A video reflection for Remembrancetide

The Revd Dr Peter Doll, Canon Librarian and Vice Dean, shares a video message for Remembrancetide as we remember all who have lost their lives in times of conflict.

Watch the video message above and read the full text below.

"Remembrance is a time of year when we call to mind most particularly those from the armed forces of the Crown died in warfare. The slaughter of millions of soldiers in the trenches of the First World War so profoundly shook this nation that the end of that conflict has never been forgotten.

Here at Norwich Cathedral the Remembrance season starts a month earlier than Armistice Day, as each year on the twelfth of October we remember the martyrdom of the nurse Edith Cavell, whose execution by the Germans in 1915 provoked a worldwide sense of revulsion. Edith continues to be revered by the armed forces because in a real sense she risked her life for their safety. Unlike other Remembrance services, here military veterans share the centre stage with nurses who stand as an honour guard around Edith’s grave. As is fitting, we honour both those who have risked their lives fighting for the sake of freedom and those who also risked their lives healing the wounded and comforting the dying.

Edith witnessed to the power of love even in the midst of the worst of human violence and hatred. In 1914, she was working in Brussels as the founding director of the first professional nurses’ training school in Belgium. Caught up in the German invasion, she insisted that all her nurses should treat enemy and friendly soldiers just alike. Each man was a father, husband, or son, and as nurses they had no part in the quarrel. She said that the profession of nursing knew no frontiers.

Edith’s care for the vulnerable extended also to those allied soldiers caught behind enemy lines. Even though the German occupiers of Brussels threatened death to anyone assisting these soldiers, from early 1915, Edith became part of an underground network that helped them escape to the neutral Netherlands. At times she had German soldiers upstairs in her clinic, and Allied soldiers hiding in the cellars.

Eventually Edith and the rest of the underground group were all arrested and imprisoned. Edith was tried along with 34 others and found guilty of treason. On the afternoon of 11 October 1915, she learned that she and a resistance colleague would be executed by firing squad the next morning.

Edith faced her death with calm courage. She said, ‘I have no fear or shrinking. I have seen death so often it is not strange or fearful to me’. As a Christian and as a nurse, she had committed herself to the service of others, conscious that this might cost her everything, even the sacrifice of her own life. As Christ had done from the cross, she prayed for the forgiveness of those who would kill her: ‘I expected my sentence and I believe it was just. But this I would say, standing as I do in view of God and eternity: I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’. Edith’s words were a rejection of the patriotic hatred that drove the war, and they are words that speak to us just as powerfully and directly today.

If humanity has any hope of breaking out of the cycles of hatred and violence that mar our world and the human race, it will be only when we learn, as Edith did, to recognise the humanity of our enemies, and to love our neighbours, one person at a time."