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In a few hours time, in common with many clergy around the country, I will put robes on and go and stand outside, in my case, in a courtyard in central London, and wait for the church clock to strike eleven. If it’s the same as previous years, some people will come out of their offices or shops to stand with us, others will walk past, look at their watches and wonder whether to stop. The silence we keep isn’t a complete silence of course… how could it be on a Monday morning in one of the busiest cities in the world. But in stopping our conversations just for a couple of minutes, we’ll remember the ones who died then - and who die now- when a society is convulsed by violence and lies in war. 500 years before Christ, the Greek playwright and solider Aeschylus wrote that in war, truth is the first casualty. Last year I walked through the catastrophic landscape of the destroyed city of Aleppo in Syria and listened to the experience of Syrians living through one of the most toxic wars of recent times. It struck me then as it often strikes me on Armistice Day, that war upends everything; there is often enormous moral ambiguity about what is happening and how it happens. These days, the picture of two opposing armies on a square field with soldiers in rows is completely out of date. In modern wars, the distinctions between combatants and non-combatants is blurred if a rocket launcher is put on the roof of a school; or the bombing of a civilian population is justified by that terrible phrase collateral damage. They say there are no atheists in the trenches; but these days there aren’t many trenches either. War fought in city streets poisons societies, makes orphans of children who went to school as normal and came home to rubble. Sends households of people into paroxysms of grief from which they never fully recover. While the arguments for whether war can ever be just are well rehearsed, and people of faith hold differing views just like everyone else, one fundamental principle is not contested. Christ did not tell his followers simply to hope for peace, although he did tell them to pray for it. But irreducibly, he told them to be makers of peace. Making peace rather than simply wishing for it, is hard work, long term work that begins in the hearts and minds of all of us. And can be strengthened by the silence we keep today, remembering the calamity of war, in which as Robert Graves wrote, ‘Death (becomes) young again’.