‘Aces High’ downed – Red Baron & Prancing Horse:

The Royal Air Force, formed on 1st April, celebrated by shooting down German ace Manfred von Richthofen three weeks later. He was the ‘ace of aces’, the fighter pilot who brought down the most enemy aircraft. He had begun the war as a cavalry officer before transferring to the German air force. He led a fighter wing known as the ‘Flying Circus’ because of their brightly painted aircraft.  Von Richthofen’s own personal machines were painted bright red, giving rise to his nickname, the Red Baron. Between September 1916 and April 1918 he brought down eighty allied aircraft before he was finally brought down. One RAF fighter pilot, Mick Mannock, refused to toast von Richthofen on his demise, saying “I hope the bastard roasted on the way down.” Later, in the summer, British novelist D H Lawrence was married to Frieda von Richthofen, a distant cousin of Manfred.

In June, Italy’s highest-scoring fighter ace, Francesco Baracca, was killed. His aircraft featured a prancing horse symbol painted on the side. Years later Francesco’s mother suggested to a young racing driver called Enzo Ferrari that he adopt the symbol for his racing cars.

The Australian Corps go fishing:

Above: An Australian Imperial Guard keeps watch.

The renowned Australian Corps came under the command of the British Army’s General Rawlinson early in 1918. He was pleased with the men and wrote in his diary about their unusual pastimes in the trenches:

They are certainly original fighters and up to all sorts of dodges, some of which would shock a strict disciplinarian. Some of the German shells were falling short into the pools of the Somme river and exploded under water. Two Australians spent the day in a boat rowing about and watching for a shell to explode and then picked up the stunned fish. They wore their gas masks to prevent recognition!

Third Battle of the Aisne, 27th May – 9th June:

Aiming to tie the Allies down to allow a main attack in the north, the Germans launched their third large-scale attack at Chemin des Dames and the River Aisne with a new storm breaking on the Aisne heights, a ferocious artillery barrage that shattered French units massed on the front line. It was estimated that two million shells were fired in the four-and-a-half-hour-long preliminary bombardment. By the evening, the French gains in the three great actions had vanished like smoke, and the Germans had crossed the river, advancing fourteen miles on the first day, an unprecedented success on the Western Front. Operation Blücher-Yorck was a great success for the German commander, Erich Ludendorff. On the second day, he was beyond the Vesle, and on the third, his vanguard was looking down from the heights of the Tardenois on the waters of the Marne. It was the swiftest advance made in the West since the beginning of trench warfare.

Pleased with his success, Ludendorff then changed his plans and took forces reserved for a northern attack to support a drive westwards to Paris. The message painted on Germans trucks read, On to Paris! But the advance ran out of supplies and momentum as American troops, fighting their first engagement of the war at Cantigny, together with French forces, stood in the way. Captain Lloyd Williams of the US Marines in Belleau Wood summed up the Americans’ mood; Retreat? Hell, we only just got here! Williams was killed in the ensuing battle that followed on 6th June. The Marines began a counter-attack to take the wood. On the first day, they lost 1,087 men, more than had been lost in the whole of the Marines’ history to that date. Nevertheless, after three weeks of brutal fighting, they eventually took the wood. Meanwhile, on 9th June, Ludendorff had tried to cut off the Allied salient between the two great dents he had made but failed again. His position was hopeless; he was the victim of his own early successes.

Above: New British troops arrive at a port in France.

Battle of Matz, 9th – 13th June; Advent of the Americans:

Operation Gneisenau, a further German attack, was intended to straighten their forward line. Despite inadequate planning, they pushed the French back, gaining six miles of territory and inflicting heavier casualties than they suffered. However, the offensive floundered and French counter-attacks forced the Germans to halt proceedings after only a few days. In the course of this Spring Offensive, as it became known, they had lost 963,000 men. By this time their surviving soldiers had become so disheartened and disillusioned by their failure to break through the Allied defences that they began shouting abuse at their own reinforcements, calling them, War prolongers! At the same time, ten thousand Americans were arriving each day in France. By the summer of 1918 half a million ‘doughboys’ were on the front line. The British Army was also reinforced, having suffered a 36% casualty rate during the Spring Offensive, with 540,000 new recruits being sent to the Front between March and August. But the Germans facing them still had 207 divisions in all, compared with 203 Allied divisions. Britain also employed manual workers from several nationalities to work in France:

Chinese               96,000

Indians                48,000

South Africans     21,000

Egyptians            15,000

West Indians        8,000

On 19 July, Honduras became the last country to join the war, declaring war on Germany.

Heroines at Home and at the Front:

Above: Women filling shells.

Back in ‘Blighty’, after an explosion at the Chilwell National Shell Filling Factory in Nottingham killed 134 employees, it was suggested that the Victoria Cross be awarded to staff for their subsequent bravery in going about their own work. Sadly this was not done, as the medal could only be given to individuals in uniform. The number of women in non-domestic employment in April 1918 had risen to 4,808,000, 1.5 million more than four years earlier.

At the Front, two British women who had earned themselves the nickname from Belgian troops, the two Madonnas of Pervyse, Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker, were injured in a gas attack in 1918. They had travelled to Ypres in 1914, setting up an independent first aid station. They were awarded seventeen medals for bravery.

The Second Battle of the Marne, 15 July – 5 August:

The May and June attacks by the Germans had driven the French back from the Aisne to the Marne. There are two explanations for the surprising extent of the German advance, shown on the map below. First, instead of attacking in ‘waves’ of men, they advanced in small groups pressing forward where the opposition was weak and keeping their reserves close at hand to exploit any gap created. Secondly, the British Fifth Army was unusually weak: the line recently taken over from the French had not been put into a proper state of defence; Haig had massed his reserves in the north, where he expected an attack; and after Passchendaele, Lloyd George had retained many reserves in England to prevent unprofitable squandering of life. However, by early July, the German successes had failed to bring outright victory.

The advances had so exceeded Ludendorff’s expectations that he was unprepared to exploit them. The British troops offered magnificent resistance in response to Haig’s famous order, With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. Finally, the arrival of Allied reserves, in fresh condition from Palestine and Italy, turned the tide.

Ludendorff still hoped to create a diversion that would allow a decisive attack in Flanders. His last offensive began on 15th July, east and west of Rheims. Divisions drove forwards, crossing the River Marne in several places, but then they were held. The advance achieved nothing and instead the Germans had fallen into the Allied trap. Hitherto Foch had stood patiently on the defensive, hoarding his assets. He had tried almost too highly the fortitude of the British soldier. Now he had got his reserve, and Haig, to augment it, had dangerously thinned his own front in the north, to the consternation of the War Cabinet. The moment had come to use it. On 18th July Foch counter-attacked on the right flank of the new German salient and drove it in. This attack was led by masses of light tanks which forced the Germans to retire. It was not a great counterstroke, but it forced Ludendorff to pause and consider. He halted and then began to withdraw from the Marne pocket.

Foch now had freedom of movement, for with him, at last, was the full American army. By July, there were already a million Americans in France. The German command had long been aware of how great this menace was, but the German press had told the people that it was only a force in buckram. Even up to July this newspaper belittlement continued. But at Chateau-Thierry in June an American contingent had fought with furious gallantry, and on 15th July in the same area, one American division and elements from another had rolled back the German assault. These were the troops who, according to the German press, would not land in Europe unless they could swim like fishes or fly like birds. They had proved their worth in pushing the Germans back to their March starting positions.

Preparations for the Peace Offensive:

But the true counter-attack was not to come until August, at Amiens. In July, the Allied attacks showed the effectiveness of ‘all-arms’ battle tactics, with troops and tanks advancing behind an artillery ‘creeping barrage’ while ground-attack aircraft swept overhead. At Amiens, these were to be put into operation to great effect. The plan for the Peace Offensive, which aimed at compelling a German surrender, was wholly British. Haig had now come to the height of his powers and was a different man from the cautious, orthodox soldier of the earlier days of the war. He had not always been happy with his French colleagues; in some ways, he had been too similar to Pétain, and in every other way too dissimilar to Foch, to be quite at ease with either of them. But now his mind and Foch’s seemed to be on the same ‘wavelength’. The Chief of Allied forces was now elevated enough to take advice, and from Haig, he drew not only his chief weapon – the tank – but also many of his tactics, as well as certain key points in his strategy. The British Army had suffered far more than the French in terms of casualties, but they were still ready to take the chief role, one which they retained until the last day of the war. This was a measure of the reverence in which Foch held his ally. The British ‘Tommy’ was, by now, well-disciplined, as the following notice, pasted into their pay-books, suggests:

Keep your mouths shut! The success of any operation we carry out depends chiefly on surprise. Do not talk – when you know that your unit is making preparations for an attack, don’t talk about them to men in other units, or to stangers, and keep your mouth shut, especially in public places.

British troops at Verneuil, 19 May 1918.

This secrecy was essential to success at Amiens since many previous battles had shown the Germans fully aware of Allied plans. The tables were now turned, with British intelligence also far more effective than it had been previously. Detailed preparations could be made on the basis of information obtained which identified 95% of German artillery positions. In particular, Lt Ernest Rollings MC of the 17th Armoured Car Battalion (pictured left) went ‘behind enemy lines’ to recover detailed plans of the Hindenberg Line. On his return, he commented that it was by far the best fighting day I have ever had. In 1931, a newspaper report described the Welshman as ‘The Man Who Ended the War’. Perhaps the journalist who wrote of it thought that he deserved a ‘niche in the pantheon’ alongside that other iconic Welshman, and PM, David Lloyd George (below), the Man who won the War.

Above: David Lloyd George at the height of his power.

The Temper and Temperature of Britain:

For now, however, the temper of Britain through the spring and summer was heavy and apathetic, but it revealed by little spurts of violence how near men and women were living to the outer edges of their nerves. The crisis of March and April had produced a new resolution, but it was a resolution which had no exhilaration in it and little hope. People had begun to doubt if the War would ever end. The night was still so black that they had forgotten that the darkest hour might presage the dawn. But as the months of ‘darkness’ dragged on, and the word from the battle-fields was only of still further retreats and losses, the popular mood sank again into a dull listlessness. To make matters worse, in June there was an outbreak of ‘Spanish ‘flu’. Thirty people died in Lancashire, but no one had any idea how many millions more it was about to kill.

For Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the soldier-poets, the satire they wrote was partly the product of the feeling that they belonged to a different race from the civilians they found themselves among while convalescing at Craiglockart Hospital near Edinburgh. Sassoon published his satirical poems in Counter-Attack (1918). Many of them were protest poems indignantly implying that the war was being needlessly prolonged by politicians and generals who could have stopped it. While Owen was on invalid leave in England, if he met civilians who talked too glibly about the war, he would thrust in front of their eyes photographs of horribly mutilated soldiers. But he, together with Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell, reserved his satirical condemnation for the rich, old men who were making a profit out of the war and did not share the soldiers’ terrible discomforts and dangers, yet concealed their selfishness behind a front of self-righteous flag-waving and jingoism. In his poem, The Parable of the Old Men and the Young, Owen envisages Abraham killing Isaac despite God’s command to sacrifice a ram instead:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

This indignant mood that led these soldier-poets to satirise civilians is revealed in a letter which Owen wrote to his mother from Scarborough in July 1918:

This morning at 8.20 we heard a boat torpedoed in the bay, about a mile out. I wish the Boche would have the pluck to come right in and make a clean sweep of the pleasure boats, and the promenaders on the Spa, and all the stinking Leeds and Bradford war-profiteers now reading ‘John Bull’ on Scarborough Sands.

The Return of the War Horse & the Fall of the Virgin:

The morale of the soldiers at the Front throughout the spring and early summer matched the cynical protests of people and poets on the home front, for the war to be brought to an end. It was perhaps best summed up in the following song:   

Meanwhile, preparations for the offensive continued throughout the summer. Fifteen thousand cavalry horses prepared for action. Cavalrymen had operated as unmounted infantry for most of the war since there were few opportunities for horse-mounted soldiers to fight effectively on the typical Western Front battlefield. As the fighting became more open again, cavalry began to be utilised once more.

Earlier in the war, in the town of Albert, near to the Somme, a statue of the Virgin Mary outside a church was hit. It didn’t fall completely and remained, leaning over. It was reckoned that when it finally fell the war would end. At the beginning of August, the statue toppled. Trench warfare on both sides was certainly coming to an end, thanks to the tanks. But as the Germans left their trenches in the summer of 1918, they left notices for the British to warn them that the war was far from won and lost:

Dear Tommy,

You are quite welcome to what we are leaving. When we stop we shall stop, and stop you in a manner you won’t appreciate.

Fritz 

Sources:

Norman Ferguson (2014), The First World War: A Miscellany. Chichester: Summersdale.

Fiona Waters (2007), A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Illustrated Poetry of the First World War. Croxley Green: Transatlantic Press.

John Buchan (1935), The King’s Grace, 1910-35. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Irene Richards, J. B. Goodson & J. A. Morris (1938), A Sketch-Map of the Great War and After, 1914-1935. London: Harrap.

E. L. Black (1970), 1914-18 in Poetry. London: University of London Press.

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It’s been a long Good Friday, not just in Northern Ireland, so can the UK City of Culture, 2013, help us turn Bloody Sunday into a Day of Resurrection? In ‘Derry Days (Extracts from a Diary)’, Myra Dryden muses on Sunday routines:

Why do I hate Sundays so much? I think if I were in a coma for thirty years and woke up on a Sunday I would instinctively know what day of the week it was…

 

….there’s a wealth of material in this twenty-four hours of misery for any writer worth her salt. I mean, right at this minute, I am contemplating a play on the subject. I’ve got the title ready and waiting, ‘SUNDAY BORING SUNDAY’, and I’m directing it at Radio Foyle. It’s about an old man, living alone in a council flat. Everybody I know is in it (and a couple I don’t), and they all decide to visit on the same Sunday afternoon, each thinking he or she will be the only one there…the pensioner can’t wait to get back to his old boring Sunday routine by the end of the play… I’ll never understand why the Boomtown Rats hate Monday so much.’

(Published in Borderlines: A Collection of New Writing from the North-West, edited by Sam Burnside, 1988.)

Bob Geldof in 1991. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Myra Dryden was born in Derry and went to live in Singapore, England and Cork for eighteen years, before returning to Derry, with her family, to run her own business and study at Magee College. Perhaps someone should have told her, on her return, that it wasn’t the Irish punk group who hated Mondays, but a senseless teenage killer, one of the first of many to open fire on US schoolchildren. She can be forgiven for not knowing this if she was in Singapore at the time the record was released, as it was banned from most US radio stations, despite its popularity on the other side of the North Atlantic. According to Bob Geldof, he wrote the song in 1979, after reading about the shooting spree of 16-year-old  Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in the playground of Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California on 29 January 1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions was “I don’t like Mondays: This livens up the day”.The song was first performed less than a month later. Geldof explained how he wrote the song in Atlanta, where he was doing a radio show. He had just heard about the shooting and was on the way back to the hotel when he thought of the brilliant line, ‘the silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’.  The journalists interviewing her said, ‘Tell me why?’ because it was such a senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So Geldof wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it, not as an attempt to exploit tragedy. The other famous line, ‘the lesson today is how to die’ was later applied (by him) to the situation in Ethiopia during the Live Aid concert, but it could equally well be applied to Bloody Sunday and the bombings in Belfast and Birmingham, as well as to the more recent school shootings in the US. All have been senseless deaths of children and young people.

Bloody Sunday mural in Derry on Free Derry Corner (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For those who don’t remember or don’t know about the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, 30^th January 1972, it followed on from the sending in of British troops in 1969 to protect the Catholic minority from Protestant violence and intimidation. To begin with, the majority of Catholics were welcoming towards the soldiers, but the Irish Republican Army was not. It began to shoot soldiers and policemen, and the Army responded by making intrusive house-to-house searches in Republican areas, locking up suspects without trial. This was called internment, and the Army frequently imprisoned the wrong people. Protest marches were organised by the Civil Rights Association, such as the one which led to ‘Bloody Sunday’. Twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters were shot by British soldiers in the Bogside area of the City. Thirteen died of their wounds on the day, including seven teenagers, and another man died of his later the same year. Five of those wounded were shot in the back. Two other protesters were run down and injured by Army trucks.

Mural of victim of Bloody Sunday (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

The event is commemorated in U2’s well-known 1983 song, the lyrics of which, while condemning the Army, are not at all supportive of ‘the battle call’ of the IRA:

Broken bottles under children’s feet

Bodies strewn across the dead-end street

But I won’t heed the battle call

Puts my back up

Puts my back up against the wall

 

And the battle’s just begun

There’s many lost, but tell me who has won?

The trench is dug within our hearts

And mothers, children,

Brothers, sisters torn apart.

 

The UDA marching through Belfast’s city centre in a massive show of strength, summer 1972 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Thirty years after this song was recorded, perhaps we are all in danger of retreating into our own communal trenches. Last year, forty years after Bloody Sunday, with the sectarian battle(s) seemingly over, and following many investigations and official enquiries, British PM David Cameron finally made a formal apology in Parliament in 2012. At the time, the soldiers from the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment claimed that they had been fired upon first, and that some of the demonstrators had guns. However, no weapons were ever found at, or near to, the site. On Bloody Friday, 21^st July 1972, the ‘Provisional IRA’ placed 22 bombs all over Belfast, in shops and cars on the streets, killing nine people and maiming 130. These were ordinary citizens, not policeman or soldiers, who had been targets in the past. The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) also began a campaign of terror with bombs and bullets, killing many innocent people.

28.01.2007 Derry, Ireland Bloody Sunday 35th year’s commemoration. At the end of the march people gather at Free Derry corner where the names of the victims are recalled; on the top of a building members of the bogside republican youth show anti-Sinn Fein signs, calling for a vote in favour of independent candidate Peggy O’Hara. Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LoJcsO3SxY Part of Occupied Ireland set (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

However, In 1974, the IRA took their campaign a stage further, by placing bombs in pubs in ‘mainland Britain’, killing many innocent teenagers. On 21^st November, they placed three bombs in Birmingham. Two were in city centre pubs, and the third outside a bank along one of the main roads into the city, along which I and my friends travelled every Saturday night on our way to ‘Youthquake’ gatherings at St. Philip’s Cathedral.  I remember returning from the city centre, where I had been eating in the Wimpy Bar next to ‘The Tavern in the Town’, where a bomb went off in the underground bar, getting off the bus at the terminus at the top of the avenue in Edgbaston where we lived, some four miles out of the city, and hearing the blast. The bomb which had been placed on our bus route had failed to detonate. After that, almost every Saturday for the next four weeks before Christmas, we were called out of the city-centre department store I worked in, for bomb alerts. Our next-door neighbours were Irish, and I also remember the backlash they and many other faced in the large Birmingham Irish Community, which led to the wrongful conviction and sixteen-year imprisonment of ‘the Birmingham Six’. The twenty-one victims killed in the two explosions, eleven at ‘the Tavern in the Town’ would now be, like me, middle-aged, with grown-up children of their own. Many of the hundreds who survived the blast suffered horrific, life-shattering injuries. Yet the real bombers have never been charged, despite the accusation that the then leadership of the IRA, now ministers in the Stormont Government in Belfast, know who they were. A petition has been started by one of the victim’s family to get the case re-opened, so that they can be brought to justice.

Bloody sunday mural by the bogside artists showing Father Daly escorting injured marchers to safety using a white handkerchief. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It took another ten years after the publication of Borderlines and our visit to Northern Ireland from Birmingham for the Agreement to be reached on Good Friday 1998 which ended the fighting in the Province, hopefully for good, though recent events in Belfast show that the sectarian cultural conflict between Unionists and Republicans is still deeply rooted in many communities, despite all the efforts made in the eighties and nineties in ‘Education for Mutual Education’. Through the Christian Education Movement, Religious Education teachers from a variety of schools throughout the West Midlands of England and Northern Ireland came together to exchange resources and produce a pack for use in secondary schools dealing with the themes of ‘Conflict and Reconciliation’.  It was based on the principle that pupils needed to work on their own identities, both as individuals and members of communities, before they could develop the skills to span religious, cultural and ethnic divisions. The pack was published by CEM in 1991, and for a time proved very popular with schools in both ‘regions’. One wonders if, following the Good Friday Agreement, the politicians took over and the real architects of peace were pushed into the background, depriving a new generation of any sense of ownership over the peace process and forcing them back onto the streets to express their identities in limited symbolism and violence.

mural waterside Derry (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

Myra Dryden’s ‘Extracts from a Diary’ end with the following entry for a Friday, which reminds me of the irrational trepidation I felt when I saw my first Army patrol on the streets of Londonderry, around the same time as the incident she describes here:

This morning I heard the sound of shooting in Bull Park. I’ve been shaking ever since.

 

Then, the knock. It was somehow undemanding, soft. A badge was waved by way of explanation.

 

“Strand Road.”

 

“Did you hear anything?”

 

“See anything?”

 

(Feel anything)

 

I heard cars back-firing: thirty of them. I saw the frightened faces of children, through spinning bicycle spokes. I felt a volcano erupt inside my head, and splatter over Friday’s ‘Journal’.

 

Aloud I lie.

“Nothing.”

 

Retreating footsteps echo through the frosty night air. Low voices carry over from next door.

 

“Did you hear anything?”

 

“See anything?”

 

(Feel anything)

 

I cool my brow on the vestibule glass.

 

Another Year.

 

Do I feel anything? Nothing that a bottle of Valium and a one-way ticket to Australia wouldn’t cure…

The final verse of U2’s song doesn’t pull any punches about the real solution to ‘the Troubles’. They don’t put their faith in ‘Victory for the IRA’ but in the Resurrection Day Victory of Christ:

Sunday Bloody Sunday (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The real battle’s just begun

To claim the victory Jesus won

On Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

 

The politicians have claimed their victory, but have the people of Northern Ireland claimed their victory over death? Having learned today’s lesson of how to die, isn’t it time for all societies on both sides of the Atlantic to outlaw the bullets as well as the bombs, and to move on to learn the lesson of how to live securely without them? Good Friday is behind us, but Easter Sunday has yet to dawn. Perhaps Derry/ Londonderry, as the UK City of Culture can show us all, in 2013, how to treasure our traditions without remaining slaves to them.

Related articles

• Bloody Sunday by Douglas Murray – review (guardian.co.uk)
• ‘Sunday’ Outrage (fiannaiochta.wordpress.com)
• Families continue Bloody Sunday march for justice (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
• N Ireland open Bloody Sunday probe (bigpondnews.com)
• A view of UK City of Culture from the near abroad (sluggerotoole.com)
• Derry launches City of Culture year (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
• Curtain To Rise On UK’s First City Of Culture (news.sky.com)

 

Independence:

 

Watching the quarter-finals of the men’s singles tennis tournament from London yesterday, at the same time as preparing for my Bible Study on ‘Independence’, following on from 4^th July, I was reminded that there are some famous lines on this theme which are painted above the players’ entrance to Wimbledon centre court:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same…

They come from a poem by Kipling, two full verses of which are given below. What I like about these lines, written for his son, is that they emphasise that we should not be afraid to fail in life, and imply also that the line between success and failure is very fine indeed. In our daily lives, we are always crossing this line, or having it crossed for us, so that triumphs are turned into disasters and disasters into triumphs. It is all a matter of perception. What I may perceive as a success, someone else may see as a disaster, and what I regard as a catastrophic failure someone else can view as having the seeds of success. It depends upon

perspective, I suppose, on whether you’re face down in the gutter or looking up at the stars! One thing is sure, that God gives us permission to fail, even if others don’t, because he knows that only by conquering our fears can we gain true freedom in Christ, gaining our independence in the world, as well as from it.

NSRW Rudyard Kipling (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘IF’ (1910) (First and last verses)

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

English: Jack Kipling Suomi: Jack Kipling (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And- which is more- you’ll be a Man, my son!

Kipling – best-known as the author of ‘The Jungle Book’ – helped his poorly-sighted son gain a ‘commission’ as an officer in the British Army at the beginning of the Great War. He was killed in action and Kipling never forgave himself, turning against war. This is the subject of a recent BBC film starring David Suchet and Daniel Ratcliffe. It’s this theme of the relationship between generations, and the balance between independence and inter-dependence, which constantly recurred in Kipling’s life and work, and it’s a theme explored in these prayers, reflections and meditations..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOVING ON: WE WELCOME NEW FREEDOMS

Reader:

 

The routines of our former life are passing away now. We have outgrown the formal relationships that protected and disciplined us. We leave behind the shelter of our schools and colleges and enter the arena of free society.

 

Leader (Prayer):

 

Lord…

We welcome the freedom to embark on a new career;

Freedom to earn our own money, or train to earn it;

Freedom to spend our money or to save it;

Freedom to set new routines for ourselves;

Freedom to plan our leisure time;

Freedom to shoulder new responsibilities;

Freedom to make new meanings out of life.

 

We welcome new freedoms

To grow into the world you have given us;

To travel to the destinations you have prepared for us;

To meet and serve the people you have waiting for us.

 

In the challenges of freedom – Equip us;

In the decisions of freedom – Direct us;

In the arts of freedom – Discipline us;

In the dangers of freedom – Protect us;

In the joys of freedom – Steady us;

In the uses of freedom – Guide us.

 

Readers:

 

Let’s now praise those who have given us our immediate heritage: those from whom we have learned to think and understand, to know beauty and see goodness, to learn from the world and to recognise God.

 

There are those who have taught us, forgiven us, believed in us, and enjoyed our company and friendship.

 

There are those who have laughed with us and not at us, who protected us with their understanding when we were under fire from others.

 

There are those whom we have taken for granted.

 

And there are those who have loved us without conditions.

 

There is no need for jealousy and conflict between the generations. Let us know comradeship with those who are older and comradeship with those who come after us, as we share the same world and head for the same destination.

John 16. 25-33:

 

Victory over the World

 

“I have used figures of speech to tell you these things. But the time will come when I will not use figures of speech, but will speak to you plainly about the Father. When that day comes, you will ask him in my name; and I do not say that I will ask him on your behalf, for the Father himself loves you. He loves you because you love me and have believed that I came from God. I did come from the Father, and I came into the world; and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”

 

Then his disciples said to him, “Now you are speaking plainly, without using figures of speech. We know now that you know everything; you do not need to have someone ask you questions. This makes us believe that you came from God.”

 

Jesus answered them, “Do you believe now? The time is coming, and is already here, when all of you will be scattered, each one to his own home, and I will be left alone. But I am not really alone, because the Father is with me. I have told you this so that you will have peace by being united to me. The world will make you suffer. But be brave! I have defeated the world!”

 

Readers (Meditation):

 

What, free to suffer? Yes, but to bear it and make meaning of it.

 

What, free to stand the relentless monotony of manual labour? Yes, but not to be dehumanised by it.

 

What, free to take never-ending exams? Yes, but not to become victims of the exam system, not to allow it to label us as ‘failures’.

 

What, free to be involved in the sins of mankind? Yes, but to be forgiven by the One upon whom the judgement fell.

 

What, free to believe in a true God of love in a world of ruin? Yes, but not without proving him true.

 

What, free to die? Yes, but only to find that you are sons and daughters of God and destined for eternity.

 

We are in the world, and we shall have trouble with it, for we are not of the world;

 

‘We are all in this recession together,’ say the politicians;

 

We are in the same boat, and the boat is being rocked by a storm;

 

We are of the same population, which is exploding;

 

We are on the same road, and the road is blocked;

 

What a world!

 

Millions still enslaved by warfare;

Two-thirds of the world still enslaved in poverty and hunger.

 

John 8. 31-36:

 

Free Men and Slaves:

 

You’re probably familiar with the following chorus, sung every year at ’The Last Night of the Proms’ accompanied by various gently self-mocking, patriotic theatricals from the stage and the auditorium at the Royal Albert Hall. You may be less familiar with the translation of the Hungarian national song written by the national soldier-poet and hero of the 1848 Revolution, Sándor Petöfi. It has become popular again recently, recited and chanted by the crowds in Budapest on the anniversary of the Uprising on March 15th. Both contain Declarations of Freedom from Slavery, and this theme was an important one in the interaction between Jesus and the religious authorities of his time, who did not understand why this man from Nazareth was telling them that they were not really free. The idea that they were sinners and that they needed to be set free from their enslavement to sin did not go down very well among those who were proud of having Moses and Abraham as their ancestors.

 

Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves,

Britons never, never, never,

Shall be slaves!

 

(Thomas Arne)

 

On your feet now, Hungary calls you!

Now is the moment, nothing stalls you,

Shall we be slaves or men set free?

That is the question, answer me!

By all the Gods of Hungary

We hereby swear,

That we the yoke of slavery,

No more shall wear!

 

Slaves we have been to this hour,

Our forefathers who fell from power

Fell free and lived as free men will,

On land that was their own to till,

By all….

 

(Petöfi Sándor, translated by Szirtes György)

 

 

 

 

 

John 8. 31-36:

 

So Jesus said to those who believed in him, “If you obey my teaching, you are really my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

“We are descendants of Abraham,” they answered, “and we have never been anyone’s slaves. What do you mean then, by saying, ’You will be free’?” Jesus said to them, “I am telling  you the truth; everyone who sins is a slave of sin. A slave does not belong to a family permanently, but a son belongs there forever. If the son sets you free, then you will be really free.”

Reader:

 

Against all the victimisation of the world, God has set us free, and we are free indeed.

 

So, in the freedom of the Son, the perfect Man,

We shall make money honestly,

We shall make love honourably,

We shall make time for those who need us,

We shall make friends of our enemies,

We shall make peace with them, and with God,

We shall make Him supreme governor in our lives,

For in his service is perfect freedom.

The Lord is my employer. I shall never be redundant.

 

 

Leader (prayer):

 

Lord,

 

Now it is our turn to join in; to share the responsibility;

 

To bear this responsibility we need your protection, Lord – the armour-plating of your spirit. Protect us…

 

From big businessmen and bankers who see us as little people with no power to stand on our own feet;

 

From corporations who treat us as an easy market for their junk;

 

From advertisers who promise success for the price of a tube of toothpaste or a bottle of sun-tan oil;

 

From status symbols and celebrity culture, and the lust for money;

 

From those who would pollute our minds, soil our bodies and ignore our spirits;

 

From a world still full of bombs and drugs;

 

From ourselves, for we are too often our own worst enemies.

 

Lord, as we go out into the world…

 

Help us to remember…

 

In our colleges and offices,

In hospital or prison, in the city or on the land,

In the coffee bar or on the motorway,

In whatever place, in whatever condition:

 

All:

 

We are always free to love and serve our neighbour,

We are always free to love and serve God.

 

Amen.

 

 

(Adapted from Paul Kimber’s prayers and meditations for the St Alban’s District Council of Churches)

 

 

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