WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

A SERMON FOR REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

November is the month of the Holy Souls.  Last week we commemorated all the souls of the faithful departed in the three Requiems of All Souls Day, praying especially for the souls of our own families, our friends and loved ones, offering up life's pains and sorrows for them, submitting their names to the Guild of All Souls, and doing everything we can to alleviate their suffering and shorten their time in Purgatory.  Today we may be assured that our departed loved ones are grateful for our efforts.  There is absolutely nothing they can do to help themselves, and have only us to rely on to assist them in their need.

This week we turn our attention to a very special group of holy souls, those to whom we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude, those who laid down their life for their country.   Those of our armed forces, the dearest and the best of this land, who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their nation.  Not just our own countrymen, but patriotic men and women from every nation, who died in the protection of their homeland.  Today is the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the end of hostilities at the end of the First World War, and we commemorate the Fallen.  Throughout the world today, on this Remembrance Sunday, the living gather around the cenotaphs and the war memorials, and lay wreaths in memory, lest we forget.  Here in the United States, it is the custom to keep these observances in the month of May, on Memorial Day.  The actual anniversary of the end of World War I was yesterday, when in 1918 the Armistice was signed at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  In this country we dedicate this day to our veterans, giving thanks for all the men and women who served in our armed forces, and who survived, and came home.  To them, on behalf of all the rest of us who live in freedom and comfort today because of the sacrifices they made, I offer our humble and profound thanks.  Lest we forget.  But a day later, on this Sunday closest to Veterans Day, we remember the fallen.  We join with our veterans today in memory of those who were left behind on the battlefields of Europe, the Pacific, those who lie in Arlington and the other military cemeteries throughout the world.  The fallen have a message today for those who survived, a message to be passed on to all of us, reminding us of their sacrifice, their ultimate sacrifice.  To those who survived, the Fallen cry out:

When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.

And in the Ode of Remembrance For the Fallen, recited today at churches, cemeteries, and cenotaphs across the globe, we join in acknowledging their sacrifice and vow never to forget:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

We will remember them...  On the roads of Europe a century ago, 1914 and the four bloody years that followed, over a billion men, dressed in the uniforms of the armies of the various nations, marched to war.  Over 13 million would never return.  At first they marched with heads held high, filled with the stirring music of military bands and bagpipes, with the propaganda of the nationalist cause, ready, if necessary to sacrifice their lives for their country, but with little thought of how much suffering that sacrifice would truly cost.  The Allied Powers marched eastward, confident that it would be a “piece of cake”, and that they would be in Berlin within a few weeks.  Meanwhile, the Central Powers marched towards the west, equally confident that they would march straight to Paris.

But soon the two great armies met, and within a few weeks, the pipe dreams of the High Command of both sides were shattered, as the movement of the western front slowed down and finally stopped in the terrible stalemate of trench warfare.  Like the rats who lived with them in the mud-cased disease-infested holes in the ground, our soldiers would live and learn to survive.  They would hear the bugle call to attack, advance 30 yards, lose 20 or 30 men to the machine-gun fire and gas attacks, and then hear the call to retreat, back to their trenches, suffering another few dozen fatalities on the way back, and then find themselves back in the same filthy trenches they were in before.  All for nothing.  The number of casualties was unbearable and the conditions beyond atrocious.

Gradually word got out to the new recruits, and no longer were heads held quite so high on that long march towards the trenches.  Confidence was replaced by fear.  What they had thought was a vague chance now became a real probability that they were marching to their death.  Can we imagine what was going through the minds of these young men as they trudged through the mud, the air filled with the sound of artillery fire gradually growing louder, the earth shaking from the shells, the lingering scent of poison gas and the overpowering stench of blood and rotting corpses?

One of these young men, a private in the West Yorkshire Regiment, had the presence of mind to take a small crucifix with him into battle.  He kept it close to his heart in the breast pocket of his uniform.  One day, as his troop clambered over the wall of the trench to attack yet again the German position, a bullet came whistling towards him and struck him full in the chest.  By the hand of God, the bullet hit the crucifix and ricocheted off it to hit the soldier in the arm, causing nothing more than a flesh wound.  This man was my grandfather, and if it had not been for that crucifix carried in his breast pocket, I would not be here today.  While he was in the hospital recovering from his wound, they removed the bullet from his arm and presented it to him.  He spent his time recuperating by carving the blunt end of the bullet into a cross, an image of the cross that saved him, the Holy Cross that saved us all.

Five years ago this week, I was driving back from Italy to England, and had to pass by the battlefield of Verdun, where there took place the longest and bloodiest battle of World War I.  I visited the war cemetery there and saw row after row of white crosses stretching in every direction as far the eye could see. Over 230,000 are buried there, most of them unidentifiable and forgotten.  One can only imagine what these poor fellows went through in the days and weeks leading up to their ultimate sacrifice.  The Road to Verdun earned the title of the Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way.  The road is still there today, each mile echoing the footsteps of the more than two million French and German soldiers, who trudged along it towards an unknown fate.  What must have gone through the minds of these men as they marched down the Voie Sacrée, so far from their mothers, their wives and loved ones, wondering if they would ever again see their faces, or if they would ever again be able to embrace them?  What a multitude of individual agonies was suffered by these tremendous armies of nations.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.  It is a sweet and honorable thing to die for one’s country.  Very easy for those of us at home to mouth these noble words, but as these men of Verdun tried to grab a minute or two of terrified sleep in their filthy, stinking, rat-infested trenches, to the sound of shells bursting around them, the screams of the wounded and dying lying out there in no-man’s land, the smell of burning flesh, their thoughts were probably not about how sweet and honorable this all was.  And yet they kept going, resolute, gritting their teeth.  In today's bulletin you will find the famous words of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice who tried to capture the heroic nobility of these men in his famous poem:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

The men who came home, they know what it was like, and after all that carnage, all that terrible loss of life, they above all others appreciate what it is to be at peace.  We too though, need to understand what that peace is, and that we must preserve it intact.  “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts,” says St. Paul in today’s Epistle to the Colossians, “to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.”

For without Christ there can never be peace.  Christ was born in the silence of midnight in the bleak mid winter of Bethlehem. “Glory to God in the highest,” sang the Angels at Bethlehem, “and peace on earth to men of good will.”  From the peace of that night, Our Lord grew up to teach us that “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”  We have been repeating these Gospel words almost every day during this octave of All Saints.  And not only in the Beatitudes did Christ preach the Gospel of Peace, but by his almost every word, his miracles, and his example.  And yet, amid the ubiquitous presence of this message in the life of Our Lord, there rings out a note now and again, as of a clarion call:  “Think not,” reminded our divine Saviour, “that I am come to bring peace on earth.  I am come not to bring peace but a sword.”  What a stark reminder that no matter how much we might try to keep the peace, there are others sometimes who are equally determined to pick a fight.  And sometimes we have no choice but to fight back.  Not in the spirit of revenge, not refusing to turn the other cheek, but always with charity, always ready to forgive our enemies.  We have a moral responsibility to defend those who depend on us.  This duty is as natural as that of the mother bear protecting her cubs, parents guarding their children from danger, and governments their people.

There is nothing more unnatural than the mother who would destroy her own child.  But in the larger scheme of things, the government who would use its power against the good of its own people is the same perversity.  It must never be forgotten that the first duty of a government is to protect the nation and its people.  And yet there are those who think nothing of sacrificing the lives of our good men of the armed forces, of laying upon the altar the dearest and the best, for no better reason than to make themselves more rich, more powerful.  These same governments think nothing of laying upon the altar of Moloch the blood of tens of thousands of the unborn.  These are not the peacemakers.  These are they who would wage war most foul against the laws of God and of the good nature he created.   For them there can never be peace.  And we are never supposed to make peace with these powers of evil.  For us, peace is what we must proclaim, like the angels of Bethlehem, to men of good will.  But we must be ready to defend ourselves and fight to the death against those who are not. 

Let us beg God for the wisdom to tell them apart, the men of good will from those who would attack God’s holy kingdom.  But once we know where our own battle lies (and for each of us this will be in different places, different times, against different enemies), once we are shown our path, then we must march down our own Voie Sacrée, our Sacred Way, the Road to our very own Verdun.  We must keep walking stedfastly on, fearful of the outcome perhaps, but determined to sacrifice all for our Saviour, our Redeemer, our King.  If the men of Verdun taught us any lesson at all, it is that Peace comes at a price, and that price always represents sacrifice, and often our lifeblood. 

Whether your battle is against poverty, or life-threatening disease, against injustice or persecution, whether your fight is with the temptations of the flesh or the spirit, or with the world and its vanities, or with the very devils of hell, remember today the sacrifice of those who went before you.  Remember the men of our army and navy, our air force and marines, all those who laid down their life for God and Country.  Our allegiance today is to the same God, the same country.

And that takes us back to that poem by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, to the second verse of the hymn in the bulletin, as we leave behind the devastation of the battlefield, the blood and suffering of this vale of tears, and turn our attention to that other country, with its King who is not of this world, but who is the the Son of God and Prince of Peace.  Let us offer to him today all that we have, all that we are, as we bravely resolve to follow our destiny to the end of our very own Voie Sacrée:

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.