11 November 2026

When Edmund Blunden made his way along the trenches on the Western Front, he passed ‘a young and cheerful lance-corporal’ with a mess-tin of tea bubbling over a little flame.

Three fire-bays later, a shell dropped behind Blunden. ‘I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought all was lucky as it should be.’ But it was not.

When he returned along the trenches, he discovered that the ‘young and cheerful lance-corporal’ had been blown to smithereens, his remains scattered on all sides.

‘At  this moment,’ wrote Blunden, ’while we looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.’

Time stops dead – the cheerful tea-making, the gruesome shelling, the split second between that time for war and that time for peace, the anticipated horror and the unimaginable grief of the lance-corporal’s brother.

This is our remembrance – on this and every day. Let us never forget it. This is war and this is the time for war! Christ’s covenant requires that we stand in the shoes of all three – the poet, the sacrificed soldier and his grief-stricken brother.