Articles - From the Vicar

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird upon the rain-wet lilac sings--
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?

Unlike Wilfred Owen, his more famous fellow-soldier and poet, Wilfrid Gibson survived the horror of the trenches in the First World War, dying full of years in 1962. His poem Lament, which I quote in full above, addresses itself to the survivors of the conflict and, in particular, to the ambiguous feelings felt by those who came home, leaving so many of their comrades to lie forever in the fields of northern France. Gibson's poem is, in part, a poignant meditation on the guilt of the survivor.

For our generation, war is both nearer and more distant than it was for Gibson's. Nearer, because twenty-four hour news channels bring the horror of modern conflicts into our homes. More distant, because not many of us now have close family or friends who are in the armed services: over four million men fought in the British Army in World War I; today there are scarcely more than one hundred thousand serving soldiers. Commensurately few of us will now know how Gibson and his fellow survivors felt in 1918.
The silence we still observe on Remembrance Day is an important way for us to reflect on the waste of war, then and now, to remember all who have died in conflict, and, for Christians, a time to renew our determination to work for the peace of Jesus, our Prince of Peace.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay