Lest we forget, let's dance with skeletons
This is an edited version of a sermon delivered by The Rev'd George Pitcher at St Bride's, Fleet Street, on Remembrance Sunday, 11th November 2006
The Act of Remembrance is a difficult one for those of us born since the last World War. Not just emotionally difficult - how do we engage emotionally with events from before we were born? But practically difficult too. To focus on the sheer scale of the lives lost to war is meaningless - we can't comprehend the scale of the loss and the suffering. But to concentrate on an individual might be invidious - a single person's story misses the collective narrative...that is, how among the many thousands who fought and died, the individual becomes truly selfless. Nevertheless, it is the latter path that I choose to take. I want briefly to tell you the story of Royal Medical Officer Captain Brian Brownscombe, of the South Staffordshire Regiment and a paratrooper. Brian had what people of his generation would call a "good war", until of course the day when he had a very bad war indeed. He was part of the battle for Sicily and fought in the Italian campaign. Flown in by towed gliders in 1943, his glider was once released early by its tug-plane and ditched in the Med. As the craft sank, Brian's batman, Pvte B W Dukes, announced with impeccable timing that he couldn't swim. Brian Brownscombe held him up in the water for 5 hours until they were rescued by a landing craft, an action for which Brian was awarded the George Medal. Later, in the Italian campaign, Brian - a heavy sleeper (as well as drinker) - slept through a German counter-offensive and evaded capture by driving through German-occupied territory and swimming out to sea, where incredibly he was hauled from the sea by the same landing-craft commander with the words: "Not you again!"
On Sept 17th 1944, he was part of the paratroop drop into Arnhem, where his luck ran out. In the fierce fighting, he and his fellow medics set up a Field Hospital at the back of the Municipal Museum in Arnhem. It was very full of wounded and more casualties were being brought in continually. The position at the museum became untenable and those who could do so withdrew from it. Brian Brownscombe and two medical orderlies stayed with the wounded. On Sept 19th the Germans overran the museum and they were taken prisoner, the medical officers being taken to the Municipal Hospital, where they continued to treat both British and German wounded in the days that followed. The following Sunday evening, Capt Brownscombe was talking to a Danish propaganda officer at the door of the hospital when a drunken SS officer, Karl Lerche, shot him through the head with a Luger from some nearby bushes. Brian's fellow officers did what they could, but they say the only surgeon that could have operated on the wound was the one who bore it. Brian Brownscombe was dead. He was 29.
Brian was my uncle, my mother's elder brother. I say he was my uncle but I wonder whether I should say he would have been my uncle, for I was born a little over a decade after he died. His presence nevertheless was huge in our family. He was not often spoken about, but the stories we did hear were about his fun, his riotous medical training, the carousing in London, my mother, a nurse, going out drinking with him and falling off the back platform of a bus as it cornered in Regent Street. The skeleton he kept under his bed that he would dance with to entertain medical students. The human hand that he threw from his University College window to startle a passing nurse.
I have often dwelt on Remembrance Sunday on what might have been and what might not have been had Uncle Brian lived. And today I ask: What are we to learn from one story among so many? My elder sister recently visited Uncle Brian's grave at Oosterbeek and walked for almost an hour among the immaculate headstones in search of one that recorded an age as high as Uncle Brian's 29 - most were in their early twenties; very many were 18 or 19. So, in a week when we have heard much from a church group called Ekklesia of pacifist white poppies to mark the folly of war, let me mark my generation's profound gratitude to that generation that I and my children do not live in a world run by the kind of man who pulled the trigger of his Luger in the bushes outside the Municipal Hospital of Arnhem.
In our condemnation of violence and war, we sometimes overlook the magnitude of the evil that those young men took on. Of course today we remember the waste of precious life among all nations in war. German, Japanese and Italian soldiers were victims too. But we're also entitled to remember with special gratitude and pride those who stood up to and prevailed over perhaps the most evil regime that Europe has ever faced, "made more sinister by the dark lights of perverted science".
It is the very ease with which we can identify that evil - Nazi Germany - that raises my next question: What are we to learn from the way my uncle and his colleagues lived, as well as from how they died? In our Anglican funeral liturgy, we commit ourselves to renewal of purpose in the time that is left to we who are left living. And so today we commit ourselves to renewed efforts to be vigilant, to be appreciative of our freedoms, to be fully alive out of respect for those who sacrificed their lives to save humankind from tyranny. But our difficulty today is that our world is so much more complex, the threats indistinct. Nazi Germany 60 or 70 years ago was a tangible enemy. Today we are told our war is not with a nation state, not with a regime, not with an army, but with an abstract noun - "terror". How can we aspire to live our lives in a manner worthy of the heroic man and women that went before us in, dare I say, more straightforward conflicts?
I return to my Uncle Brian and his colleagues in the Royal Army Medical Corps for inspiration. It is too simplistic to say that they were soldiers at the same time as being healers, the men whose Hypocratic oath, their commitment to the preservation of life, overrode their military obligations. But it's true that they took some different kinds of risks - such as staying with the wounded when the time came to retreat. And then treating the wounded irrespective of their nationality. There is a defiance of death in that, an acknowledgement that healing and making good and human life transcend the darkness of war. That view, that faith, can have no room for those who tell us that Islam is an evil, that we are civilised and others are not, that we are safe if only we stick among our own. The risk that we are called to take is not just to stand up to our enemies, but also to move among them, to recognise our common wounds and our common humanity, to heal.
In peacetime as in war. The abiding image I have of the uncle I never knew is of this big man waltzing in the arms of a skeleton, a man who took risks on London buses as well as in the streets of Arnhem. And in combining healing with fighting, let's take the risk of standing up for what we believe while engaging with our enemies. Let's defy not just those who wish us dead but those who wish our enemies dead, by even going among them, taking the risk that, even there, there may be healing that can be done. Let's fight for what we believe, but let's take the risk of staying with the wounded, moving among our enemies, doing what we can to heal. Let us in that way defy those, among our friends as among our enemies, who would deal only in darkness and death. Let us confront our mortality. Let us dance with skeletons.