It's the poets who have written most memorably about the
pity of war and remembrance, so it's to the poets that I turn
today.
Here are words from Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered
thee, O Zion.
As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein,
For they that led us away captive required of us then a song,
and melody in our heaviness, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of
my mouth .....
And this is from Rudyard Kipling, writing in 1897, well before the First World War:
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captain and the Kings depart:
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!
And from a great poet of that first Great War, Siegfried Sassoon,
in his 1919 poem "Aftermath"
"... the past is just the same, -- and War's a bloody game.....
Have you forgotten yet?
Look down and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never
forget."
From three very different times and contexts comes the admonition
that we must not forget, we must never forget. Contradicting it,
perhaps, or at least standing over against it, is the admonition
to forgive and forget. And especially for many of us who're too
young to have personal or vivid memories of war, there's always
a question: is it time to let go of the past, to give up clinging
to recollections of past glory or past tragedy and to move on.
Why is it important to remember? Why were the psalmist and the
poets so concerned lest we forget? How can we remember the past
while not dwelling in it, while living fully in the present?
I asked someone who admires the work of Elie Wiesel, documenter
of the Holocaust, what Wiesel might say are the main reasons we
must not forget. My friend said he thought there were two main
purposes to remembrance: to honour the victims, and to help make
sure that such terrible things can never happen again. Both these,
I think, help us to live in the present, not in the past. We honour
the dead because we know, at however inarticulate a level, that
it is by giving such honour that we shape our own worth: to honour
the memories of good people, brave people, innocent people, is
to worship, to worth-shape, in the here and now.
We try to ensure that such terrible things never happen again
because we are committed to living present lives which learn from
the past rather than being condemned to repeat it. Let's look
for a moment at the people whose memories we honour today. It's
the Sunday before Remembrance Day, a day dedicated to remembering
particularly all those who have lost their lives in war. In the
U.S. it's called Veterans Day, which gives it a slightly different
and narrower focus, I think. Here in Canada we gather to remember
every one of the dead, whether soldier or civilian, actively involved
in the fighting or accidental victim. We remember those we know,
by name, and we remember those unknown to us in any personal way,
the unknown soldier dead in the trenches, the unknown child dead
in the bombed building, the whole body of people whose lives were
cut short by war. Some of them were heroes, some of them were
very ordinary and unknowing; all of them had an inherent worth
and dignity which we honour today.
Here's a poem by Malcolm Lowry about an almost unknown man named
Ingvald Bjorndal. As far as I can tell from the notes with the
poem, he was a Canadian of Norwegian background; Malcolm Lowry
has translated a letter in Norwegian, signed by Bjorndal, which
was found in a bottle in the sea off the coast of France by a
fisherman in November 1940: While we sail and laugh, joke and
fight, comes death And it is the end.
"A man toils on board; his life drifts away like a puff of
breath;
Who will know his dreams now when the sea roared?
I loved you, my dear, but now I am dead, so take somebody else
and forget me.
My brothers, I was foolish, as you said:
So are most who have placed their fate in the sea.
Many tears have you shed for me in vain. Take my pay, Mother,
Father;
I have come a long way to die in the blood and rain.
Buy me some earth in the graveyard at home.
Goodbye. Please remember me with these words."
To the green meadows and the blue fjords. We do not know Ingvald
Bjorndal's dreams; we know only that he loved green meadows and
blue waters. Let us remember this man who gave up his life 56
years ago, and let us honour him by our love and caring for our
green meadows and blue waters.Many of the hopes and dreams of
the war-dead are unknown to us.Most of those who died in the first
World War, and more and more of those who died in the second,
are known to us now only as names, and can be honoured only in
that most general way that I have suggested, as people of inherent
worth and dignity, whose lives were tragically cut short. But
some of the people who died in those wars and in others were known
to some of you here. I talked a couple of years ago to a woman
in her late nineties who knew many of the young men who fought
in World War I.
She was in her teens during that war; they were her chums and
boyfriends and brothers of her girlfriends. I thought how long
ago it is to many of us, and how a new light is shed on it by
recognizing that someone still with us knew these men who were
in the trenches and on the battlefields -- knew what their hopes
and dreams were, what made them individuals, different from one
another, what made them honour-able, worthy of honour. Some of
you, too, know women or men whose lives were lost in wartime,
in many different wartimes. By honouring the memories of these
dead, we strengthen our resolve to work for a world in which all
that they considered sacred can flourish. Let's commit ourselves,
here, today, to that task.
The second great reason for remembrance is to try to ensure that
the terrible events we call wars, and all the disasters which
lead to wars and which make for the millions of small private
wars we still wage, will not happen again. To remember is to work
for peace. To remember is to recollect, in our hearts as well
as our minds, the horror of violence, the waste and pity of war,
so that we reject it with all our strength. I want to tell you
a little bit about a British poet who devoted himself to conveying
his experience of the pity of war. His name was Wilfred Owen;
he died at the age of 25, and his poetry is living testimony both
to the importance of remembering and to the honour we owe to one
who helps us keep our memories vivid.
Wilfred Owen wrote in a book which he did not live to see published
that, "The poetry is in the pity." Owen was born in
1893; his father had a modest job with the railway. His mother
was a strict Calvinist, but remained close to her son even when
he announced in a letter, "I have murdered my false creed.
If a true one exists,I shall find it. If not, adieu to the still
falser creeds that hold the hearts of nearly all my fellow men."
When Wilfred Owen was in his late teens, he went to be an assistant
to the vicar of a country church, but he left there after only
a short time because he couldn't convince himself that Christianity
had any power to relieve the many sufferings that he saw among
the parishioners.
In 1913 he went to teach at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux, France,
and was there for two years before returning to England in 1915
in order to enlist as a soldier. He was trained and then commissioned
in a regiment which went to the western front in January 1917.
The weather was extremely cold and the fighting was fierce. Owen
became ill and had to be moved to a hospital and then sent back
to Britain to recuperate. In hospital there he met Siegfried Sassoon,
whom I quoted earlier, and who was an army captain and already
known as a war poet. Sassoon encouraged his writing and also optimistically
assured him that when the time came for Owen to return to the
front, his experiences would help his poetry. Owen did go back
to France, on August 31, 1918, and was killed a week before the
Armistice, on November 4.
At the time of his death, Wilfred Owen, who said that his sympathies
were always and everywhere with the oppressed, was preparing a
volume of poems for publication. The Preface included these words:
"This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet
fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything
about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power, except
War. ..... My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry
is in the pity. ..... All a poet can do today is warn. That is
why the true Poets must be truthful." Here is part of the
pitiful truth that Wilfred Owen had to tell, a poem called "Anthem
for Doomed Youth":
"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, --
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling to them from sad shires.
"What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."
As we close our curtains or draw down our blinds tonight, may
we continue to remember the doomed youth of all the wars, and
the poets who have written their anthems. Because of them, we
are less likely to forget, more likely to work for a world of
"never again". Perhaps the worst enemy of that commitment
to "never again" is resignation, cynicism, the attitude
that wars have always been with us and can't be prevented. Unless
we believe that peace is possible, it will never be possible,
and it's perhaps because I believe this so strongly and admire
passionate commitment so much, that the American poet Edna St.Vincent
Millay is one of my favourites. Her poem "Dirge Without Music"
is the antithesis of resignation and defeat, even while it recognizes
the clear and awful realities of untimely death. Millay, too,
knew many of the young men who went to their deaths in the First
World War, and many of those who came back to die later of the
effects of war. She wrote:
"I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts
in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
"Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost.
"The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses.
Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in
the world.
"Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
We do well, I think, not to be resigned to violence, uncaring,
malicious killing, whether in war or in the more ordinary lives
which we are so privileged to lead today. And because I believe
it's important not to restrict our remembrance to those who have
died in the battles of identifiable wars, but to remember also
today people like Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian who was executed
four years ago for his dissent from government policy, people
like Jesus of Nazareth who died for their convictions, people
like Mahatma Ghandi who was assassinated because his message of
non-violence was too powerful for his hearers -- because I believe
that the honouring of lost lives and the determination that the
losses shall never happen again must encompass all kinds of victims,
including those whose deaths were more significant than their
lives, I want to end with a prose-poem by a man called Bartolomeo
Vanzetti.
That name may ring a faint bell for some of you, or be completely
unknown. Vanzetti was not a war hero; he was a fishmonger whose
big mistake in life was to have far-out social opinions, and in
the end, in this century, in North America, he was executed because
of his beliefs, along with his friend Nicola Sacco. Sacco and
Vanzetti immigrated separately from Italy in 1908. By 1915 they
were both settled in Massachusetts, Sacco working in a shoe factory
and Vanzetti selling fish. Both men left the country for Mexico
during World War I to avoid military service, then returned to
America after the war. In 1920, during a payroll robbery at a
shoe company, two employees of the company were shot and killed.
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and charged with the crime. The
fact that they were both armed at the time made them prime suspects,
as did their reputations as draft dodgers, political radicals,
and anarchists.
There was no hard evidence tying the defendants to the crime.
The jury which tried the case refused to listen to the testimony
of any Italian-born witnesses. The judge was openly biased. Sacco
and Vanzetti were convicted because they were Italians and radicals.
After they received death sentences, their appeal for a new trial
was denied even though another man now confessed that he had participated
in the crime with an organized gang.
A storm of protest arose; the Massachusetts Governor refused to
grant clemency; demonstrations were held; but all protest was
to no avail and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electrocution
on August 23, 1927. Agitation continued long after the execution.
As late as 1959 the Massachusetts Governor was asked to grant
a retroactive pardon for the two. The motion failed. In the 1970s,
a former member of an organized crime consortium wrote in his
autobiography that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been involved in
the killings and named the actual murderers.
With this in mind -- one small embodiment of all the wrongful
deaths which we remember today so that they will never happen
again -- I offer you Bartolomeo Vanzetti's "Last Speech to
the Court" before his sentencing.
"I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to
name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker, from his boyhood a skilled
worker, lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account,
a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little
home at the verge of a wood, near a brook.
"Sacco is a heart of faith, a character, a man; a man, lover of nature, and mankind; a man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of liberty and to his love for mankind: money, rest, mundane ambition, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life.
"Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate. He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows. Never .....
"Oh, yes, I may be more witful, as some have put it; I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his hurtful voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism, I felt small at the presence of his greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him: this man called thief and assassin and doomed.
"But Sacco's name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katzmann's bones and yours will be dispersed by time; when your name, his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a dim rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man .....
"If it had not been for these thing I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance; for justice, for man's understanding of man, as we do by accident. Our words, our lives, our pains -- nothing! The taking of our lives -- lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler -- all! That last moment belongs to us -- that agony is our triumph."
Today we remember those who have died whom we wish had not
had to die. We honour their lives, whether they were heroes or
stumblers, soldiers or fishmongers, poets or babblers. We dedicate
ourselves to ensuring that the events which took their lives --
hatred, war, violence,
intolerance, greed -- that these things shall never bring suffering
and death again. Never again.
Never again. We will remember them ..... LEST WE FORGET. Amen.