Christian Comment with Peter Carter, Stroud Quakers

Remembrance

THIS coming Sunday is Remembrance Sunday.

Together, we will honour the British and Commonwealth servicemen who died in two World Wars and other conflicts.

We are known internationally for the dignified and restrained way that we remember our war dead.

I have mixed feelings about Remembrance Sunday.

My parents were both conscientious objectors in the second World War.

They refused to join the armed forces.

Instead, they worked to help families bombed out of their homes during the blitz.

It is difficult, too, for me to remember selectively.

I cannot for example remember the sacrifice of our airmen in the last war without thinking also of the tens of thousands who died when the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan.

Also, I need to remind myself that respect for the courage and sacrifice of the fallen is not the same as glorifying the often cruel and senseless conflicts in which they fell.

Some years ago, I visited a German military cemetery at a monastery in north-west Germany.

One grave was marked “Ein unbekannter Ukraner”, an unknown Ukrainian.

He had died in the final months of the war as the US army swept towards the Rhine.

Numbers of Ukrainian men joined, or were pressed into, the German armed forces on the eastern front.

How this particular man came to be in north-west Germany, and how he died, we shall never know.

He was on the “wrong” side, of course.

But after all these years, does that really matter?

He was some mother’s son, and she never saw him again.

Surely Remembrance is about real people, military and civilian, who lived and died in the extraordinary circumstances of war.

It is not about abstract ideas such as glory and sacrifice.

Nor does it matter who won and who lost, who was right and who was wrong.

On Sunday, many people will want to think of a particular friend or relative who died in war.

But I have no friends or relatives to remember in this way.

So I shall think of the unknown Ukrainian.