FS Kelly

Text of a talk from Remembrance Sunday

I’d like you to listen the beginning of a piece of music written in the year 1915. It’s called Elegy for Strings, and as you listen perhaps you will hear the sadness of war, or the stillness after a battle, or hope, or the lack of hope – listen to a minute or two now:

Elegy for Strings on You Tube

That piece was written by a young Australian composer called FS Kelly, Lieutenant-Commander FS Kelly; you’ve never heard of him, and perhaps you can imagine why. It’s a beautiful, sad piece fully titled, Elegy for Strings In Memoriam Rupert Brooke. Now you may have heard of the poet, Sub-Lieutenant Rupert Brooke, and recognise the opening words of his poem The Soldier, written in 1914:

If I should die, think only this of me;

that there's some corner of a foreign field

that is for ever England.

Sub-Lieutenant Brooke died of malaria, on an Allied Forces hospital ship in 1915. It was moored just off a Greek Island, and one afternoon he was indeed buried in some corner of a foreign field. Overwhelmed with sadness, his friend FS Kelly wrote his Elegy for Strings at the base camp for the Gallipoli campaign, where he was serving. Gallipoli. You see it’s not so much the year FS Kelly wrote his music, or even for whom he wrote his music, although both are significant; but that a young Australian composer and soldier could write something of such sad beauty at Gallipoli; a place where over 120,000 Allied and Turkish forces died.

On Remembrance Sunday we look back together, sometimes not too far. We are glad to see humanity at its sacrificial and its best; but we don’t rose-tint the view, and we also remember humanity at its saddest and its worst. On Remembrance Sunday we will never reach any easy conclusions, and all we can probably predict with certainty, is that the generations that come after us in this place, will be remembering conflicts that we haven’t yet conceived.

But we are in this holy place today, to say that even in humanity’s darkest hours, God’s grace abounds. God’s word reminds us that out of slavery and captivity in Babylon came a rebuilt nation; it reminds that St Paul sat on a Roman death row as he wrote some of his most inspiring words to his dear brother Timothy; and of course it tells us that Jesus Christ lifted his head as he was crucified, looked us in the eye and called out to each of us: Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.

Just as the beauty of FS Kelly’s music was birthed on the bloodied beaches of Gallipoli, today we remember that the most holy is found right in the middle of our most unholy. And therefore we have hope.

FS Kelly was wounded twice at Gallipoli, but, unlike many others, the young composer survived and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Sadly, in November 1916 he was killed rushing a machine gun post in the Battle of the Somme. He is buried nearby; in some corner of a foreign field.

Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord

They shall rest from their labour,

and their deeds will follow them. (Rev 14:13)