Catch-17: the first question every Christian must answer is, "Why are you not a pacifist?".

It was always bitterly cold, despite the crowd huddling around the Cenotaph in the days of my childhood. Hamilton's Gore Park provided focus for the ranks of soldiers and sailors of the Great War, as it was called. I remember the cold and the awful minute of silence shattered by volleys that startled pigeons into sudden flight. Before that, of course, the parade had been colourful and even cheerful. My father's group, the Veterans of Gallipoli, marched with the Royal Naval unit, since they had been Wavy Navy volunteers with land service in Turkey and Flanders.

War creates a special camaraderie, possible only where shared near-death experiences forge bonds of trust and reliance. The flip side is the memory of fearful threat and violent loss. A letter from the American Civil War battlefront described it as "days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror." Warfare loses its glamour in the reality of mud and rats and lice. The Great War poets made this clear as their initial romanticizing switched to echoes of human degradation and suffering.

Siegfried Sassoon, raised in affluence as a "fox-hunting man," turned to grimmer realities after the lessons of trench warfare in Flanders. He scorned the Brass Hats (as did Canada's own C. Y. Harrison in Generals Die in Bed). He even wrote about "suicide in the trenches," accusing "the warmongers" of ignoring the actual conditions of the army:

I'm back from hell

With loathsome thoughts to sell;

Secrets of death to tell;

And horrors from the abyss.

His wounds -- and his reputation -- took him for convalescence to the Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh where he met fellow poet Wilfred Owen. (Pat Barker's Regeneration tells the story well.) Sassoon's family connections kept him from court martial for his anti-war sentiments. Instead, he was officially considered "shell-shocked."

In July 1917, Sassoon issued a statement: "Finished With the War -- A Soldier's Declaration." The brief message was "an act of defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." The soldiers who had entered on "a war of defence and liberation" found themselves fighting one of "aggression and conquest." He protested against the "political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed." He wanted to destroy "the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

The poet-critics of the war were like those modern anti-heroes Corporal Klinger of M*A*S*H and Capt. Yossarian of Catch-22. They are sane enough to want out of insane warfare, but only someone declared insane can be discharged. Like Hamlet feigning madness to set his insane world aright. Sassoon was caught in a kind of Catch-1917: his rejection of the war made sense, but military society couldn't tolerate anything that made greater sense than its destructive goals and skills.

Today, we know too much about the great wars of history, about their ambiguous purposes, their jingoism and deceit. In particular, the Civil War and the Great War have been analysed and debunked. More prosaic and scholarly studies match the poetry ("The poetry is in the pity," said Owen).

And here are we, God's People, followers of the Prince of Peace. Surely, the first question every Christian must answer is, "Why are you not a pacifist?" Are our voices raised in denunciation, protest and rebellion against society's rule of death? Do we utter a clear and unceasing call to work for alternative means of justice and peace? Or do we merely comply with extreme nationalism and the inhuman political economy that drives the nations still? We suffer from our own Catch Clause. Counting ourselves higher than human institutions and superior to violent means and ends, we yet cave in to the demands of global power and the forms of international tyranny that make continuing conflict inevitable. War has been called Hell and Madness, yet it is obviously the preferred way to deal with one's rivals, or "enemies." The teaching and example of Jesus pale before the powers-that-be.

Yes, we must honour our noble dead this re-membering month. But, unless we have more to say and to do about reconciliation and justice, there will be no peace in our time, or our children's either. In that case, we must make do with Sassoon's awesome lament for:

The unreturning army that was youth;

The legions who have suffered and are dust.

Joseph C. McLelland is emeritus professor of McGill University and The Presbyterian College, Montreal, and a contributing editor of this magazine.