Today there are very few survivors of the First World War – a handful out of the 5.5 million who fought in that terrible conflict.  The passage of time is slowly consigning that War into the realms of History and eventually it will be seen alongside the Battle of Trafalgar and other conflicts – times of great heroism in the life of our Nation but not personally involving anyone alive.  In time,  World War will live on only in archive footage, the written word and the memoirs of those who took part. The BBC is recording some of the stories of the few survivors and, of course, our own John Duffell is making sure that not only we, but future generations will know the of the lives and the stories of Epping folk who took part in both the First and Second World Wars.  These stories are of vital importance because they are the way in which future generations can enter into what it was like and why it had to happen.

I have vivid memories of World War I:  I can tell you something of what it was like in the trenches. I can speak to you of the mud and the incessant rain; the cold and the fear.  I can tell you what it was like to go over the top into No-man’s land; I can also tell you what it feels like when bullets are flying all around.  I know what it was like to leave the ship and tread the water as a distant shore was invaded, desperately seeking a bridgehead in the Dardanelles  from which to launch a counter-offensive.  I know something of what it was like to feel shrapnel bury deep into a leg and what it felt like to wake up, delirious in a field hospital.

How can I possibly tell you these things?  Because they are etched in my memory: -  they are all tales my grandfather told me.  As he lay in his bed, facing his final illness, I would creep into his room, as a boy of eleven and I listened eagerly as he told me of his own First World Wartime experience, through which the War came alive.  Why was I particularly interested?  Partly because it happened to my grandfather and partly because I was brought up in the aftermath of World War II.  Boys like me were fed with wartime stories, told by family relatives and in the many books and films which appeared during our boyhood.  In the telling of these tales – by my grandfather and others – it was possible to enter into the both the agony of the conflict and also its glory.  I was lucky, I suppose, because my grandfather survived to tell the tale.  Many millions were less fortunate and on memorials like those in this Church and at the end of the High Street, and on war graves, they are commemorated as a name, a rank, a date and place of death. Only painstaking research by the John Duffell’s of this world flesh out the detail and give us something of a picture of what they were like.  And we need these pictures not only to feed our own memories but to hand on to future generations.

Just over a week ago, we were showing a group of Year 7 children from St. John’s School, around the Church. When we came to the memorial over there to those who had died in the First World War a girl cried out, “That’s my name”. I discovered she belonged to an Epping family so, in all probability, that was a distant relative. A boy joined us and pointed out his own surname. “That was my great grandfather.”  To that boy it wasn’t just a name on a War memorial but part of his own family story – as indeed are most of the names carved throughout the Nation, part of our Nation’s story. But they are personal family stories first.  War, in the end is always personal even if the reasons for fighting it are not.

As Jonas Hart, from Southend, recalls on the BBC website:

“I had no quarrel with Germany. The most important point of recruiting in those days was Lord Kitchener and that wonderful poster they had. It read ‘The Country Needs…’ and Kitchener’s hand is pointing at you. And underneath his hand, is the big word of ‘YOU’. I was seventeen. I was with a friend and we decided we would take a risk. We went in to see the recruiting officer, Captain Dimmer, at the top of the Southend High Street.”

His friend was killed in the War but Jonas survived. He didn’t wax lyrical about the struggle for freedom and justice. In fact, he was extremely critical of the British Government and of how he was treated. He did not feel that he was a war-hero. He was just an ordinary bloke who did his duty – putting service before self.  It was for him and people like him that the Royal British Legion was set up in the first place.  Yet, today, we look on their offering as part of a great Sacrifice in the cause of justice and freedom and the stories they have to tell us are more than just personal stories. They are part of that bigger story about the struggle for freedom and justice against the world’s wrongs.

To make sense of that bigger story we have to go to an entirely different story. This too was part of the stories my grandfather told me because my grandfather, was also a devout Roman Catholic. He didn’t tell me this story in words. Perhaps he showed it through kindness or by the way he encouraged me or perhaps because I saw that his religion and God mattered to him.  Only later did I realise the significance of this story when it too became part of my own. It is only when I face up to the Cross of Jesus Christ that I can make sense of War as a struggle for freedom and for the triumph of goodness over evil.

This came home to me particularly vividly when I read the story told by a Jew, Elie Weisel in his book ‘Night’.  Elie Weisel had been taken to a concentration camp as a young boy. Those who watched the ceremony from Auschwitz on the 60^th Anniversary of its liberation, earlier this year, may well have seen him placing one of the memorial candles into the frozen snow.

The story he tells in ‘Night’ is particularly harrowing, and so the French novelist, François Mauriac felt when Weisel visited him after writing it.  Weisel had lived through one of the most atrocious stories of the Second World War and he had come out of it with his faith in God severely tested. He spoke of standing amongst a praying congregation, “observing it like a stranger”.  Mauriac, a practicing Christian, could give him no answer to his loss of faith though for Mauriac, God was still a God of Love.  “What did I say to him (Weisel)?” writes Mauriac. “Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him – the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine..” or did Mauriac speak of the link between that Cross and the suffering of men or of the Resurrection which even in Weisel’s experience could equate with the rising of the Jewish Nation of Israel from the crematories and charnel houses of places like Auschwitz?  Or did he perhaps speak of grace and how God can redeem even the most destructive things in our lives and give them new hope and direction?  No, Mauriac, writes, he could not speak of these things. He could only embrace him, weeping.

To those who have lost loved ones or who have gone through great suffering as so many war veterans and their families have, we can speak of the struggle for freedom as being part of the struggle of Christ against the evil which without that struggle remains unchecked but perhaps it is more important to show them that into Christ’s broken heart the whole world can creep for shelter.  And yet – it is only when we place our struggles for the things that matter in life alongside God’s struggle for the human heart  can this Remembrance we make today be more than an act of nostalgia or of commemoration.

Once I had learned to link grandfather’s stories with the story of Jesus I realised that there was something else about today’s commemoration. It is not just about looking back but much more about looking forward in hope.  These stories of our dead soldiers and our own remembrances of World War II, Bosnia, Afghanistan, The Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and so many other conflicts are both an honouring of those who gave their lives in War and of the hope they offered us.  A hope which Micah the Prophet spoke when he said, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more…” 

The story we have to tell our own grandchildren is about this hope that is summed up in the Kohima Epitaph – “For your tomorrow, we gave our today”.   It is their hope we must cherish today and hand on into the future. 

This hope is not just as an ideal – but something that must be won and won again if the world is to grow into a safe place where all can live in harmony with each other.  It is not the heroics of battle that matters today – it is what those heroics bought and which we must go on buying in sacrificial lives which, drawing strength from the example of Christ, seeks His freedom for all.  I have a story to tell you, we must say, and it is that of our forbears whom we are remembering today.  It can be summed up in words by the poet Paul Elouard, a Frenchman who fought in the resistance against the Nazis. Writing of his dead comrade  Gabriel Péri, he ends his poem:

Words there are that make life worth the living
and these are simple words
like warmth and giving
ustice love and liberty … words for courage and discovery
Comrade brother both these words are ours

The poet concludes that these words sum up Gabriel’s life:

Who died so we should stay alive…His hope lives on – we shall not let it end.  

Hope lives on -   that is what these stories we remember today have to tell us – and we shall not, must not, let it end.