Mr A Dale, Dean of School
At 11.00 am on the 11 November 1918, the guns of the Western Front fell silent and after more than four year of continuous bloodshed, the war to end all wars was over. Over seventy million had been mobilized and between nine and thirteen million were dead, as many as one third with no known grave. But of course it was not over; and human nature being what it is, and politicians being what they are, time after time Australia has been drawn into international conflict and hundreds of thousands of service men and women have lost their lives – sometimes in the defence of their country as in the Pacific War of 1941-45, more often in the interests of another nation and all too often, to no good purpose at all.
Nevertheless, twice a year we come together to remember those who have died in the wars of our nation – Anzac Day on 25 April and Remembrance Day on 11 November. We can’t rationalize it. We mostly can’t justify what happened. We dare not romanticize it any more. The makers of wars are judged harshly by the facts of history. Many of those who went to war did so with enthusiasm, no doubt believing the political propaganda. Others were simply caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Nevertheless they went and fought and died. In some cases, even worse, they returned, maimed in body, mind and spirit to live out lives with their loved ones, almost forgotten or at best ill-supported by the nation that sent them to war in the first place.
But still we come to remember. We come to identify with them: with the individual and often unknown courage and self-sacrifice by which they gave of themselves; and with that distinctive fellowship we as Australians prize so highly – mateship. It is impossible for us to imagine the hardships they endured in the mud of Flanders, the burning sands of North Africa, the steaming jungles of Burma and the Kokoda trail, the degradation of the prisoner of war camps, or the sandstorms of Iraq and Afghanistan.
We come to remember. We come to identify with the despair and grief of heartbroken families who lost sons and daughters, husbands and wives and who continue a bittersweet remembrance. The lucky ones knew for sure that their loved one was dead and had a war grave to visit. Too often the last message was simply “missing in action.”
We come to remember. We come to identify with communities and with a nation that lost its brightest and best and most talented before they were able to realize their potential. We come to mourn the waste of life, the destruction, the loss; the ‘what might have been’.
We come to give thanks for their good intentions and actions. We come to repent the conflicts we have helped to create. We come to pledge ourselves to peace so that they will not have died in vain.
So on Friday, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the eleventh year of this new century, the School will once again observe Remembrance Day and we will somehow enter into the lives and events of time past. For “time past is present in time future” 1, and in doing this we come to experience a little of what the Queensland war poet John Manifold called “the courage chemically pure” 2, and reinforce within ourselves what it really means to be Australian in our present and in our future.
Remembrance that connects us in this way is important for any spiritual or cultural tradition. To be without the connectedness of individual and group remembering is to be adrift psychologically and culturally, without goal or direction. Remembrance is one of the greatest gifts and qualities we humans possess. It is not just some sort of sentimental dwelling in the past, because we cannot undo the past and we cannot linger in the present. We can only go on into the future with what the journey so far has taught us. The Greek word we translate as ‘remembrance’ means ‘to make eternally present’. And it is this sort of remembrance that purifies the past, comforts the present and lights the future. If we can live with openness to the processes of our past, then we can also live with greater openness to the opportunities, richness and learnings of our present and to the limitless possibilities of our future.
The wisdom derived from clear and balanced remembering not only indicates the possible but the right road ahead. Just as importantly, it tells us where we must not go and what we must not allow to happen again. It is all too true that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” 3. The acres of stark white crosses in the war cemeteries of northern France say ‘never again’. The poignant inscription on the mass burial site at Babi Ya – Earth do not cover my blood: let there be no resting place for my outcry 4 – demands that the Holocaust remains forever in the human memory, lest it be repeated. But the collective human memory is short. The pointless horror of war and genocide still goes on, even as we say, lest we forget.
If you have ever lived in an Australian country town or if you live in one of the older suburbs of Brisbane, you will often have passed a memorial surmounted by the figure of a soldier in World War I uniform, his rifle inverted, his eyes cast down and, on the column at his feet, name after name of those who have fought and often died in that and subsequent wars. Completing the list of names, the long familiar words: Their name liveth for evermore. 5
We’ve all rushed past memorials like this with barely a glance, let alone a thought as to what they represent. But this week we stop to remember, not just to honour those names from the distant or even recent past, but in contemplating their stories, better to understand our own. Because as we remember, we both enter into the events of the past and we also make them present. It is true that the past is never dead to those who would know how the present came to be: and the dead are never dead, as long as they inhabit the memory of the living, as who and what they were somehow become part of us.
Contemporary technology aids and reinforces this process of remembering and sense of connecting and human connectedness – historical films like Peter Weir’s 1981 blockbuster, Gallipoli, and television programmes that create stories out of the old sepia photographs and yellowing film footage. Young faces in uniform, looking out at us; faces we could have known. And so the story is told and retold. Somehow Gallipoli and the Burma Railway and Long Tan are no longer just pointless horror and meaningless disaster but have become part of our personal and community meaning; ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and somehow transcending themselves. In the midst of “the pity of war, the pity war distilled” 6, the loyalty, the mateship and the self-sacrifice smothering fear and self doubt, somehow they became what they otherwise might never have been – the stuff of myth and legend, encapsulating what we are at our best, as human beings and as a nation.
They must not have died in vain. They did not die in vain. We will honour their memory by achieving what they sought to achieve, by being what they hoped to be. They will continue to live in our memory and in our actions. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them” 7.
So here in remembrance, we make present those past lives that have become intertwined with our lives. We engage with the faces that look out at us from the old photographs. We name their names. We recall their deeds.
Their bodies are buried in peace. Their name liveth for evermore.
References
1. Eliot, T. S. (1944) Burnt Norton: Four Quartets. London: Faber
2. Manifold, J. (1944) The Tomb of Lt John Learmonth AIF. In The Heritage of Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Curry O’Neill
3. Santayana, G. (1905) Reason in Common Sense. Volume 1 of The Life of Reason. New York: Houghtom Mifflin
4. Job 16:18. Revised Standard Version.
5. Ecclesiasticus 44:14. Revised Standard Version.
6. Owen, W. (1915) Strange Meeting. In The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon
7. Binyon, L. For the Fallen (1914). In The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon