By: Shafer Parker

My first encounter with Eric Bogle’s wonderful song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” came when I was listening to Canadian singer John McDermott’s double platinum first album Danny Boy, released in 1992. McDermott has built his career supporting veterans and soldiers by mostly singing anti-war songs, which, when you think about it, perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times. Anyway, Bogle’s song tells the story of a young Australian soldier who lost his legs during the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War. The point of the song is made when on Australia’s ANZAC Day (equivalent to our Remembrance Day) some young people ask of the veteran’s parade, “What are they marching for?” The singer replies, “…and I ask myself the same question.”

The song is immensely sad, but cathartic. But what’s even sadder is that no one seems able to answer Bogle’s question anymore. Not the singer, who implies that without his legs life has lost its meaning, and not songwriter Bogle, who poignantly leaves the question unanswered. And, quite likely, not most Canadians. When I began that last sentence I intended to say, few Canadians under 50, but then I thought, how many Canadians of any age really understand the purpose of the wars our ancestors fought? I suspect the percentage is vanishingly small.

Ironically, considering Bogle’s song is supposedly sung by a First World War soldier, the purpose of that war does not seem like a mystery to those who wrote of it at the time. For example, in Canadian soldier John McCrae’s famous poem “In Flanders Fields” the purpose is so obvious that he can assume his readers will know his meaning when he exhorts them to “take up our quarrel with the foe” and then holds them accountable if they “break faith with us who die.” So guilty will those faith breakers be that McCrae feels justified in threatening them with the dead soldiers becoming restless in their graves should that happen (“We shall not sleep ...”).

McCrae merely hints at what the soldiers were fighting for, but in “For the Fallen” (1914) Laurence Binyon states it plainly: England’s children had “Fallen in the cause of the free.” So meaningful are those deaths to Binyon that he can write of, “A glory that shines upon our tears.” And instead of plaintively asking the purpose of their devotion, Binyon can say, “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old/Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn/At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.”

The contrast between the early twentieth century and the late twentieth century could not be greater. Without endorsing any particular war, or military action, it must be noted that at the beginning of that century the vast majority of people living in England and amongst her scattered daughter nations, knew there were things worth dying for. By the end of that same century, not so much. And now that we’re well into the third decade of the 21st century? Well, I’ll let you, the reader, answer that one for yourself.

GIVE TODAY!

So, what was this “cause of the free,” that Binyon lionized and that McCrae hinted was the real “quarrel with the foe?” I will answer that question, but before I do, let me pause a moment to mourn two things: (1) that so few will know the answer already, and (2) that so many will spurn the answer when it is given.

The answer is, the cause for which so many English and Canadian soldiers “gave the last full measure of devotion,” and which was still widely understood in the early 20th century, was a heartfelt application of the rule of law that was almost unique to Great Britain and her colonies. When Britain fought Germany in the First World War, they understood that they were defending a view of law that could genuinely be referred to as a law of liberty. Not the law of liberty referred to in the epistle of James (1:25). That law is directly related to God’s work in the believer’s soul and is in effect regardless of a person’s cultural or national heritage.

Instead, I’m referring to a related law of liberty that first received the name Magna Carta (Great Charter) and was signed by King John and his barons at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. That the Charter’s promise of liberty was honoured more in the breach than otherwise for 400 years, is almost beside the point. As Winston Churchill writes in The Birth of Britain, “The leaders of the barons in 1215 groped in the dim light towards a fundamental principle. Government must henceforward mean something more than the arbitrary rule of any man, and custom and the law must stand even above the king.”

Quite frankly, apart from England and her satellites, including English Canada and the United States, that principle has never really been embraced elsewhere.* And that explains why, so long as the memory of the Charter and it’s logical outgrowths in law (known collectively as the English Constitution) remained entrenched in the minds and hearts of the English peoples, neither England, nor its offshoots could ever produce the equivalent of an Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, or any other of the many tyrants that are so regularly inflicted upon the suffering billions of our world.

Another way of seeing this concept is to remember Elrond’s familiar phrase as he sent the “Fellowship of the Ring” to their doom: “May the blessing of Elves and Men and all free Folk go with you.” I submit to you that this sentence from The Lord of the Rings could only have been written by an Englishman, and that an Englishman could write it only because of England’s special commitment to a higher law, a law of God, that exempted no one, not even the king. This idea did not begin with the Great Charter, but the Charter represented an advance in its expression that did not die until the last century.

Today, as we honour Canada’s fallen in “that long forgotten war,” let us remember that to a surprising degree our liberties have been taken from us, not by war, but by distraction. Ever since that Great War we have been dazzled by successive governments, each promising more and more benefits for the flesh while stamping out liberties that encourage the growth of the soul. These have been governments that largely had no love for, nor even memory of, the Charter that made England great and, for a time, enabled a world that experienced some brief moments of true liberty. It’s time, dear people, to take up McCrae’s torch once again and hold it high. We must not break faith with those who lie in Flanders fields.

*As a backhanded compliment to English history “rule of law” was used by the Nazis to justify their horrific inhumanities in the Second World War. Not unrelated is the modern insistence on “rule of law” that characterises so many modern, lawless governments. All of them abuse the expression because none of them believe in the Supreme Law Giver who ultimately holds nations and national leaders to account—forever!

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