On Friday 11 November, much of the nation will come to a standstill for two minutes, the first, it is said, to remember those who died in war, and the second to remember, in the words of Harry Patch, the last veteran of the Great War trenches, ‘the people left behind, mourning.’

It is in part for these people that we need commemoration. The impact of the death of a soldier on active service is felt not just immediately by his or, sometimes nowadays, her, family, but as a wound that may never totally heal. In the summer of 2010, 97 year old Lily Baron visited the grave of her father, killed in France in November 1917. On her wreath, she wrote ‘I’ve missed you all my life.’ The loss of a soldier in war can reverberate in the family for almost a hundred years.
The inauguration of the Cenotaph and the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920 played a surprisingly large part in comforting those who had lost loved ones in the Great War, especially women. An observer wrote, ‘They seemed to feel that it was at last possible to give some expression to the feelings that they were compelled to subdue while the war continued.’

An estimated one and a quarter million people filed past the Unknown Warrior in the week before his grave was sealed. They now had a focus for their grief — for many thousands their loved ones had no known grave – and they identified with the nameless soldier they were honouring: he might be, and so for some people he emotionally became, their husband, their son.

Today, the ceremonies at Royal Wootton Bassett have given recognition and solemnity to the memory of those killed in Afghanistan; the pain of families who have lost loved ones is acknowledged by their fellow countrymen. The very moving website of Help for Heroes (www.helpforheroes.org.uk) has a page dedicated to the fallen in Afghanistan. Beside a photograph of the soldier they mourn, the family write their own words of love and grief; many also raise money for the charity as a lasting memorial.

On Remembrance Sunday, our prayers are for them. But as Harry Patch, who shook hands with the last German veteran of his war, memorably said, ‘Let us remember those who died on both sides of the line’. We remember not just our dead of two World Wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, but the dead of every nation involved, our ‘enemies’ as well as our allies. No nation is blameless in war, as my own family shows: my late husband was German, of Jewish background, and lost many of his relatives in concentration camps; he was born in Dresden, which was terribly destroyed by my countrymen. If we are to be truly reconciled, we have to accept our own responsibility.

Today we are all more immediately involved than in the past, hearing the name and seeing on television a photograph of each soldier killed in Afghanistan. We should also remember and pray for the others whose names we don’t know, whose lives and culture are very different from our own. In a small book of prayers from the First World War are the following words, which are still appropriate today:

O Jesus, who, dying on the Cross, didst forgive and pray for Thine enemies; we ask Thy mercy for ourselves and for those who fight against us that, our sins being forgiven through Thy passion and death, we may all attain to the happiness of eternal life. Amen

Quotations from The Quick and the Dead: fallen soldiers and their families in the Great War, by Richard van Emden, pub. Bloomsbury, October 2011
Prayer from A Simple Prayer Book for Soldiers, issued by HMSO by arrangement with the Catholic Truth Society, undated, but used in the Great War.
Joan van Emden is a Lay Minister at Christ Church Reading. 

On Sunday 8th November 1987, as people gathered around the Enniskillen cenotaph, an IRA bomb went off. Eleven people died that day including the daughter of Gordon Wilson. Later that day he spoke to the BBC’s reporter, Mike Gaston: ‘I have lost my daughter and we shall miss her. But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back…’ These were words that spoke of forgiveness.

He later wrote ‘We ask God to forgive us, but we are subject always to his condition that we must forgive others. God’s forgiveness is ultimate, ours is the forgiveness of man to man.’
Gordon Wilson’s words and his courage had a profound effect on many people who looked upon his words with great admiration, but we can never underestimate, or undervalue, how hard sometimes forgiveness can be. Forgiveness can be costly and for some seemingly impossible, particularly when the other side, so to speak, is unrepentant.

It can seem a never-ending process when each day we have to live with the wrongs of others. Wars change lives and societies. This autumn over nine million people across the country have tuned in to watch the second series of Downton Abbey, a vivid portrayal of how war affects and changes people and of subsequent broken relationships and misunderstandings. As we watch the upstairs/downstairs life of this family we see how much war is instrumental in breaking down barriers, of affecting every class of society, of how people’s lives have changed as they have had to cope with grief and disabilities, and the catalytic changes to their styles of life and expectations.

But for some, war is transformational, a time of reaching one’s full potential, of looking beyond our own seemingly narrow lives, as clearly portrayed by both Lady Sybil and Lady Edith as they turn to the needs of the soldiers. Through the changes and destruction that conflict brings, be it between nations or individuals, we need to try and seek peace and reconciliation, to learn to honour and value each other, to respect each other’s differences, to cross the bridges that divide us, to move towards the peace that passes understanding and to look towards a future of hope.

This year the Royal British Legion celebrates its 90th anniversary and the work of the Legion has helped and supported service families and individuals over the years. Its values speak of remembering and giving thanks for sacrifice in the cause of freedom but also looking to a future of hope and peace, not one of bitterness and recriminations.

As we draw together as a nation on Remembrance Day to honour those men and women who have died and those many who bear the scars of war, both visible and invisible, we pray that our lives may be open to the possibility of change and reconciliation, to seeking forgiveness and understanding of each other in the sure and certain knowledge that nothing ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

And so we pray:
O God, look in mercy
on the deep divisions of our world.
Set in our hearts the spirit of penitence,
forgiveness and reconciliation,
that the day may soon come when we no longer distrust
or fear one another, but are drawn together
in unity of purpose, in understanding,
and in love, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. ©CTBI
The Revd Jane Manley is Curate at St John the Baptist Church, Crowthorne and Chaplain to the Crowthorne Branch of the Royal British Legion.