Sermon: Service of Remembrance 2010

The Revd Canon Dr Nicholas Thistlethwaite is Sub Dean & Precentor

Preacher:: Nicholas Thistlethwaite
Date:: Sunday 14th November 2010
Service:: Mattins
Readings:: John 11:50; Isaiah 2:4

‘It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ (John 11:50)

In March 1943, Elise and Otto Hampel were executed by beheading in the Plotenzee Prison in Berlin. They were ordinary Berliners: a working-class couple of limited education; the sort of people you would pass in the street without noticing. That was the clue to their success. For three years, this unremarkable couple had conducted a propaganda campaign that baffled the Berlin police, forcing them eventually to hand the case over to the Gestapo. What Otto and Elise Hampel did was to leave hundreds of individual postcards all over Berlin calling for civil disobedience and sabotage. In these ungrammatical and badly-spelt messages, the Hampels denounced Hitler, mocked the claims of the Nazi propaganda machine, called for a negotiated peace, and demanded freedom of speech. They left their postcards in the stair-wells of apartment buildings, at railway stations and in factories, and because they could go everywhere unnoticed – this perfectly ordinary, working-class couple – for a long time, nobody spotted them. They were eventually caught when a Gestapo informer who worked alongside Otto in a furniture factory (by then given over to making coffins for soldiers) found one of the cards on the floor beside Otto Hampel’s locker. There was a show trial, and they were both condemned to death.

After the war, their story became the basis for a novel by Hans Fallada. It has been translated into English under the title, ‘Alone in Berlin’. The fictional Otto accepts his capture and condemnation unemotionally. He even takes a detached interest in the mechanics of his execution. Despite the grim subject matter, with its unrelenting picture of the lies and violence of Hitler’s regime, the message that it sends out to the reader is a powerfully redemptive one. For although the book closes with Otto’s execution, he knows he has won. The detective who has been pursuing him, and who has in the process got to know his quarry at a deep psychological level, has had his eyes opened by the experience to his complicity in the evils of the Nazi regime and has taken his own life. A prison guard who has shown Otto some kindness when his superiors aren’t looking, has realised with shame that he lacks the courage to break with the regime. The clergyman who comes to prepare the prisoner for his death is a hypocrite who treats Otto as a common criminal. Their freedom is an illusion. Paradoxically, the man who is free is the condemned man. By actively opposing an unspeakably evil regime – by making no compromises with it – Otto has preserved his integrity. Morally, he has won.

‘It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’

When Caiaphas (the High Priest) said those words, he was not necessarily being cynical. In the word of realpolitik, he – the pragmatist, the survivor – had a legitimate point. Compromises are sometimes necessary for the greater good. A sacrifice can draw the poison out of a situation – restore the equilibrium. So, in the interests of public order and good relations with the Romans, Caiaphas was prepared to see Jesus sacrificed. His judgement was that the unacceptable alternative might be the annihilation of the Jewish state.

Jesus’ death on the cross was later interpreted by the Church, in the light of the prophecies and salvation stories of the Old Testament, as an act of redemption. That’s a theological point. But even for those who struggle with the theological meaning (or simply reject it), the story of Jesus has a redemptive quality precisely because it shows up the cruelty, violence and fallibility of human behaviour for what they are. A conspicuously good man is put to death by conspicuously bad (or, at least, morally compromised) men: by Caiaphas, by Pilate, by the soldiers who enjoy inflicting pain, by the crowds who call for Jesus to be crucified. Consequently, as he hangs dying on the cross, powerless, mocked, and abused, he has won.

‘It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’

The stories of Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, and Otto Hampel, the carpenter from Berlin, have something else in common which is of relevance to our act of remembrance today. Both were (on the face of it) ordinary men. Through the terrible wars of the last hundred years we have learned that is that it is often the ordinary men and women who make the difference.

That truth was powerfully expressed, ninety years ago, on Armistice Day 1920 at Westminster Abbey.

It is not known for certain whose idea it was that the British dead of the First World War should be commemorated by the burial of an ‘unknown warrior’ in the Abbey. To the promoters of the plan, the warrior would symbolise all those who had died for their country, whose place of death was not known, or whose body remained unidentified. The Government was enthusiastic, and a committee was formed to implement the proposals.

On the night of 7 November 1920, six bodies were exhumed from the main British battle areas on the western front. Each was draped with a Union Jack, and the commander of British Forces in France selected one ‘blind’. Three days later, the body in its coffin was escorted with full military honours to the quayside at Boulogne where Marshal Foch awaited it; it was then transferred to HMS Verdun for the journey across the English Channel. Having arrived in England, it travelled by rail to London, passing through Kentish stations with platforms lined with silent onlookers.

The following day (Armistice Day) the coffin was conveyed on a gun carriage to Whitehall where the King was to unveil the newly-completed Cenotaph. Vast crowds were in attendance. Following the Act of Remembrance, the gun carriage continued on its way to the Abbey, followed by George V and Government ministers in the role of chief mourners. One thousand women, who had lost husbands or sons in the war, were guests of honour at Westminster, and there the body of this ‘unknown warrior’ was solemnly interred at the west end of the nave. In the week that followed, more than a million people visited the grave.

The inscription reads: ‘They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house’. It is the one ledger stone in the Abbey across which no one is permitted to walk.

The grave of the Unknown Warrior is a potent symbol precisely because no one knows the age, rank, regiment or social class of the soldier interred there. He is therefore the representative of thousands or millions of our countrymen and women who have given their lives in war. He is everyman: the ‘one man who dies for the people’.

The great wars of the twentieth century, and the wars that have succeeded them, including the current conflict in Afghanistan, demonstrate that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. In the past, poets celebrated kings and nobles. In modern times, they celebrate ordinary men and women: Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’, the farm-hand who dies far from home in the South African veldt, Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘young man with a meagre wife / And two small children in a Midland town’, who loves to show photographs of them to his mates and is blown to pieces in the trenches, and Bruce Rain’s airman in the Battle of Britain, whose last flight is pictured as ‘his coronation / the chosen king of a chosen nation’. In their patriotism, their commitment to freedom, and their belief that political oppression and the threat of terrorism are intolerable and have to be resisted, they are the representatives of us all. In them, the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary. They give their lives, but their moral integrity is intact. They have won.

And so today we honour the men and women of our armed forces who fought the good fight, whose likenesses we glimpse in the flickering film images of the trenches and ambulance stations of 1914-18, of the sea, air and land battles of 1939-45, of the bleak and dusty landscape of Afghanistan today, and of many (too many) other conflicts of the last hundred years. So many lives. So many lives that demonstrate how apparently ordinary men and women can achieve extraordinary things when faced with the ultimate test as they pioneer the way to that promised future when nations (in the words of Isaiah)

shall beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruning-hooks …(2:4)

and when the seed that falls into the earth rises to new life and bears a rich harvest to be shared by all.