The Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph is the nearest thing we have to a truly national religious moment. But there’s a paradox. It’s a religious – or quasi-religious – ceremony developed initially to commemorate the First World War, a war that is supposed to have killed religion. And it’s an act of remembering in which much is forgotten.
Dr. Michael Snape, Reader in Religion, War and Society at Birmingham University, explains this well: “What you have to remember is that these people had the same hardware as us, the same bodies, but very different software.”
That software was religion. The men who fought in the First World War were products of the Victorian Age. They will all have gone to Sunday School. The main meeting points of their lives and the parameters of their identities were defined by religion. It was not just how they made sense of what was happening to them. It was where they met, how they communicated, how they measured time. Churchmen in 1914 might have lamented the decline in churchgoing – churchmen always do – but Michael Snape says that religion at the beginning of the war was actually in pretty good shape. The idea that people were alienated from the churches because of the war is a retrospective reading of history.
We remember the Great War every year. But we remember it through the patina of what it has come to symbolise for us – waste and futility. That was not necessarily how it felt at the time. Many understood the call to war as a call to sacrifice, believing that the laying down of their lives could make the world a better place. James Clark’s painting ‘The Great Sacrifice’ which shows a British soldier lying ready at the foot of a crucified Christ was hugely popular. Published in The Graphic newspaper at Christmas 1914, one commentator said that, for a period, it turned every railway station news stall into a shrine.
One of the most moving things that my producer Rosie Dawson discovered during the research for my Radio 3 programme on God and the Great War was The Young Crescent – a beautifully produced monthly magazine from The Crescent Congregationalist Church in Liverpool. It ran right through the war, bringing news from the Front back to the community at home and sending messages from home to the boys at the front. Through the copies of the magazine it is possible to trace the painfully beautiful story of The Order of the Ginger Knut – a group of young men who enjoyed one last Lancashire walking holiday before going off to war. They invented their own ritual – a kind of confectionary Eucharist – in which they all placed a biscuit on their tongues at the same time and thought of home, and of Christ.
This parochial theological creativity finds an echo in the wider church as it struggled to meet the needs of those bereaved by the conflict. Ever since the Reformation the English Church had forbidden the saying of prayers for the dead. During the Great War, however, that historical, moral and theological objection began to crumble under the sheer weight of dead bodies, burned or lost far from home. It’s fascinating to watch the official church make pastoral accommodations in spite of its theological objections.
As it happens, Martin Luther himself did write a prayer for the dead. I find its simplicity and humility deeply moving.
Dear God, if the departed souls be in a state that they yet may be helped then I pray that you would be gracious.
That will do for me.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
God and the Great War is broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday 9th November, 6.45. Click here for more details.
