Letters - 14 March 2025
From Ukraine to a belated return
Ukraine
As an eighteen-year-old National Serviceman in 1958, I took part in a NATO exercise in Germany. The ‘enemy’? You guessed it, the Russians and their ubiquitous tanks, which had two years earlier rolled into Budapest to ‘liberate’ the citizens there. The ‘citizens’ rose up against their attackers but were ruthlessly crushed into submission. The Hungarians had appealed for help from the west, just as the Ukrainians are doing today, but no help came.
My squadron (contemporary cavalry with Saracen armoured cars) had taken position on what is known as the Bielefeld ridge. One morning I took a walk in the wooded area where we were bivouacked and came across a small graveyard. Over the entrance a notice read, ‘Die Sechs Soldaten’. Further reading told me that six young Wehrmacht soldiers (the oldest being sixteen years of age) had tried to stop the allied advance into their homeland with a light field gun, but each of them had died in the attempt.
At that point (was this God speaking to me? I was certainly in listening mode) it suddenly occurred to me exactly where I was. We were very close to the town of Hamelin where a ‘Pied Piper’ had once taken away the children of the town when their parents refused to pay the price of the tunes he played. The similarities to the fairytale were all too obvious. Hadn’t another ‘Pied Piper’ done exactly the same thing just a couple of decades earlier? Was Robert Browning being prophetic in 1842 when he wrote his famous story? ‘Something’ certainly inspired him to write it…
It should perhaps be noted that the same Hungarians who had been visited by the tanks of the Soviet Union in 1956, and had appealed for help, recently erected razor wire to prevent so-called illegal immigrants from entering their territory. Magyars with short memories perhaps?
Bill Bingham
The UK government’s increasing military spending and cutting overseas aid are the antithesis of all things Quaker, a denial of human worth, the integrity of Creation, and that of God in everyone.
Now more then ever we need to be ready to speak truth to power.
Gerard Bane
