��ѿ��ý

Available for over a year

Good Morning For the first time yesterday Ireland laid a wreath in the Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. One hundred years on, age does not weary the solemnity of this occasion, nor do the years condemn the importance of this act of remembrance. Standing out amongst the brave soldiers of the First World War there was only one who was awarded a double VC. The Victoria Cross with Bar went to Noel Chavasse. He was the son of the Bishop of Liverpool. An Oxford Blue with a first in Philosophy he, together with his twin brother Christopher, ran the 400 meters in the 1908 Olympics. He trained as a doctor, enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served on the front Line in France and Belgium. In 1915 he was awarded the Military Cross, in 1916 the Victoria Cross and in 1917 he was wounded north of Ypres. With a blow to his skull and under heavy fire, with mustard gas mixing it with wind and rain, he crawled through no man’s land to rescue the wounded. He saved numerous lives but not his own. Just before he died he dictated a letter to his fiancée and said, “Duty called and called me to obey”. When his father wrote to another of his sons to tell him of Noel’s death he cried, “Our hearts are broken, for oh! How we loved him. Your dearest mother is pathetic in her grief.” The Cenotaph is a testament to the pathos and love of all war-broken-hearts. From the Somme to the beaches of Normandy, from Northern Ireland to Helmand Province the roll call never ends. It’s true that they, the dead, grow not old; but it’s the testimony of the bereaved that neither does their love grow cold. Pathos is not perennial like a field of poppies. It’s soaked in the soil of the soul. Bishop Chavasse, Noel’s father, went on to write to his son, “What should we do in such sorrow as this, if we could not rest on the character of God.” For Bishop Chavasse, God was not a conquering hero, but one who showed himself through Jesus “as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. A grief that knows no national borders. Ireland’s presence at the Cenotaph yesterday shows that some enmities and enemies do not last forever. A thought reinforced on this the 25th Anniversary of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. That’s the hope that breathes life into the remembrance of the dead.