GENEralities

Remembrance Day is just past. It seems to me to be a day about the worst of times and the best of times.
What follows is part of a letter from an old soldier. Bill Ward, my father in law, served as an artillery officer in the New Zealand Army in the Second World War. He wrote this letter to Jude, my wife, when she was going through some challenging times in her life.

I can remember back all those years to the time when I was a soldier in the New Zealand army in Italy doing what I suppose had to be done with a 25 pounder gun. In that period which was about two years in length of time I can recall how from time to time I suffered dreadful bouts of depression, homesickness and sadness. As did, I guess, every soldier in such circumstances no matter what country in the world was his home. Can you imagine a 21 year old boy, newly married, in a country so far from home, in the midst of a freezing Italian winter cowering in fear from the brutal war which was raging about him? If you can, you can imagine me.

Now I look back down the arches of the years to that awful period of men’s affairs and I wonder at how little the agony touches me now. . . No matter how hard I try I cannot call up enough detail to experience the pain I must have felt then. . .

But consider the other side of the coin. Italy is simply a beautiful country and without any effort at all I can summon up all sorts of detailed images and memories of it so that in the present time I can still enjoy the happy times in perfect detail and can recall them clearly as though they happened only yesterday. I could give you a list to go on and on—the awe of Vesuvius erupting, the far away mountains, the enchantment and the sense of history of Rome, the magnificence of St Peter’s, the cold clinical beauty of the Palace of Victor Emmanuel, the summer sun on the hills around Florence and across the blue Mediterranean, the absolute magic of Venice, the joy of the war’s end in Trieste—these things and many more I remember even more clearly and with greater pleasure as the years go by. I survived the horror of the war I fought in, and while its lessons and the values it taught will never be forgotten, the agony of the way those lessons and values had to be suffered has faded into the dimness of history.

My father in law is a wise man. It is interesting that he now finds it hard to conjure up the details of the awful things he experienced. Remembering such things requires some effort. Remembrance Day is a part of that effort. We need to remember the sheer, bloody cost of war—the agony, the loss, the sadness. Why? So we will never embark on it too lightly.

Despite the agony and suffering, however, it is the good things, like the beauty of the Italian countryside, that Bill Ward remembers. For some, war was a positive experience. It was exciting. There was travel to exotic places at government expense. There were wonderfully close friendships. Marriages began in those heady, risky days. Everything was more intense and full of life because the possibility of death was so close. Ordinary peace time life must have been pretty tame by comparison.

I suspect there are many of us who yearn for a bit of that excitement and intensity in life.

From an old and wise soldier, to an old and wise woman: Near the end of Parenthood, the movie, after all the bedlam and turmoil, Grandma says,

You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster. Up, down, up, down . . .I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just interesting to me that that ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited and so thrilled all together. Some didn’t like it. They went on the merry go round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.

Grandma’s roller coaster sounds like Bill Ward’s war.

Remembrance Day is about life lived to the full. It’s about ordinary people risking all for a way of life and a set of values. It’s about living lives that are full—full of fright and pain and sorrow, robust good health one moment and sickness the next, excitement and thrills and memories and colour and wonder. Lives open to the possibility agony and loss, but also open to beauty, love and heroism. It’s life like the roller coaster. Jesus called it abundant life. You get more out of it.

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