In an Essay titled "Lest We Forget", Brian Matthews tells the
story of a letter written to his maternal grandmother by her husband Alex,
early in 1918.
Alex wrote:
I shall try to write as often as I can and I hope this settles your mind
a bit. Your prayers are being answered my dearest Ann… this war is at its
worst… MY dearest Ann, leave is stopped, but when it starts I shall get
away on leave… if it is not too much trouble, you might send me on a small
parcel and when I do come home I shall give you as much money as I can.
I wish this war was finished. I am fed up… MY dearest Ann, you and the children
try to be as cheery as you can. I feel all messed up but I shall just have
to carry on the best way I can. I am glad to hear that the children are
keeping all right. We are not on the same front now. We are on another front
and it is actually hell. I could tell you more but this letter might get
opened. We are out for two or three days… I will now close, hoping this
letter finds you and the children keeping well. I am keeping not so bad
at present. I remain your loving husband. Alex.
Shortly after this letter, Alex, like those mute presences on the honour
boards of so many churches and village halls, made the supreme sacrifice,
and never did get away on leave.
A few months later, Ann Murray received a letter that read.
Madam.
I have to inform you that your husband 17051 Pte A Murray 1/6 Duke of
Wellington's, was admitted to No 10 Casualty Clearing Station last week
suffering from shell wounds to the head and chest and that he died on
the 28th April. He received the sacraments during his illness, and was
very resigned and patient. He desired me to say that he sent his love
to you and the children. He was interred on the 29th April in the local
military cemetery, according to the rites of the Catholic Church. I beg
to offer you and family my sincere sympathy in your sad bereavement.
Yours Faithfully
Rev. P. J. Kilduff.
Annie never visited her husband's grave. As silent as he was about his
whereabouts, so was the Reverend Kilduff. Seventy five years later, grandson
Brian poured over old maps and with the help of old documents and some
imaginative leaps, concluded that the during the big push of 1918, the
new location must have been Ypres, where the fighting in those last months
was indeed, hell.
He placed these surmises before the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
in Buckinghamshire and sure enough, they found him, in a small British
War Cemetery, just outside the village of Arneke, near the Belgian border
and a few kilometres from Ieper, as Ypres is now known.
Brian writes:
Fields of sweet corn, crowding up to the low stone walls on two sides,
briskly rattled in the same breeze that tuned the cypresses to a pensive
sigh. 17051 Pte Alexander Murray's meticulously tended grave was over
near one of the walls, bees lazed through the lavender nodding across
his engraved name; summer sun radiated from surrounding stone. It had
been a nightmare getting there and it was going to be worse getting back.
Time and again, we'd come close to abandoning the whole journey. What
after all was the point? Black cypress shade; a moulding of earth; a name
cut in a stone…. But of course it was worth it. It was as if we knew him
at last, as if he'd struggled home. My dearest Ann… I shall get away on
leave, years too late, with no one to meet him, but home nevertheless.
My family was enriched that two of us, at least, had seen his grave, placed
flowers on it, photographed it, signed the cemetery's memorial book. It
was a lesson in history, why history matters, detecting, listening to,
making sense of the alien voices of the past.
It is not easy to make sense of such carnage as human beings seem uniquely
capable of inflicting on each other, on the earth, on the life that surrounds
them and is so often extinguished by them.
Some men go to war and lose their faith in the midst of the carnage and
horror. Others see in another way, and begin to understand the despair
and hope of God at the odd irony of humans who so readily leap the bounds
of gravity but cannot comprehend how to walk lightly upon the earth. To
them, the Crucified, suffering God begins to make sense.
Lawrie Biggs, my good mate and for many years the Anglican Vicar of Drouin,
a town just east of Melbourne, found his faith in God in the midst of
being blown up in a U Boat Attack. Laurie survived, and came back to a
lifetime vocation in Christian ministry.
Somewhere within the stark polarities of brilliant compassionate heroism
and seamy sewer morality lies the reality of human existence and experience.
War is not a place where God is absent, any more or less than any other
place. In war, some men and women ascend to the greatest feats of humanity
possible, and others sink to the lowest ebbs of inhumanity.
We cannot make sense of this unless, like God, we accept the reality of
our capacity for both greatness and terribleness. War brings these two
into stark and awful contrast.
So when we send sons and daughters, mothers and fathers out to battle,
we must first count the terrible cost that will resonate through many
generations, the great burdens that are being thrust upon the resources
of humanity, when we command and train people to go and fight and kill.
Such a choice should never be made, unless there is absolutely no other
course, unless there is no other process, or possibility of resolution,
and then, only if the consequences of inaction are surely more terrible
than the awful reality of what will happen to that young lad who sees,
and hears, and brings back to his family and home, the horror and the
pain and the sorrow that war must inflict on mind and soul, and who's
legacy will be felt for generations to come.
Such are the people, the experiences, that men and women have endured,
men and women whose suffering and sacrifice we come to remember today.
Initially, today was marked to celebrate the end of a war.
We do not glorify war on Remembrance Sunday. But we do remember.
We remember and honour the sacrifice that was made by men, women, families,
children.
We remember those whose lives were, and then were no more.
We remember those who endure the empty rooms, the absent voices.
We remember, so that we, so that governments, so that our people, will
never forget.
We remember because we too, must not forget.
We remember, and pray that one day, humanity will have no more wars to
remember.
In the presence of God who does not turn away from our fragile, faulty
and sometimes shattered humanity but enters into it in the person of Jesus
Christ; in this, the presence of God who for the sake of His love, suffers
with us, we remember.
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