Coming back is always difficult. We had stood at Tyne Cot in a circle by the names of Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, killed in action on 7th October 1917, and I had called out every 7th person round the circle. This was to represent the one in seven who, having served in WW1 didn’t return at the wars end.
I reminded them of what Mr Yonge said when the war memorial was dedicated in 1920 heard not say much, burnt out as he was from the emotional draining of the war years but he reminded those present of the vision of peace and justice they had struggled to uphold.
There are many things that separate us from the generation of 100 years ago, just as there were many ways in which they differed from each other: volunteers and conscripts, combatants and noncombattants, pacifists and conscientious objectors.
We are a digital generation: blogs replacing letters from the front line. Even so human emotions link us together. The group had reflected on the lives of some of those ‘shot at dawn’ earlier in the day in Poperinge. We were tired and still a long way from home when we boarded our ferry at Zebrugge to Hull.
So what will we remember about our journey together? Some cited the visits to trenches still visible a hundred years after the conflict. There was the misty morning at La Boiselle crater and later at the Thiepval Memorial: the mist itself making its contribution to the emotions of the day. As the landscape emerged from the fog so the cemeteries if the old front line of The Somme Battlefield began to be seen more clearly, each one marking the sacrifice of another hundred or thousand young men.
There was the rebuilt city of Ypres and the tunnels dug under the city of Arras. There were the small personal items in a display case: a bible, a letter, a photograph. There were the old rusting remains of ordinance piled up alongside manglewurzels at the edges of fields. There was name after name on gravestones and on walls and sprinkled amongst the hundreds of thousands that tiny few, the 42 we looked for and acknowledge as our own.
I never knew them in life, the Silcoates Pals, not like John Yonge did who taught 39 of them, but their photographs and stories have been a big part of our remembering in these centenary years. We will return to remember again next year with another group of students.
For those who think we have spent too long on such remembering, I have said before that it is a serious and challenging task. We hold it in common with so many other people. Daily other human beings join the ranks of those remembering others killed in war. We cannot shirk the task. Just as the Psalmist recalls the trees clapping their hand and the valleys singing, so we too know that cities can wail and fields can weep.
Meanwhile, the sun rises on another day.

In our life and our believing
The love of God