my half-uncle: the eldest of my father’s siblings. In the trenches, he received a letter from home in 1916 from his mother, my granny, which finished with ‘love from brother Don,’ referring to my dad who was just a few weeks old and a brother Fred didn’t know he had.

Four names. Plus millions of others that are now remembered, perhaps, by no one except by those who visit the huge war memorials like the one at Vimy Ridge and who we commemorate at the centenary of the start of the First World War on Monday, 4 August.

The men who returned were not the same people who volunteered following declaration of war in 1914.  For them, the world had changed forever and they had to learn to live with what they had been through. It was supposed to have been so different: soldiers fighting to rid the world of an evil. They were to make the world safe when they entered the Great War in 1914. But those young men had had their idealism challenged and often shattered in the mud and trenches of the battlefields. 

Some of them came from the town where we live or maybe the house we now call home. They looked like us; had the same hopes for life as us.

And neither do we forget also those brave men and women who, because of their principles – including their faith - would not bear arms but served in other ways.

Most of us cannot comprehend the horrors of war.  But sometimes, great loss comes closer to home.  On 11^th September 2001 we saw evil unfold in front of us, committed by the people who crashed 4 civilian jet liners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania. The horror of it and why and how had they taken control of the airplanes and turned them into weapons of destruction; we wonder still and are shaken.

I remember working at my computer and, as so often, having the Internet news running quietly in the background.  I saw the breaking news and then walked to the television where I stood, numb, watching the airliners crash again and again into the towers as the news clips were repeated.

Someone watching those same events, wrote some lines to help deal with what he saw:

I remember the fallen,
those lost in thick black smoke.
I remember the terror-stricken in four planes
Above the earth before the crash.
I am reminded of the fear of those trapped 110 storeys above the ground.
Tears are my prayers.

One hundred years after the beginning of the Great War (the “war to end all wars”), conflict and strife remain in so many places: Ukraine, Syria, Gaza – as well as those many hundreds of ‘little’ wars that simmer just below the threshold of attracting TV news coverage and therefore pass unnoticed by us.

Yesterday, Life & Faith Group – a Friday lunchtime collection of friends and truth-seekers I belong to – had a discussion  about arguments: their causes, their effects and how we as followers of Christ should approach them, given that they are so common to our race. In one sense a little, local argument over something trivial should not be compared to a conflict where people are being injured or killed. Yet each arises from the same causes: fear; frustration; misunderstanding or selfishness.

Jesus told his followers that when they visited a home they should pray peace upon it. We are called to be peacemakers (something that requires effort and activity, not simply standing back and keeping quiet).  We are led to speak the truth, lovingly – meaning not that we should coat our words in sugar but that we should care enough to speak truth even when people won’t want to listen. 

On Monday, 4^th August we commemorate the deaths, injuries and losses experienced by soldiers in the Great War and their families: British, Belgian, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Indian, Australian, New Zealander, Canadian. Oh yes, and German, Austrian, Hungarian and others too.

There will be a lot of sanctimonious talk  by politicians about their 'sacrifice' but life was as precious to them as it is to us. On this day, we are asked to remember. But remembering alone is not enough. We must prevent strife from taking root in us and we should care enough to be peacemakers.

An impressive clergyman

 Studdert Kennedy

There was a time when, to be an impressive clergyman, it helped to have an impressive name. 

To walk from the vestry into the sanctuary in my former church, one strode through a gallery of photographs of my predecessors.  Day after day I would walk under the gaze of the founder of the church, The Rev Augustus Jones, with his Edwardian lamb-chop whiskers.  

Not far from him was The Rev William Thimble Thorpe. Although Mr Thorpe did not sport whiskers, you would have to admit that his name is deeply impressive. Sadly, 60 years after he resigned his ministry, the old greybeards in the church still shook their heads on the rare occasion his name was mentioned.  It turned out that Mr Thimble Thorpe had left under something of a cloud. There were dark mutterings that he had allowed his wife to take paid employment…

My sister’s researches into our own family tree have revealed a remarkably impressively-named clergyman, three generations removed from us: The Rev Theodore Theophilus Pitcher.  In giving him such a God-centred pair of Christian names (God’s gift + friend of God), were The Rev Theo’s parents giving him, from birth, an ever-so-gentle steer towards his eventual vocation?  We may never know.

Some impressive clergymen of the past didn’t always need to be named: their titles were enough.  Throughout my time as a minister I have kept a large grainy photograph of The Rector of Stiffkey above my desk. This has served as a reminder of what happens when a minister goes wrong. He also has a rather fun, rakish stare. Google him – his tale will repay the effort – and spare a prayer for ministers, that they may not end their careers defrocked and killed by a lion in Skegness, as he was.

Anyways, all this is but an introduction to another impressively named, and much more admirable, clergyman of the past who in this anniversary year of the beginning for WW1 ought to be better remembered today. The Rev Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy was an Anglican priest and poet. He was nicknamed 'Woodbine Willie' during World War I for giving Woodbine cigarettes along with spiritual aid to injured and dying soldiers. 

The Rev Studdert Kennedy was awarded the Military Cross during World War I. The citation reads: “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He showed the greatest courage and disregard for his own safety in attending to the wounded under heavy fire. He searched shell holes for our own and enemy wounded, assisting them to the dressing station, and his cheerfulness and endurance had a splendid effect upon all ranks in the front line trenches, which he constantly visited.”

Having been rather gung-ho about the war at its outset, he became a Christian socialist and pacifist as a result of his wartime experiences and, on return to civilian life, wrote a great deal about democracy and the problems of unregulated capitalism and greed.  He finished his career as an industrial chaplain, campaigning for the rights of working people and offering them in the workplace the same selfless spiritual aid that he had given to comrade and enemy alike in no-man’s land.

Which, it seems to me, is pretty impressive.