Address given at the Service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving on Remembrance Sunday 2024

I have told this story before, a story about remembering better. Forgive me if I tell it again, remembering better is so important. 

My grandfather (my mother’s father) joined the Kings Own Royal Lancaster Regiment in 1916. He was captured at the Third Battle of Ypres. Grandad never spoke about the war. He was a slightly forlorn figure in old age and we told the story for him. Before he became a prisoner, he had been hit by a bullet. It pierced a bible in his chest pocket and then deflected from a cigarette case behind it. My family joked that it was vice, not virtue, that saved his life. Even so, as a boy, the bible with bullet hole was a family relic.

Only recently did I discover I had this story wrong. A cousin handed over some papers. There was a letter, written in pencil, from German imprisonment,

It is only God’s grace that I am still living today. The bible you gave me had a bullet hole right through it.  A bullet went through my cig case in the other pocket and then glanced under my arm, just bruising it.

Grandad had been shot twice, in the chest, and the bible did indeed save his life. 

Remembrance is difficult, you can go wrong. You must work at remembrance, keep the memory accurate, keep it honest, not let the story slip. I am a historian, any historian will tell you that being accurate and honest about the past is constant, hard work.

Another example. In the Second World War, John Jarmain served in 61st Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery.  He saw action at El Alamein and in the long North Africa campaign: Tobruk, Tripoli, Wadi Akrit. He took part in the invasion of Italy in 1943 and, a year later, landed in Normandy on ‘D+1’. Three weeks later, he was killed by mortar fire. Jarmain was a fine poet, a poem about El Alamein begins,

There are flowers now, they say, at Alamein;
Yes, flowers in the minefields now.
So those that come to view that vacant scene,
Where death remains and agony has been
Will find the lilies grow –
Flowers, and nothing that we know.

His point was that within two short years people were mis-remembering – nothing that we know. 

none but us has known that land:
El Alamein will still be only ours
And those ten days of chaos in the sand.
Others will come who cannot understand,
Will halt beside the rusty minefield wires
And find there – flowers.

The past is hard to know.  The past is different, it is not a bit like the life we know but wearing funny clothes, it is alien, it is strange and we get it wrong.

George Steiner, used to argue – in a drum roll of words – that there are moments when remembrance will always fail.  How can we remember, he asked, the life scorched and irradiated leaving a shadow in the ground at Hiroshima?  How could we ever imagine, hold in our heads, the workings of a mind that herded people into a gas chamber at Auschwitz Birkenau and then went home to listen to Mozart, or to play with the children?  We cannot ‘remember’ that.  The past is strange.

I have preached on this day many times; I have said that remembering is hard many, many times.  And now, suddenly, I find it will not serve.  I should remember better. 

On Thursday, I was out on North Green when HRH The Duchess of Gloucester opened the Field of Remembrance.  She toured the Field and plunged into conversations.  I followed at a distance and I met people utterly committed to remembrance.  There was the man at the memorial for civilian casualties.  This man told me that when he was three, in 1940, he contracted measles and was taken to hospital by his father (who was home on leave).  His father went home and went down to a shelter in an air raid.  They were both killed.  The little boy in hospital could not tell the nurses who he was and where he was from.  It was weeks before the family found him.  Now, there’s some tricky remembering - but Jeffrey Borsack is determined we will not forget.  He is campaigning for a public memorial to civilian casualties.  Opposite him, was a woman wearing her father’s medals from Monte Cassino.  We talked about a man whose funeral I took.  He had fought at Monte Cassino, his wife did not seem to know but the British Legion did and they were there.  I met Beverly Williams, from Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, with a rack of medals from long service that had taken her to Northern Ireland, Iraq and elsewhere.  She was standing, though, at the Bomber Command plot, because she had another row of medals, her father’s.  He was a bomb aimer on a Halifax.  She was not going to forget him, or all those others from Bomber Command.

All of them knew the past is so very different from the present, all of them knew that remembrance can be hard.  All of them though, were entirely determined to tell the story and to keep it accurate and keep it honest.  The past is tough, but you do have to work at it, you must look for the words.  We all have to go searching there for the story of who we were and who we are.

There are some simple duties.  We talk about losing someone when they die.  We don’t lose them, we remember.   They stay with us.  We must remember what women and men did out of loyalty, duty and a sense of service.  We must tell the truth about men like my grandfather or a battle like El Alamein.  We must be honest about what war is and what war does.  We have to remind ourselves what conflict means and note we still expect our armed forces to do with, apparently, less and less resources. 

Simple duties, then something more.   There are two big, modern ideas.  The first is that if your dreams are big enough you will succeed.  We think we can boss the present and make the future – we think we are self-made.  The second is that it is all a competition, them against us, we have to win, most of all we have to beat them.  Two big modern ideas.  Both of them lies.  And both depend on the dreadful heresy that we cannot handle difference.  We must have the world on out terms, the way we see it and the stuff the rest.    That’s how wars are made.

We have not just discovered how to be human, we are not in charge and the world is not full of enemies.  We have to manage difference, we have to remember who we are, how different we have been.  We have to do the difficult stuff.  It is our remembrance, our honesty and our accuracy that will save us.  Digging deep to find the words to say, those are the things that will remind us who we really are and the deep solidarity that binds us to one another and to God.  We will feel the difficulty, we should feel the difficulty.  And then we should overcome it.  That is how peace is made. 

Today, and everyday, we must seek the truth, find the words, we must remember – accurately, honestly.  We must gather up the pieces and tell the story.  So, I am sorry Grandad we should have done better.  We must remember better.