Thame remembers its war dead
HUNDREDS of people gathered together on Sunday, to remember all those who died fighting in the Great War of 1914-18 and all the conflicts since, including that currently being waged in Afghanistan.
In the minute’s silence that followed a lone trumpeter playing the last post, the only sound to be heard, ironically, was the distant gun fire of a local game bird shoot.
All the emergency services, young people’s groups, local authorities and most of the local clubs and organisations were represented in the wreath laying, and included the Mayor of Thame, Jeannette Matelot Green and Thame’s MP, John Howell.
The Rev Derick Chambers, conducting his last Remembrance Day service in Thame before he moves on to another pastership, told those assembled: “We cannot help but grieve over the loss of so mamy lives by war.”
“In one sense,” he continued, “war is a product of failure. War emerges as a spectre which hovers over the human race when nations, cultures or ideologies fail to agree, compromise or negotiate. It was Winston Churchill who said, “rather jaw, jaw, than war, war.”
“War is a product of failure of the human race to love each other at any level and every level. It is the antithesis of the greatest of Jesus’s teachings, ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ (John 15 v 13)
“But how can a man stand idly by and watch, as all the ideals he believes in, his loved ones and the concept of freedom itself, be destroyed by some deliberate act of violence? And therein lies the essence of conflict. The idealist will defend liberty and freedom, however abhorrent the taking up of arms is to him. However unnatural it is for him, he will give his life for a cause worth believing in.
“Times change,” he went on. “At Loos, in Belgium, 95 years ago this year, the British Expeditionary Force faced the invading German Army. On the first day of battle, 60,000 British soldiers were killed. Many remain unidentified from that day to this, and lie in war cemeteries alongside their fallen comrades. In Afghanistan, over the last eight years, over 200 British lives have been lost. This is not a war of the unknown warrior. Every name is known, every family is informed, and we who witness the procession home of another brave warrior, grieve alongside them too, for they are our son or daughter, our brother or sister.
The Rev Chambers concluded: “We are part of this world as Christ himself is part of this world. Jesus, who came amongst the oppressed, the suffering and the grieving. Jesus, who looked upon humanity with compassion but whose gaze never left the kingdom of heaven, commanded us to love one another, just as he did, until the day comes when we can live together as one human race and the spectre of war will be no more. Amen.”
09/11/09
