At 11pm on 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany, 11 hours after Germany had invaded Belgium, a neutral country and a country that Britain had a long standing treaty to protect. The German’s had wrongly thought the agreement a mere ‘scrap of paper’; and so began a global human tragedy. Lasting for 4 years, the war mobilised 65 million men; more than 21 million people died including 13 million civilians. With these sobering thoughts in mind, I walked with the Tribe to our local church, St Mary’s, for a vigil service commemorating the centenary outbreak of the First World War.
Our service was in the morning at 11am and parishes across the country held similar services, others holding services at 11pm marking the exact time of the declaration of war. After gathering inside for a hymn and prayer, the small congregation walked out to gather around the village War Memorial where the list of those who died were read out followed by others who had died in the war but were not named on this memorial. One of the names read out had been killed in Iraq (Mesopotamia as it was then). It is depressing to think that the region still has so many troubles today, not helped perhaps by what happened at the end of the war when the Allies went back on their promise of giving Arab leaders control of the Middle East, instead carving up the area into ‘mandates’ run by Britain and France under the eye of the League of Nations. This was when half of Palestine was set aside as a Jewish homeland – very much in the news today. I digress.
A beautiful commemoration wreath was laid at the memorial – we had been asked to bring a garden flower to insert in the wreath. A lovely and moving idea and one that the Tribe appreciated being part of. After another prayer we returned inside.
Two poems were read; the first by Philip Larkin, MCMXIV (the Roman numerals for 1914), a brilliant and depressing insight that following the outbreak of war the age of innocence was gone forever and would never return again. The second was Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Attack’, a vivid and terrifying description of fighting in the trenches – Sassoon fought on the Western Front, so his descriptions are very much first hand. The Tribe listened attentively to all of this and I hope that they will remember what they learnt; it is so, so far from their lives today, and I hope it will remain that way, but I also hope that they will learn this important part of our history. More prayers and another hymn followed before the service ended. I was so glad that we made the effort to go – it was a moving tribute to those who gave so much 100 years ago.
