The scars of war run deep.
At 11am on the eleventh of November 1918 the first world war ended; the shelling stopped, the guns fell silent and just over four years of horror came to an end. We are here today to remember that war, that which was lost during it and the hope that came with peace. The war came to an end in November 1918 but its consequences didn’t – the scars of war run deep.
The most obvious scars are the physical injuries soldiers and non-combatants came back with. In Simon Armitage’s poem, Manhunt, we hear the narrator trace the frozen river across her lover’s face, the blown hinge of his lower jaw, the broken collar bone, fractured shoulder blade, punctured lung and broken ribs. Physical injuries might heal but the scars remain, reminders of what took place, and some of these scars are not merely visual but disabilities that will last long after the return from war.
The poem moves on from the physical injuries to the mental ones, the grazed heart, the sweating, unexploded mine buried deep in his mind around which every nerve in his body had tightened and closed. The description “shell-shock” for those who experienced the symptoms of mental injury without a physical headwound came from the early days of World War One – by December 1914 about 10% of officers and 4% of enlisted men were described as suffering from it. Nowadays we’d call it post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD and we’d be surprised if anyone returned mentally unscathed from the combination of physical stresses, injury, the uncertainty of survival and the experience of watching friends and comrades die. When we lay poppies on the grave of the unknown warrior we think not only of those who didn’t come back but those who came back changed. The poem in the front of your order of service says that they went with songs to the battle – I’m not sure about that, but if they did, metaphorically at least, and if they came back also singing then those songs were surely not the same. The scars of war run deep.
Those scars affect not just individuals but families and communities – the towns and villages of Britain had gaps in them in the years after 1918, holes where someone should have been and wasn’t, their inadequate replacement being a line on a war memorial inscribed with too many names for such a small place. I say Britain, but of course it wasn’t just Britain but every country of Europe and towns and villages across the world and it isn’t just the first world war in which young people have gone off to fight and not returned, but every conflict before and since. The focus of our remembrance today is the past – those whose sacrifices gave us our opportunities – but we should also remember the wars of the present, those who face danger and grief today, this week, this month.
Just as an individual’s scars can be mental as well as physical, so the scars of a community can go deeper even than the list of names on the war memorial. War breeds fear and hatred and those things are perhaps even worse than death because they last and they spread and they are what will cause the next war.
“Do not fear,” we heard from Isaiah just now, but it’s not so easy – we can’t just will ourselves not to be frightened when faced with threats, so what’s to be done if fear isn’t a choice but a physical response? I’d like to draw a distinction between being frightened and living in fear and to suggest that whilst we can’t always change the former, there are ways of moving out of the latter. The scars of war run deep – war takes away our hope for the future with lives lost that had been filled with potential, opportunities wrenched away, friendships broken beyond restoration. If we are to mend these hurts – and I am very much suggesting that we should try – then we have to share a hope of something better. That is part of the commitment that we will make later, to live lives full of ambition and to leave behind us a world better than we found it. I find hope in this room – hundreds of us, mostly young, brilliant and kind; from every nation, culture and religion on earth coming together to remember the fallen and commit to a better future. Live in hope rather than fear.
The reading from John doesn’t say “do not hate” – instead it frames the instruction positively “love one another”. We don’t talk about love at Harris Westminster – it’s too difficult to disentangle it from romance and physical affection, neither of which I wish to begin talking about this evening. Instead we speak about kindness, about not being a jerk, about welcoming others, embracing difference and it is these ideas that are being summed up in that one short word, the antithesis of hate. We can’t choose who we fall in love with, but we can choose who to love (which is actually, as an aside, good advice when thinking about long term partnerships, but again, this isn’t the place). We can decide not to hate – following the example of Edith Cavell, whose body was, like that of the Unknown Warrior, repatriated to the UK and given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey. Edith Cavell was a British nurse in Belgium. She was caught helping captured soldiers to escape and was executed for treason. The night before she died, Cavell said “Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.” Her memorial, by the side of the National Portrait Gallery, the finest in London, records these words and about her death says simply Brussels, dawn, October 12th 1915.
It’s hatred to dismiss injury done to others with “they deserve it”, love is when we recognise the shared humanity and say, with John Donne, that any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. We know almost nothing about the unknown warrior except that he shared our humanity. We don’t know if he was fearful, if he hated the enemy, if he smoked, told jokes, had a girlfriend, had a boyfriend. Inasmuch as anyone deserves anything, he deserved to live a full life, have the same opportunities that you do – but instead he died, somewhere on the battlefields of Northern France. Ask not for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for thee.
The scars of war run deep, cracks that cut through society, that lie like unexploded bombs in our minds and our cultures. There’s a question, I think, of whether we do wrong by remembering, whether by returning to the injury we draw attention, stoke bitterness and hate and fear. It’s a question – and it’s one to which I think the answer is no. I don’t think we mend things by pretending that the scars don’t exist – that’s to bury those sweating unexploded mines. There’s a Japanese tradition called Kintsugi in which broken porcelain is mended by filling the gaps with precious metals, gold and silver. The repaired vase is not as good as new – the damage isn’t smoothed over, hidden, ignored – it’s changed, beautiful in a new way. I have tried it at home – with airdrying clay, superglue and gold paint, a modern solution to an ancient problem – and the result is rather wonderful, something that remains as a reminder to me of the foolishness of dropping the thing but which is beautiful in its own way.
Last summer I visited Upper Slaughter, one of the UK’s handful of “Thankful villages” – places that lost nobody in the first world war. It’s a rather strange experience – there’s no war memorial, you see, no need to have somewhere to inscribe the names and so the record of this gratitude is an absence, the lack of a war memorial and just a small plaque on the schoolhouse wall. It would be better if every village was like that, if there was no need for war memorials, but I find it much more meaningful to stop in a village that has one and read those names, or to pop into a graveyard and hunt for the white stone finger that represents a Commonwealth War Grave. Most of these are in the endless rows of the battlefields at Ypres or Amiens but there is often the odd one in a corner where you wouldn’t expect it – particularly close to the coast, I think, the bodies of sailors washed up by the sea. It would be better if there were no war to remember, but there was, so we do.
In France, villages didn’t simply suffer bereavement, some of them were entirely destroyed by the fighting. Six of those have not been rebuilt or absorbed into other communities – they remain as memorials to the destruction, reminders of what happens when we give into the hate that says that the lives of the enemy don’t matter and the fear that tells us to fire first in case we don’t get to fire at all. Those villages are not beautiful in the way of Upper Slaughter, stone cottages, carefully tended fruit trees and a river running through. They’re dead and deserted, cracks in the countryside, but even cracks that aren’t mended with the art of kintsugi can have something to say – cracks that let the light come in. Cracks that show us what we were and want not to be.
They went with songs to the battle – no Laurence, I don’t really think they did. But we go with songs today – we’ve sung one together and finish with another – an opportunity for us all to raise our voices together, not with the perfection of the choir singing the anthem, but with a shared vision of humanity – imperfect, scarred, broken and pieced back together, rough in places, sore in others. Today we remember those scars, those cracks; we see ourselves in the light they let in; and we commit to live lives not of hate but of love, not of fear but of a shared hope.
Footnotes
1. Kintsugi and the light that comes through cracks is talked about at greater length in Cracks.
2. Lawrence Binyon's poem "For the Fallen" is dissected more thoroughly in War is Hell.
3. John Donne's poem "No Man is an Island" is picked up in Kennedy, Gorman and Donne and in Sides and Symbols.
4. Edith Cavell and the Unknown Warrior come up regularly at this time, for example in Why This Soldier and Not Fear but Love