Remembrance and Resurrection

Edward Leigh MP

I have just been watching the Remembrance Day Parade, the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War. How unbearably moving it was to see the last three survivors at the Cenotaph. Difficult not to shed a tear at the thought that, of the five million who served, only these three amazing survivors are left.

November 11 was also the feast-day of St Martin of Tours. In the summer we stopped by at Tours for lunch. The Cathedral is fairly modern. Incredibly, St Martin’s tomb (he was born a pagan about 316) was lost and then found again by a local antiquarian in the nineteenth century. The old Cathedral had been destroyed, and by careful research he worked out where the high altar might have been and discovered it.

A true tale of Resurrection.

Martin, of course, was the soldier in the Roman Army who gave half his cloak to a near-naked beggar. “I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked, and you clothed me, sick, and you visited