Rememberance Sunday

There was a very different feel to Remembrance Sunday this year.

For the first time since I was a child and used to put on my brownie uniform and go to the war memorial in the village were we grew up with all the other brownies and scouts, it felt like something bigger than a bit slotted into the service.  Both Milngavie and Bearsden have Ecumenical Services at their respective War Memorials, but I couldn’t be at both and practicalities meant it made more sense to be at Bearsden Cross.

Now anyone that knows the area will know the cross is quite a major route, even on a Sunday morning.  However, they shut off the roads de-touring the traffic down the quiet back street as a couple of hundred people gathered together in the bright Autumn sun to remember those lost long ago and those still being lost today through the horrors of war.  The strains of ‘Nimrod’ gathered the stragglers before prayers were said, Bible readings read, the last post and reveille sandwiched the two minutes silence, and wreaths were laid.  After in the Church a solo voice sung out ‘Make Me A Channel of Your Peace’, calling us to the heart of the Eucharist.  Don’t make us ostriches, burying our heads in the sand but make us channels of your peace Lord, bringing peace to the hearts of people even if they are suffering in the fields of conflict, let us spread your love, declare your hope and proclaim that faith can heal the deepest darkest sorrows.  I have always struggled with Remembrance Sunday in church mainly because no matter what I tried there was always a sense of tension around with no amount of explaining or personal stories being able to change it from an act of glorification to one of remembrance for some.

This year there was a real sense of purpose as a community joined together in and act of dignified remembrance.  A very good day.

Remembrance Sunday

Roll Call

Price was reading the roll call.  Before him were standing the men from his company who had managed to return.  Their faces were shifty and grey in the dark.

To begin with he asked after the whereabouts of each missing man.  After a time he saw that it would take too long.  Those who had survived were not always sure whom they had seen dead.  They hung their heads in exhaustion, as though every organ of their bodies was begging for release.

Price began to speed the process.  He hurried from one unanswered name to the next, Byrne, Hunt, Jones, Tipper, Wood, Leslie, Barnes, Studd, Richardson, Savile, Thompson, Duncan, Shea, Simons, Anderson, Blum, Fairbrother.  Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men in factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have frown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers’ shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

Of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names.

Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong