Thought for the Week: Humility
Stephen Feltham considers humility, ego, love and Spirit
An article extoling the virtues of humility appeared in the Friend on 27 June 2014. It was written as the 100th anniversary of the start of the first world war approached. Now the anniversary of the armistice on 11 November 1918 approaches. In the years since, wars have continued and new wars have begun. Few have ceased. Conflict, it would seem, is a perennial human condition. Humanity seems so flawed, notwithstanding the pockets of enlightenment and hope for peacefulness scattered around the planet. We are, after all, only human – but because we have imagination, insight and inspiration there is that of the Spirit within us all to inspire and encourage our endeavour for a world without conflict.
In 2014 I posited that: ‘The practice of humility and of modesty in thought, word and action at a very local level may deny the opportunity for the seeds of war to germinate and prosper; for it is there, in our own backyards and not the great council chambers of nations that the seeds of war are first sown.’ I feel that sentiment still rings true and that much more can be learned from world war one on the subject of humility (or the lack of it).
It is well known that the armistice came into force on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. It is less well known that the armistice was actually signed and agreed by Germany and the Allies six hours earlier, at five in the morning, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne in France. At the time of signing it is said that the German representatives asked the Allies for an immediate truce and ceasefire, but Ferdinand Foch, the supreme Allied commander on the Western Front and a marshal of France, refused. A well-respected academic has calculated that on the day that the armistice was signed 11,000 soldiers were killed. Never has such a lack of humility, coupled with an excess of ego, had such a terrible and tragic consequence. Officially, the last person to be killed in the war was an American soldier, private Henry Gunther, who was shot dead at one minute to eleven. He was of German descent, and he and his family had become targets of growing anti-German sentiment in the United States. Worse, not long after arriving in France he had been busted in rank from sergeant down to private. Apparently, a letter he had written to a friend criticising army life, and warning him against enlisting, was read by the US military censors.
The regiment went into action a few days after he was demoted. From the start, he displayed a willingness to expose himself to all sorts of risk. On the last day of the war, on his own initiative, he charged the enemy lines. Eyewitnesses described the Germans firing warning shots overhead. Stunned German soldiers were said to have yelled at Henry Gunther in broken English to stop – that the war was over – but to no avail. It was said he still must have been fired by a desire to demonstrate, even at the last minute, that he was courageous and all-American. Was it Henry Gunther’s ego – his lack of humility – that killed him, or was it world war one?
Charles Darwin, in the 1870s, wrote: ‘The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it.’ I believe those words to be true as much for humility as for anger, hate, love or ego. In making room in our lives for more humility we can salve our anger, dissipate our hate, quell our ego, heal that which is wounded, and allow love and the Spirit to flourish.
This is a revised and edited version of a pamphlet published in September.
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