On Monday August 4th 2014, the British people remembered the words of Edward Grey:
“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
And at 11 pm, the time at which World War I started on this day a century ago, they turned out all but one of their lights.
Churches and cathedrals across the land held services which ended with the symbolic dying of the light. At one such service, in Rochester Cathedral, as the lights were extinguished, a choir of English and German singers sang the following words from Luke’s Gospel to a setting by Rheinberger:
via When darkness falls.