My 90-year-old father-in-law asked for my help recently.

He gave me a white linen bag, tightly drawn and knotted at the neck. It had been found among the possessions of his father, who died in 1969. No one had opened it since then – and for many years before. It had been too painful.

Inside were the fragments of a young officer’s life, lost at the age of 28 on the Somme. A small red envelope with only two lines of address contained the telegram. On the back of a scrap of paper was the beautiful copperplate, handwritten reply from the grieving father, thanking the King and Queen for their gracious sympathy, expressing comfort in the knowledge of their shared compassion.

There was a mother-of-pearl pocket knife, two leather purses containing sixpences, a yellowing newspaper from 1917, with the announcement of this much-loved soldier’s death. Along with two regimental swords was the original wooden cross which marked where he fell, later to be replaced by a marble headstone. Most poignantly – a carefully wrapped parcel, secured with loop after loop of red wool. Inside was nothing but a laundered white pocket handkerchief.

Like so many families, there were medals too. As I turned the busy pages of the Daily Telegraph edition from over 90 years ago, I was struck by all the pictures of ladies’ hats, sheep tonic, and military manoeuvres. Among all that activity, there it was: the briefest combination of two or three lines – the marking of a death unforeseen. The contents of the bag showed me how little physical evidence of a life can be salvaged from such an announcement.

Sitting in Magdalen College Chapel on Remembrance Sunday, the trumpeter’s Last Post and Reveille’s lingering notes of love, loss and fortitude filled the late 15th century building. A few minutes before, a single bell had tolled from the tower. Its sonorous, insistent note drew in pedestrians from the High and cyclists from the Bridge. As the two minute silence fell, we bowed our heads – not just for those who had died in two World Wars, but for all the victims of conflict – the majority of whom are civilians. They and their families are affected long after the battles cease. Addressing the congregation, Terry Waite CBE observed that while dignity was the keynote of the televised Cenotaph’s ceremony, “the smartness of the armed forces, the immaculate uniforms, the precision of the drill which impresses’ this event was ‘a million miles away from that it commemorates”.

Waite spoke of suffering as part of the human condition “although some people suffer more severely than others”. As the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy, and initial success in negotiating hostage release, Waite was himself seized at gunpoint and held hostage for 1,763 days between 1981 and 1987.

He noted that most wars’ “dysfunctional aims” are not achieved. Despite the sacrifices of the two World Wars, there had been no universal peace.

Yet while armed conflict was institutionalised within society, pacifism was regarded as mere idealism, but quoting his belief with the Psalmist, “still there was a future for the man of peace”.

Writing to a surviving son on the death of his Oxford educated sibling, another grieving father wrote: “Our hearts are broken, but oh, how we loved him.” He was writing of the death of Oxford’s war hero doctor and double Victoria Cross recipient, Noel Chavasse.

Yet death in war takes life indiscriminately.

To any family so affected, there’s a use for that hankerchief bound in red wool yet.

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