Remembrance Sunday - where the poppies grow
I was privileged last year to go with Peter Rollington and the Great War Battlefields team, to visit some of the war graves in Northern France, and to attend the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres.
As we drove from Dover to Goudhurst, through the beautiful Kentish summer countryside, I was reminded how many of the War Poets, writing from the horror of the battlefields, talked about their longing for England, and specifically about their longing for the beauty of the English landscape.
Siegfried Sassoon, amongst the most famous of those war poets, who loved Kent and lived down the road in Matfield, and whose pre-war writing was all about the countryside, wrote his poem To Victory shortly after arriving in France. The poem includes these lines:
I want to fill my gaze with blue and silver / Radiance through living roses, spires of green,
Rising in young-limbed copse and lovely wood / Where the hueless wind passes and cries unseen.
He didn’t just long for home, he longed for the countryside back home.
The author John Lewis-Stempel in his wonderful book, Where the Poppies Grow, quotes the letters young men wrote home, full of love for the English countryside.
Here’s one of the many soldiers that he quotes - a young Lance Corporal called Francis Ledwidge;
“Coming from Southampton in the train, looking on England’s beautiful valleys all white with spring, I thought indeed its freedom was worth all the blood I have seen flow.”
And Lewis-Stempel argues that British soldiers heading off to fight in France signed up, not just for love of country, but specifically for love of countryside. That for many soldiers, it was a deep love for England’s fields and woods that they went to fight and die for.
Here’s another quote from a young soldier, Lieutenant Christian Carver;
“I always feel that I am fighting for England, for English fields, lanes, trees, English atmosphere and good days in England - and all that is synonymous for liberty.”
It was the beauty and wonder of England’s hedgerows and meadows that embodied the freedom the Tommy’s were fighting for.
And many of the soldiers writing home filled their letters and diaries with details of the nature they saw all around them in France; about the horses, birds and flowers that helped them survive the horrors of war.
And it’s no coincidence that the enduring symbol of the price paid for victory - for freedom - is a wildflower; a poppy. The flower that restored beauty to the ravaged earth.
It’s 101 years now since the guns fell silent in Northern France, and still we’re here, wearing poppies and remaining true to the promise to remember them.
And one of the things they fought for was the beauty of our land, our wildlife, the gentle beauty of an English meadow.
And today there is another form of destruction being wrought to the earth. Another challenge to the freedom of the beautiful world in which we live. This time it isn’t shrapnel and barbed wire that cause the damage, this time it’s plastic in the seas and CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s bulldozers in the rainforests and oil wells in the Arctic.
I’ve been watching David Attenborough’s 7 worlds 1 planet, and I have been deeply shocked by the damage it reveals that we are causing.
The second episode, about Asia, showed images of the horrendous destruction being done to the Indonesian rainforests. And I couldn’t help but think, as I watched, that these desolate wastelands of mud, once havens of biodiversity, looked remarkably like the battlefields of the Somme, Paschendale and Thiepval.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 250,000 people will die each year as a result of disease connected to Climate change.
The United Nations says that 1 million plant and animal species are currently threatened by extinction.
The IPCC - the International team of scientists and global research experts on Climate change - suggest that there will be between 25 million to 1 billion refugees in the world because of climate change, with 200 million recognised as a best estimate. 200 million people having to leave their homes as a result of the climate emergency.
And it’s not just Asia, or Africa where people and animals are already suffering terrible consequences from human actions, it’s right here in our beautiful England, the England those young men fought so hard for.
37% of UK species have declined over the last 10 years.
15% face extinction.
2% have already been lost forever.
Back in 1914, it was the decisions of politicians and Generals which led to the disaster of the Great War; today, it’s our own way of life that’s brought about the disaster of biodiversity loss and climate emergency.
How as Christians are we called to respond?
The Bible is the story of God’s passionate and never-ending love for his world. We have just heard about that love in the reading. And the bible is clear that God loves the whole of creation - animal, plant and mineral; stream, meadow and mountain. After all, the bible begins in a beautiful garden, filled with wildlife and plants, where there is a perfect harmony between people and planet. And the Old Testament is full of glorious lyrical passages where the mountains dance with joy and trees clap with delight. God’s creation is alive and singing a love song to its creator.
And then we get to Jesus, who spends most of his time outdoors, beside the sea, up mountains and on country roads. His stories are full of the language of field and farm; he talks about seeds, birds, trees and soil, of nature as the teacher of greater truths.
But despite his teaching, despite his sacrifice, despite the sacrifice of previous generations, still we fail to learn. We destroy one another in war and we destroy the earth by our way of life.
I wonder what those young men, who signed up in their thousands in 1914, inspired to fight for love of the countryside, birds and the sheer beauty of creation, would make of the world we have created.
We promise to remember them. And perhaps the best way we can do that today is by committing ourselves to fight with all we have, for all that they held dear, for God’s good and glorious creation.
But our fight will not be with the weapons of war, it will be with the choices we make.
Whether it’s buying less or cycling more; using less plastic or recycling more; shifting our energy supply to renewables, campaigning, protesting or planting for wildlife; changing what we eat, how we shop or the way we travel ….
Whatever we choose to do, let this be our memorial to the young men who died for their love, not just of country, but of countryside.
Men, like Ford Madox Hueffer, of the 9th Welsh Regiment, who wrote “In two days time we enter the Unknown, but this is what we die for…as we ought… it is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds that we die, and for the sake of the quiet fields.”
Amen