Love has the power to cause a genuine response in every human heart.
Above all, “Faith, hope and love are all everlasting. But the greatest of these is love.”
My generation cannot remember our young people – on the scale of whole cities – despatched from our land to fight a bloody war in never-heard-of-places. Young people today haven’t received telegrams that their friends – on the scale of whole towns – have fought, been killed and been laid to rest in those foreign lands.
Young Australians and young Tasmanians can be, and are, thankful that they have been spared what so many of our forebears in this town and others had to confront. We are all thankful for the price paid by more than one hundred thousand Australians for the life that we and many across the globe enjoy today.
Many of us try to understand what our veterans from conflicts such as the World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan experienced. What were their love stories and did it have a happy ending or a tragic one?
From the safety of a library, a war film or a memorial museum, we can only imagine what it was like to be torn away from loved ones.
Or maybe a love letter from 1943 would do better…
One day when you are in Melb darl get me another one of your photos I have in my wallet. I am afraid the one I have will get rather Knocked about + I want one of them when I come home. Gee darl I love you + would swap all the photographs in the world if I could be with you again.
We can wonder if Gunner Marchant had always been a writer of romantic letters. Or perhaps the separation from his wife Ida in a faraway, brutal theatre of war coupled with an instinctive fear of death led him and his comrades to pour out words of love such as they had never written before. We could imagine that writing love letters from that position was a comfort to the serviceman and an act of love for those waiting at home, out of reach.
This cenotaph, like hundreds more in the same darkness of dawn services around Australia, carry the names of those who served and fell to protect the freedom of this town, this country and our freedom-loving allies. They died not knowing if or how their country would remember them, with no way of knowing if their life helped pay for victory or was forfeited in defeat. They died with no way of sending a final few words of love to a sweetheart back home.
Let us this morning also remember those who returned home to carry on with life – but who nonetheless suffered the sights, sounds, smells, stresses and wounds of war. They lived, but they too suffered sacrifice and were changed. Their spouses and children can perhaps best tell of the physical injuries, troubling memories and nightmares. Many an innocent, carefree Australian came home a damaged and, at times, tormented veteran.
Whether they died in battle or lived to tell, they both paid a price for their nation.
We call it sacrifice.
We honour them for their sacrifice for Australia and the cities and towns from which they were drawn.
This morning we rise early and stand together in the cold and the dark. This is no sacrifice, but an act of remembrance.
If we today will consider the importance of our love of a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a husband or a wife – we get a much better perspective of the incredible gift given by them. They gave their all. They forfeited years with the people they loved, raising families and building a nation in peace. They did this for their country and for future generations. They did this for us.
So we will remember them. We honour them. We thank them and God for the free nation of Australia we inherit. We can now resolve to live lives worthy of that inheritance and do what must be done so that future generations are spared the upheaval of war.
As for love: it is not a romantic idea today. It is real and we bear witness to its power even on Anzac Day.
As it is written, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man would lay down his life for a friend”
Lest we forget.
