Jesus said, “Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”
In the name. . .
So, the Great War started in 1914, brought on by the growing economic rivalry and the fight for hegemony of the main European powers. The ongoing tensions in the Balkans eventually led to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on June 28, 1914. A chain-reaction of war declarations in August of that same year led to the formation of two blocks: the Allies (France, Russia, Great Britain, Serbia, Italy and—eventually—the United States) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empires, and Bulgaria). The first truly modern war left more dead than any other previous European conflict: more than 18 million casualties in four years. It seems very few families could have escaped the touch of war’s horror.
There is a tiny village in the Picardy region of France, surrounded by rolling fields, woods, and bucolic brooks. There, in Thiepval, an enormous arch contains the names of the 72,000 men who breathed their last in these fields. Identification of their bodies was impossible, so these unfortunate fighters rest together under this colossal tombstone commemorating their sacrifice during the seemingly endless (and ultimately pointless) six-month Battle of the Somme in 1916.
It is also called “the Somme Offensive,” a name that is ironically fitting. There is indeed something deeply offensive in sending wave after wave of men to their certain death delivered by German machine guns.
And while the marker gives their names, a little cemetery next to it holds the bodies of 300 British soldiers who lost both their lives and their identities. Their bodies are under identical headstones with identical inscriptions: “A soldier of the Great War/Known unto God.” This graveyard has a twin burial ground next to it with the bodies of 300 French soldiers, marked by crosses bearing a single word: Inconnu (“Unknown”). Their uniforms were all that signified their nationality.
The words cut into the headstones of unknown British soldiers in the Thiepval cemetery came from Rudyard Kipling, a poet with a strong belief in Great Britain’s commanding role in the world.
It was also Kipling who chose the inscription on so many other memorials on the Great War's battlefields: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The words come from scripture, Ecclesiasticus 44:14.
Kipling, who had lost a son in the war, wanted to use the full passage: “Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name liveth for evermore,” but the Imperial War Graves Commission removed the first sentence. They thought it would be too easy to add an “s” to peace, making it sound like “pieces.” “Their bodies are buried in pieces. . .”
I have mentioned before that I have spent some time reading the poetry of soldiers in the Great War. Wilfred Owen was one of theose British soldiers known as the “War Poets.” Along with Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves, he used poetry to make his countrymen aware of the raw horror that was trench warfare. Of these four poets, Owen was the only one to never return home.
While the politicians and newpapers “back home” still touted the heroic glory of fighting the war, Owen’s verses tell another story of war, especially the last lines of his poem “Dulce et decorum est.”
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
In Britain November 11, the day the First World War ended, is Remembrance Day, when British citizens honor all soldiers who died serving their country. Many consider it a patriotic, sacred duty to wear an artificial poppy to honor the fallen. The poppy’s revered status is partly due to the words of another World War I poet, John McCrae.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
The poppies are still mourning in the Flanders fields. In a nearby village a bugle is sounded every night at eight o’clock to remember the thousands of fallen soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. Then the words of Laurence Binyon, a poet who served with the Red Cross during war:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
When the war ended, on November 11, 1918, many of those who had fought in it hoped that there would at last be a sincere reckoning of the hell they had lived through. That those four endless years of horror would be the last chapter in the story of human conflict. Perhaps now the world would understand the recklessness of combining the emotions whipped up by nationalism with the destructive power of the modern weapons.
But it was not to be.
In a corner of Belgium there is a modest memorial that is different from all the other ones. Its purpose is not to remember the dead. Instead it is set there to commemorate the little glimmer of hope that shone on Christmas Day, 1914, when the soldiers of the two enemy trenches ignored the allegiance to their uniforms to exchange gifts, sing together and play a game of soccer. Many of them had never met their enemies face to face. When they did, they couldn’t help questioning the motivations they had been given for wanting them dead. The military high commands on both sides, fearful of what this would do to support for the war, outlawed any kind of future spontaneous truces.
Jesus said, “Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”