A sermon preached by General Sir Hugh Beach (matric. 1941), GBE, KCB, MC, Honorary Fellow and former Master General of the Ordnance Peterhouse Chapel, Remembrance Sunday, 11th November, 2007. The readings were 1 Kings 3:1-15 and Luke 20:27-38. "At first we were worried about the superficial things like their bawdy language and their womanising" - this is Chaplain to the Forces F.R.Barry writing about his soldiers in World War 1. "Our real problems were very much deeper than that. Religion apparently meant nothing to them. Was this something for which we should upbraid men who were enduring far more than we were? Or, could there be something lacking in the religion? For we learned in battle how splendid and how noble these apparently irreligious people were. How were these grand qualities related to the gospel that we had been ordained to preach? What message had the gospel for them, and in what form ought it to be presented? And beyond all that, in so evil a situation, of which the devil seemed to be in control, how could we go on believing in God at all? We had to face the ultimate challenge to faith, first for ourselves, and then for the men to whom we had been sent to minister." Does this language ring true for you? One can appreciate Barry's perplexity at the thought of two Christian nations, each urged on by their national churches and their service padres, fighting each other to the death. The Bishop of London, asked in 1915 for his advice as to what the church should do, answered with great simplicity "Mobilize the nation for a Holy War". And the German soldiers had "Gott mit uns" - "God with us" embossed on the buckles of their belts. So glaring and tragic a paradox could only be of the devil's contriving - must constitute an ultimate challenge to faith?
I wonder if the devil sees it so? I grew up into World War 2, and took part in its closing stages. Out of school, aged nineteen or thereabouts, the first bit of theology that I came across was a book by an Oxford don called C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. Many of you will know it well. It is a series of short directives from a senior demon, Under Secretary Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, a young fiend out on temptation duty, working for the damnation of the soul of one particular man whom Screwtape calls 'the patient'. We never learn the man's name. He is youngish, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, a civilian on some kind of war work, in love with a 'very Christian' girl. Screwtape scoffs at the idea that the war is helpful to the Devil's cause in his case. Don't you realise, he writes, that the patient's death at this moment is precisely what we want to avoid. "As the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind; full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected; taken 'out of himself' as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy (by which, of course, Screwtape means God) the patient will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight." But if he survives? "If only he can be kept alive" writes Screwtape "you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity are excellent campaigning weather. Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work build up in him a sense of being really at home on earth which is just what we want. Seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling his soul from
Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth." Donnish stuff you may say. Amusing in its way, but quite unreal. For Padre Barry life in the trenches was all too real a foretaste of Hell. Try explaining to him that war is serving God's purposes in some ways. And yet - does he not also concede Screwtape's central point? The young men whom he saw blown to bits by shrapnel, gassed or machine gunned on the wire showed qualities that he called "splendid and noble". It is in no sense whatever to glorify war if one says, with the Primitive Methodist Leader A.T.Guttery: "They died, thank God! not because their bodies were wasted with sin, nor enfeebled with self indulgence. They died under oath, willing captives of a great ideal... Let us go with them the way of the Cross!" In Screwtape the young man, Wormwood's patient, is killed by an air raid in the final letter. "He got through so easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer instantaneous liberation. One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching: next moment it was all gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account. Did you mark how naturally, as if he had been born for it, the earth born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous?" If I apply this personally, how would the case work out? Say that the bullet which so lightly grazed my spine had gone in a few inches deeper and killed me outright? I should at least have gone as the "willing captive of a great ideal" - if not straight to heaven like C.S.Lewis's hero. I should not have fallen under the spell of St. Francis.
I should not consequently have met, loved and married a 'very christian' girl, who might otherwise have gone off as a medical missionary to China. The world would have got along without the four strange offspring whom we have reared. But nor should I have succumbed, as I have done (now aged 84) to every item in Screwtape's hellish inventory of temptations for the middle aged and prosperous: reputation, acquaintance, importance, work - ending with my invincible sense of "being really at home in earth which is just what we want". Damn it, how did he know? I do not wish to make too much of this. Like all of my generation I have a great hatred of war, and indeed have devoted the rest of my working life to trying to make another war like that as unlikely as possible. But theologically - that is to say in God's eyes, (or in the Devil's) - may there not be something in what C.S.Lewis says? We shall all die one day. The quality of our life is what matters, not its length? What counts is holiness of living, courageous dying. This may be easier to achieve in a short life, spared the corruption of the later years. If this is so then war, so far from being the unmitigated evil that we so often make it, may be much closer to being what the bible says it is: part of the human condition, natural to Adam's offspring, tragic certainly but sometimes sanctioned by God himself. What matters, on this view, is how well men and women live in it, how well they die. So - let s think about today, when we remember those who died in action, in the two World Wars and ever since: 600 in Northern Ireland alone and 66 in the wars of the last twelve months. We remember them before God, in gratitude. And that is good. Army Doctrine Publication Volume 5 tells us that the Military Covenant between the Nation, the Army and each individual soldier is an unbreakable common bond of identity, loyalty and responsibility
which has sustained the Army throughout its history. It has perhaps its greatest manifestation in the annual commemoration of Armistice Day, when the nation keeps covenant with those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives in action. How well they lived and died we have no way of knowing. What matters is that we should keep faith. So says Army Doctrine. I had not thought of it quite like that. And don t let s kid ourselves that any of those we are remembering thought like this at all. Let s hear finally from Sergeant Paul McGee, writing in old age about a failed war, but speaking, I think, for many of us. He still thought that he and his friends had done the right thing. They had shared those dangers and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives. They did not need words to bind them together: their deeds were the requisite bond. McGee was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it there had not been a lot of choice.