The Gray Monk

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November 11, 2007

Remembrance Sunday

Today is Remembrance Sunday - and coinciding with Remembrance Day, the 11th day of the 11th month, the day in 1918 when the guns of the Western Front stuttered into silence at the 11th hour of the day. At this distance in time one can only imagine what it must have been like for those survivors who, after four and half years of constant bombardment, sniping and trench digging, interspersed with suicidal assaults across the killing fields of no man's land when, at the appointed hour, the last shell burst, the last machine gun stuttered into silence and the last casualty fell wounded or dying.

I remember one old soldier describing a sensation of overwhelming relief - followed by an overwhelming sense of loss. He was eighteen on the day the guns stopped - but he had been on the front and in the trenches since the summer of 1916.

Today we always remember the dead, but I have long been of the opinion that we should also remember the survivors, for each and every one of them walked away from their own battlefields, ships or aircraft in that and every war, carrying scars that could not be seen. As a child I used to watch and wonder as I saw many grown men weep at these parades and services, now I begin to understand why. I can recall my grandfather, a boy of fifteen when he joined the Royal Inniskillen Fusiliers in 1915, waking shouting and confused from nightmares when I was already in my teens. And my own father who, as an eighteen year old was among those detailed to remove the bodies from the flooded battery compartments of HMS Hecla after she had been torpedoed off the Cape of Good Hope. They had been in the flooded compartments for two weeks when the boy seamen, and others were put in to retrieve them. This was repeated a later when his own ship, HMS Ramillies, was torpedoed and saved by the deliberate flooding of her after magazines - an act of bravery by the officer concerned because it drowned him and around ninety others, but quenched the cordite fire. My father had nightmares of that and other scenes he had witnessed or been part of until his death - at 57 in 1982.

I looked around me this morning at the ex-servicemen in their blazers and medals, at the Sea Cadets, Army Cadets, Air Training Corps, Boy Scouts and other youth organisations - many of the boys and girls on parade of an age with my grandfather and his generation when they went off to war against the Kaiser. And I felt enormous pride at the manner in which these youngsters took the process of remembering the sacrifices made for us all over the years as a matter of duty and pride. As the Vicar pointed out, the youngest ever Victoria Cross went to a young man of fifteen who, as a medical orderly, contiunued administering medical aid to the wounded despite his own serious wounds, while under heavy fire. Another, awarded at the Battle of Jutland, went to a Boy Seaman named Jack Cornwall - aged just sixteen. Jack Cornwall did not survive, he lost a leg and then his life and was eventually buried in a grave which bears a marker only because his messmates paid for the head stone. The oldest recipient of the VC was a Lieutenant aged sixty one - who, to prevent munitions falling into the hands of the enemy, blew up the depot and himself as this was the only way to ensure the munitions were totally destroyed.

Today, at 11.00 we remembered them, the dead, the survivors, and those who serve still.

They shall not grow 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.

Posted by The Gray Monk at November 11, 2007 03:05 PM

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