Rev.Dr. Peter Jenner

 13/11/11 (Remembrance Sunday)

 James 3:13-18 Matt 5:43-end

It was at a visit to the Harris Art Gallery in the centre of Preston that I first came across works by a painter called Charles Spencelayh. His dates are 1865 to 1958. He painted a lot of domestic scenes with incredibly precise detail, including some character studies of working class people in their homes. Spencelayh’s gardener often acted as his model, including for the picture in Preston which caught my attention.

A man, aging but not yet elderly, is sitting, alone, in a small room in an ordinary home. His clothes, and the wallpaper and the furniture and the cloth on the table next to him, are all shades of brown. The room is very drab and quite dark, rather cluttered. The mood is one of sadness, perhaps gloom, possibly oppression. Within the room there are various reminders of Englishness. On the wall is a painting of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar; on a shelf a small bust of Wellington, reminders of British history.

The man in the painting is seated, hunched forward; he’s staring into space, pondering, deep in thought. The word that comes to mind when I look at him is ‘forlorn’. But he wears proudly on his jacket the ribbons of military medals. He’s evidently a veteran of the First World War, the ‘War to End All Wars’. On the table next to him we see remains of his afternoon tea, but next to them lies, incongruously, a gas mask. And on another chair is a newspaper. It’s a Daily Sketch from September 1938. On the front of the paper, a photo of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain under the headline: “Premier Flying to Hitler”.

This First World War veteran is evidently keeping up with the fast moving events of September 1938 when Chamberlain had a series of meetings with Hitler. The month would end with the Munich agreement and Chamberlain famously announcing that he had negotiated “peace for our time”. Spencelayh started his painting very shortly after the events of that month and in a very uncanny way he foresaw what was to happen, as in the painting this veteran seems to know that that peace would not last. I think I see in his expression the thought, “Please God, not again.” The following year, 1939, the Royal Academy nominated this work as their ‘Picture of the Year’. It (I quote) “caught the mood of the nation”.  This painting is entitled “Why War?”

That title is a question which could have been asked at most times in human history. It’s a question which the Old Testament addresses in different ways, the New Testament rather less. But what the New Testament does stress is that peacemaking is a mark of the kingdom. In the words of that letter of James: “Peace is the seed-bed of righteousness, the peacemakers will reap its harvest.”

My father was in the army in the Second World War and he was one of those who, once the war had ended, hardly ever spoke about it. When he was de mobbed, which for him wasn’t until 1947, he must have assumed that the best thing to do was to look forward in hope to a bright, new, peaceful world, without dwelling on the horrors and difficulties of the past. I can understand those of his generation who felt like that. So I find myself remembering very well the remarkably few occasions when I’ve ever heard him speak about the war. On those occasions he did seem to imply that he felt about it in a way which I’ve heard others speak at greater length, which is like this: my father would never have used the word, but it strikes me that many of his contemporaries felt that it was the ‘calling’ of their generation to eradicate a particular manifestation of evil from Europe.

One of the very few occasions when I ever heard my father speak about such things was at, of all things, a school play. One year when I was in my mid-teens our school play was a drama depicting the futility of the First World War, and through a story of men in the trenches it raised the question for every time and every place: “Why War?” think that school play was probably the first time I came across a clear portrayal of the position of pacifists. And I remember my father getting into a very heated discussion with someone about it. my father was asking the question: what else could Britain have done in 1939? I remember him saying, “If you do away with war, what do you replace it with?”

At the time, I thought that was a really odd thing to ask. I now realise it’s a very pertinent question. Given the adage attributed to Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”, are there limits to what good men can and should do? And I think that probably since that school play I’ve struggled with what I think about the big issues of war and peace-making and not letting evil triumph and, not least, with trying to work out if there can be any answer to the question: “If you do away with war, what do you replace it with?”

I don’t pretend to have anything like a complete answer to that question of my father, but I’ll relate something I heard recently which made me think again about some of these issues. It’s always been said by people whom I’m sure know what they’re talking about that in the years following 1945, the countries of Western and central Europe were so motivated by the thought “Please God, never again”, that that became the stimulus for the process which ended up establishing the European Union and its many associated European institutions. Given the turbulent history of Europe over centuries and particularly the two world wars of the 20th, the countries of continental Europe wanted to forge links which meant that they could never again find themselves in a position where their only option was to go to war with one another.

A commentator on the radio yesterday spoke about this and said that the European Union “was founded as a response to war rather than as a result of war.”  In other words, usually throughout human history the victors have made sure the defeated knew who won, rather than giving everyone the opportunity to say together, “Please God, never again.” But in Europe following 1945, it was the latter which prevailed.

But that idea was taken much further in another radio interview I heard a few weeks ago, which included a thought which I found at first quite bizarre but which has stayed with me. Someone involved in international finance at a high level spoke about the problems in that world, the problems which we’ve been hearing about in the news for the past few years. And then he said that the current financial crisis was happening as an alternative to countries going to war. He said that the rivalries and incompatibilities and frictions between European nations used to be fought out between armies on the battlefield but, given the way things work now, they’re fought out instead by people like him in the financial exchange markets.

I heard that and I thought, “I don’t know enough about the financial world to know if that way of thinking holds any water at all.” But I’ve since asked a couple of people who do know about such things and they tell me that there could well be something in this. And if there is, despite the hardships caused by financial crisis and the vehement political disagreements both in Britain and across Europe, I can’t help thinking that the present problems are preferable to the alternative. I can’t help but find myself with a little more hope for the future if people are saying that, even in part and even in just one region of the world, we may have started to say that there is an answer to the question, “If you do away with war, what do you replace it with?”

A fitting tribute to the fallen of two world wars and the victims of current conflicts would be to hear the voices of those who prayed “Please God, never again” and to find how we can make a peaceful world, in which no-one has to ask, “Why War?”.