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For the second time in three days, today many of us will keep silence in honour of those who have died in war. It’s striking that the marking of the actual Armistice; the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month; has become more popular in recent years. Commemoration has not just been left to the Sunday ceremonies at the Cenotaph. It is perhaps a more ordinary tribute interrupting the working day, marking the jagged disruption of normality that war is and the last minute-ness of making peace. The war they didn’t know would be called the First World War began in a summer caricatured with hindsight as the last bloom of a culture of manners and civility. And the moral ambiguities and complexities of the First War, with its attendant themes of folly and futility, perhaps strike more of a chord with our own war-weary population. The legacy of remembering this war is more a lament for what the poets called doomed youth than a recognition of anything like victory. Young people on all sides, in those 1914 industrialising nations, were more familiar with ploughshares than they were with swords. And their lives lived in what can seem like a distant time, can also feel strikingly contemporary: young people whose imagining at home of what war might be like could not have come close to the reality of the requirement to kill: the use of new technologies: aircraft, machine guns, and later tanks, challenging and even leaving behind the moral assumptions that surrounded their deployment. Attrition and stalemate became defining features of a war that most had assumed could be more surgical, more swift because of the new weapons that could be used. With the development of aerial bombing and submarine blockades, came a blurring of the lines between combatant and non-combatant as civilians found they were defending a home front of their own. People of all faiths and backgrounds were involved in this first truly global conflict and human beings suffered just the same, when, in the words of one writer about grief, God is silent and the wind is shrill. It is traumatised soldiers, inconsolable parents, young widows and widowers, sad for a lifetime, that have their modern parallels for us as we interrupt our day today to know that there are no words for the scale of this suffering, then or now, however eloquent the poets or articulate the historians. Even while we must re-commit ourselves to live lives of peace-making, today just for a while, we together say nothing, because for those who suffer the heart-stopping reality of the catastrophe of war, sometimes, there is nothing to say.