'He refused to fight': The bravery and brutality of being a conscientious objector

John Hoare’s diaries will be serialised as part of the Quaker’s project

A new online project telling the stories of men who refused to fight during WW1 has been launched by the Quakers to mark the war’s centenary.

“The White Feather Diaries” will serialise the diaries of conscientious objectors describing the prejudice and personal conflict they faced, the diaries are published in conjunction with powerful filmed oral-history accounts from their children.

The series is named after the symbol of shame and cowardice given by women to men who were out of uniform — a white feather.

One of the moving filmed testimonies is from the son of Donald Saunders, a talented pianist who was forced into years of hard labour due to his pacifist convictions.

Hard labour

“He had an ideal and believed strongly that it was wrong to kill another human being in any circumstances,” says his son — now an old man himself.

Saunders was nonetheless ordered to register for service, but after he refused to put on the uniform, he was court marshalled and sentenced to six months hard labour, breaking rocks.

Even for the time, conditions in prison were brutal — “because of his views, he suffered terrible treatment from warders and prisoners”.

Spat on in the street

The contempt society had for men who refused to enlist, also impacted on his wife outside prison, who was insulted, spat on in the street and sent white feathers.

He spent several years in prison, eventually being released in 1919 — a year after the war had ended. Even then, however, he was haunted by the prejudice against presumed cowards and remained a marked man, with few willing to employ him.

To follow the diaries visit the daily blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page.

The project will run at incremental periods over three years (2014-2016) up to the anniversary of the 1916 Military Service Act which introduced conscription and recognised conscientious objection.

By Dan Bell

What do you think of the actions of conscientious objectors? Why do you think the shame imposed on men who did not enlist during WW1 is so rarely discussed? If the nation faced an external threat again on the scale of WW1 or WW2, would we still expect men and boys to sign up? Tell us what you think in a comment or a tweet.

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Nigel

In answer to the question I think the answer would be yes. With the caveat that there may be something similar for women. I think it interesting that Britain came very late to conscription(though medieval knights effectively conscripted their serfs) . Many European nations with levees en masse have a long history of this and indeed seeing it connected to citizenship. So I’m sure a legal draft would be introduced.
I suspect that in fact the technological nature of modern warfare would mean this wouldn’t apply, having a load of “canon fodder” milling about will be counter productive. So it would be probably a search for “volunteers”. In a desperate search for the right level of fitness and skill would white feather’s reappear? Would we accept female reservists and volunteers being thrown into the fray? What seems to be true of war is that once you “let slip the dogs” all bets are off.
Nigel

Just on the issue of pacifism. With plenty of “subjects”
following WW2 Psychologists kicked off a lot of research. Basically this showed that men are not killers. Hence murder is very rare in a society at “peace”, even in the US which is awash with weapons (it probably doesn’t appear so simply because the number of people is so unimaginably large, who can picture one million let alone 10s 100s or 1000s of millions?). Generally a great deal of effort is required to train men to kill. It is in fact rare to find in medal citations cases of “gung ho” fighting rather than self sacrificing or rescuing acts. Of course the research often took directions to find how training could more reliably produce killers.
One thing that does get confused is the tendency of a larger number of men to take their natural/socialised competition with other males to violent ends. Any society I can think of has a wide variety of mechanisms to reduce the chance of this resulting with a killing. (As opposed to the accidental result of being so stupid as to engage in violence for instance the apparently quixotic outpourings should boxing result in a death ).
So actually I suspect that the “problem” with pacifism is that it would prove very attractive to a lot of people , too many for those who need “boots”. And I think in reality we all know this. You may well get loads of men to run around in the mud chasing a slippery ball crashing into each other. But killing? The evidence is few indeed are up for that in reality.
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