Brave enough to say no
Gerard Noel
WE WILL NOT FIGHT: THE UNTOLD sTORY OF WORLD WAR ONE’s CONsCIENTIOUs OBJECTORs by Will Ellsworth-Jones Aurum, £18.99, pp. 320, ISBN 9781845133009 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The first world war seemed like a good idea at the time. Cheering crowds thronged deliriously through the capitals of Europe as war was declared. In England the prospect of being paid to kill foreigners started a stampede to join up. Within five weeks almost 480,000 men had volunteered, many lying about their age. An exception was Bert Brocklesby, a charismatic young Methodist in South Yorkshire who wrote on the first day of the war: ‘However many might volunteer yet I would not ... God had not put me on earth to go destroying his own children.’ Brocklesby was one of the 35 ‘absolutists’ who were prepared to die rather than co-operate in any way with the war. In We Will Not Fight Will Ellsworth-Jones vividly reconstructs the dramatic story of these men whose fortitude kept alive the principle of conscientious objection which we now take for granted.
The problem posed by the absolutists was not foreseen when the Bill which effectively brought in conscription was introduced by Asquith in January 1916, expressly making conscientious objection a ground for exemption from military service. It was assumed that while CO’s might object to taking a life they would be prepared to join the army as non-combatants or do other work of ‘national importance’ which, in the well-documented case of the Bloomsburyites Duncan Grant and Bunny Garnett, meant a little light hoeing in Sussex.
When the likes of Bert Brocklesby applied for unconditional exemption, as they were entitled to under the Act, the local tribunals simply packed them off to join the Non-Combatants Corps which was subsequently ordered to France. The absolutists persisted in their refusal to obey orders, playing into the hands of those in the army’s high command who had been looking for a way of dealing with them because it meant that the men, now technically on active service, could simply be court-martialled for disobedience and shot.
All 35 men were duly tried and sentenced to death — sensationally commuted to ten years’ penal servitude. The absolutists regarded this shock outcome as a victory but, like everybody else, they were unable to account for the last-minute change of heart by the authorities. Ellsworth-Jones reveals that the plan to have the conchies shot, as advocated by Kitchener and Haig, was frustrated as a result of a secret undertaking made by Asquith six weeks earlier to a deputation consisting of Bertrand Russell, the MPs Philip Morrell and Philip Snowden and Catherine Marshall, the organiser of the No Conscription Fellowship, who had anticipated what would happen once the absolutists were sent to France.
In 2006 the British government pardoned all 306 men shot at dawn in the first world war, usually for desertion or cowardice. But for the bloody-mindedness of the 35 ‘Frenchmen’ and Asquith’s intervention on their behalf many others might have faced the firing-squad, men who by any standards were neither cowards nor deserters. As one of the 35, Calder Catchpool, said at his court-martial in October 1917:
I believe England will be honoured in history for having had the courage to introduce exemptions on conscientious grounds — had she not done so, some thousands of us would have been shot, a fate which overtook many under the less liberal regimes of Germany, Austria and Russia.
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