BBC Radio 4 2016-05-30

BBC Radio 4 2016-05-30

Good morning. Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, and while historians continue to debate whether it was stalemate or victory for either side, commemorations rightly highlight the cost of war in individual lives.

Over 8000 sailors died and as Admiral Lord West, commented: "We forget sometimes, these sailors didn't die in an instant. There were ones trapped below decks, terrible burns. War is horrible - it was a horrible death on both sides, and we must remember that." They included 16 year old Jack Cornwell, a former delivery boy from Leyton who was mortally wounded in the first salvo of the battle, and due to his bravery at staying at his post became the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross.

While Jack became a national hero, many other victims are easily forgotten. Ross Coulthart, in his new book 'The Lost Tommies' presents and annotates a photographic archive of British soldiers who fought in the same war at the Somme. It is almost impossible to comprehend the 17 million who died in the first World War, but the horrific reality is etched in the faces of these photographed soldiers as nervous smiles are slowly replaced by dismay.

Sometimes in the big political and military decisions about the need, tactics and weapons of warfare, it is easy to forget the individual. Yet the individual stories point us back to our humanity. Another teenager at Jutland, Edgar Ellis, survived shrapnel lodged in his forehead and went on to also fight in the second world war. The Bible given to him by his grandmother stayed with him during all this time and it is annotated on various dates with somewhat sadly 'still at war'. Yet it falls open at Psalm 23 'the Lord is my shepherd'. Perhaps in the midst of where individual courage and fear is often subsumed by propaganda and politics, Ellis encountered a God whose love for the individual is constant despite the mess of this world.

Yet this belief of Christians, while providing comfort, is not meant to be an opiate to tolerate the inevitability of war or injustice. God's concern for every individual has energised ethical reflection, combatted the kind of fanaticism which claims that 'with God on our side' everything is justified and led to political reform.

The commemoration of a naval battle fought 100 years ago rightly remembers individual stories, not only to better understand the history but lest we forget that the terrible cost of war is borne in the stories of refugees, the injured and the dead - whether off the coast of Jutland or Libya or in the city of Fallujah.