For Armistice Day, Madeleine Pennington reflects on courage, sacrifice and the difficult moral questions raised by war and peace. 10/11/2026
In June 1916, a military tribunal asked WW1 conscientious objector Bert Brocklesby, a 25–year–old schoolteacher, a hard question: “Supposing you were in a corner with your back to the wall and six men were before you with open sword of fixed bayonet, would you not do something if you had a revolver in your hand?”
Bert Brocklesby was a Methodist lay preacher, and many would find his response equally hard: “The Sixth Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. I take it that it is better to be killed than kill anyone else.”
Bert Brocklesby held an unswerving conviction that killing was always wrong, that war was a crime, and that his Christian faith compelled him to refuse all part of it. He was assigned to non–combatant duties but further objected, on the grounds that he would still be contributing to a war effort. He was then arrested, sent to France, court martialled, and sentenced to death – though his sentence was commuted.
Public opinion at the time portrayed conscientious objectors as cowards and traitors, but such personal stories surely witness instead to their bravery and integrity. For many, as in the case of Bert Brocklesby, their moral conviction was explicitly driven by a Christian faith. Bert was prepared to pay any cost for that faith (and at least 70 conscientious objectors died from their maltreatment in WWI) though he was thankfully spared the firing squad.
As a Quaker, I was raised on stories of these men not as cowards, but as heroes, who stayed valiantly loyal to the peace of Christ. There is a long and inspiring history of Christian pacifism – often centring on the (perceived) incompatibility of Jesus’ teaching with violence against others who are equally made in the image of God. Seventeen centuries before Brocklesby’s WWI military tribunal, the Church Father Tertullian asked, “How will a Christian man [go to] war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away? …In disarming Peter, [Christ disarmed] every soldier.” Here, Tertullian referred to Jesus’ command to Peter to put his sword down, rather than defending him against arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. And at the heart of the Christian story is Jesus’ own example even unto death, in which he did not rise to the persecuting spirit of his enemies but embodied the power – for Christians, more powerful than anything else – of Love poured out in the face of evil.
The idea that love can be as costly and brave as violence is one of Christianity’s most countercultural lessons. It is arguably the central message of the faith. “Blessed are the peacemakers”, Jesus tells us, “For they will be called children of God”.
At the same time, Christians have reasonably come to a range of positions on the legitimacy of arms in a complex world. Those who have not felt led by their consciences away from the frontline (the many Christian soldiers, or those who have stood against injustice through other forms of armed resistance), and those in every generation that have had no choice, have often equally been sustained by spiritual practice. Distinct from the many shameful times that the Church has been complicit in the justification of needless and despicable unjust wars, it has also been a source of solace for those trapped on all sides of conflict. For a soldier faced with giving his life for his country, there are few more powerful examples than the self–sacrificial death of an innocent carpenter, two thousand years ago. As Jesus also said the night before he died, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15.13).
This week we reflect on the millions (civilians and soldiers) who have died in the course of war, alongside those globally who continue to pay for the failures of their political leaders. This week, I am reminded that the moral seriousness that defined Bert Brocklesby’s defence is widespread among those who have faced true conflict, whatever they conclude about the use of violence. As a military leader once observed to me, few people grapple with the reality of ‘human sinfulness’ (namely, how to contain what we are capable of at our worst) more deeply than those in a war. For schoolboys facing death in the trenches of the Somme, or fathers today ensnared in the invasion of Ukraine, there is no cheap comfort, no easy moral high ground, and no easy answer to the many ethical dilemmas of war and peace – only hard questions, and hard answers.
Again: “Supposing you were in a corner with your back to the wall and six men were before you with open sword of fixed bayonet, would you not do something if you had a revolver in your hand?”
If it seems strange for a Quaker to admire those who have fought and given their lives in battle, the point is that both Bert Brocklesby and his opponents at least understood (or came to understand through experience) what is at stake when peace fails. In contrast, war feels distant to many of us now, after generations of peace. Talk of peace is easy, but it is hard to grasp the sheer weight – the unthinkable, unbearable cost – of personal sacrifice that ordinary men and women (including, increasingly, civilians) make in armed conflict. The implications which extend over every life, family, institution, child, civilian, soldier, and government decision. Most of us in the UK learn about the struggles of historic war early in school, and see the war memorials dotted around our public buildings simply as part of the furniture. I wonder, does a twelve–year–old really understand the magnitude and shame of what they are being told, when they hear that some of those killed in the trenches were ‘only’ sixteen? (That’s one of the oldest boys in the school, after all.) How many of us truly revisit those half–learnt lessons in adulthood to “weep with those who weep”? We see increasingly brutal far away images on social media, but even this places a screen between us as observers, and those who truly suffer.
When in 2024 the head of the British Army, Patrick Sanders, declared that modern Britain was a ‘pre-war generation‘ who must again prepare for conflict, some viewed this only as an irresponsible pitch for the public purse – and when subsequent polls have found very low percentages of respondents willing to fight for the country (including one conducted shortly after Sanders’ comments, which found that over a third of under–40s would refuse conscription if enlisted today) the findings have been used mainly as a quirky hook to turn the conversation back to peacetime issues. More recently, we have been urged to stockpile – framed largely as a precaution against natural emergencies and blackouts, but with one eye on the destabilising geopolitical situation, too – and again people have questioned if all this talk of resilience is responsible. The prominent Christian leader Pete Grieg, founder of 24–7 Prayer, split Christian opinion when he shared a prophetic warning urging Church to “prepare for war”.
It’s easy to feel cynical about the motivations of those who encourage this sort of mindset, just as it is easy to convince ourselves that such cynicism is the more ‘peaceful’ frame of mind. But most of us outside the military are nonetheless able to enjoy a cheap, complacent peace – equally as far from the hard questions probing the conscience of Bert Brocklesby as from the tragic sacrifices of those who fight literal battles on Flanders Fields. Just as our rage should be directed at those who thirst for bloody conflicts to serve their own political interests, our cynicism should first be directed towards the complacency of a society which inches closer to real conflict while most people in it do nothing at all to ‘fight’ for the peace they enjoy. As Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, 8th President of the UN General Assembly, wrote, “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.” Where are the mass campaigns for peace? The budget for peace–building initiatives? The voting for, and lobbying of, politicians who might have the power and inclination to de–escalate? The building of sustainable economies, societies, and technologies that would make the next war less likely?
This Armistice Day, I remember the courage and fear of those who have bravely refused physical violence in all its forms, and the courage and fear of those who go off to fight – as I wonder what preparations any of us are truly making for war, or for peace.
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