The Conscientious Objector

MANY years ago (in the early nineties) I stood almost alone in England as an advocate of general military service. I advocated it because I knew that regular food and athletic life (the most vital advantages of our two ancient universities) would be of physical benefit to our working classes, while hardship and sense of equality in the ranks would do a lot of good to the classes which are called ‘educated’ because they go to those universities, and ‘independent’ because they depend on the labor of others. But even then I foresaw that difficulties would arise from the clash between compulsion and conscience. For the keynotes of English history have been ‘ freedom of conscience’ and resistance to ‘State compulsion,’ especially when it touched the province of religion. I foresaw our prisons crammed with Quakers, Salvationists, Socialists, Humanitarians, and other obstinate and peculiar people who regarded militarism and war, not merely as unnecessary evils, but as definite sins against the Holy Spirit, whether of God or man. So formidable was the prospect that I gave up all attempt to impose so abhorrent a benefaction upon my countrymen; for it appeared evident that they set more store by the will of God and the guidance of the ‘inner voice’ than upon physical development or social equality, and that all efforts to convert them from belief in Christ’s teaching would be vain.

Further residence in Germany and Russia compelled me to modify my own advocacy of conscription, and to admit that my fellow countrymen were right in their opposition to it. For I discovered that universal service increased the virtue of obedience to a dangerous extent, and gave the government too strong a hold upon the populace, not only in military questions but in all affairs of life. People lost the courage of initiative; in everything they looked to the government for direction or assistance; they were over-socialized, and officials dominated nearly the whole of life, especially in Germany. But as my own belief in militarism began to shake (in spite of those obvious physical and social advantages), I found a belief in it steadily gathering strength among my own countrymen. After the Boer War, an enthusiastic propaganda for universal service was started, chiefly inspired by Lord Roberts, whose splendid career and personal charm saved his proposals from the neglect or mockery with which mine had been treated ten years earlier. Many leading journalists and politicians, especially among Conservatives and the class from which officers were chiefly drawn, began to support his view, and it made considerable progress, though the mass of the people remained indifferent or hostile.

Then came the war, and for the first year and a half it was carried on with an enthusiasm of voluntary enlistment unequaled, I suppose, in history. Recruits offered themselves in such great numbers that the War Office was submerged by the flood of men. ‘Never has the world seen so magnificent an uprising of a whole people,’ said the French Chief-of-Staff at Salonika, in a lecture to us war correspondents last December. He could only compare it with the uprising of France against her encircling enemies in the Revolution. The movement was indeed superb, and history will record it among our country’s noblest honors. But the advocates of conscription saw their opportunity in the nation’s danger. They invented the nauseous metaphor of ‘combing out.’ They raised the impracticable cry of ‘Equality of Sacrifice’ (impracticable because the circumstances of men of military age differ widely, and men of ministerial and episcopal age are, unhappily, excused from service). Lord Northcliffe ‘tuned the pulpits’ of his powerful press to the cry. The Prime Minister reluctantly yielded. Lord Kitchener yielded, also reluctantly, as is believed. The House of Commons yielded, being reduced to impotence under a Coalition Cabinet. Compulsory service was enacted, first for single men (January 27, 1916), and afterwards for all citizens (women are not yet citizens here) of military age (May 2, 1916). England was added to the list of conscript nations, and among great powers the United States alone remains outside it now.

The trouble which I had foreseen in my premature proposals for military service as a poor man’s university at once arose. The Conscientious Objector is no new apparition. He embodies that danger defined by Thomas Hobbes in the Leviathan : —

‘The most frequent pretext of sedition and civil war, in Christian commonwealths, hath a long time proceeded from a difficulty, not yet sufficiently resolved, of obeying at once both God and man than when their commandments are one contrary to the other.'

Hobbes was the extreme apostle of the State. To him the State was ‘that great Leviathan, that mortal God, to whom we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.’ To him any question of the State’s authority was so heinous a crime that ‘on rebels,’ he said, ‘vengeance is lawfully extended, not only to the fathers, but also to the third and fourth generations not yet in being, and consequently innocent of the fact for which they are afflicted.’ And as to conscience, he maintained that ‘if every man were allowed the liberty of following his own conscience, in such differences of consciences, they would not live together in peace an hour.’ Yet he was compelled to admit (and indeed the contemporary troubles under Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II forced the truth upon him) that in Christian commonwealths the difficulty of obeying both God and man when their commandments are contrary, had not yet been sufficiently resolved.

Conscientious objectors have given trouble in other than Christian commonwealths. Socrates must be counted among them for listening to his indwelling ‘daemon,’ or conscience, when it forbade him to obey the Thirty Tyrants and other State authorities. Sophocles created a noble type of conscientious objector in Antigone, who refused to obey the law of the State, and illegally gave her brother burial, acting, as she said, in free obedience to ‘the unwritten and unchanging laws of heaven — laws that are not of to-day or yesterday, but abide forever, and of their creation knoweth no man.’ ¹ That I believe to be the finest definition of the conscientious objector’s position. But the difficulty naturally increased with the nominal acceptance of Christianity as the religion of the State. For Christ’s words, taken in their obvious meaning, are commands directly contrary to the commands of every civilized state, and would make nearly all the chief functions of State, such as war, law courts, punishment, and the protection of private property either nugatory or impious. Obedience to such commands involves a life of Anarchism, in the holiest sense of the word.

This truth has been recognized by genuine Christians from the time of the Primitive Church down to Tolstoi. It has been recognized also by ecclesiastical authorities whose Christianity is more complicated; as, for instance, by Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, who admitted that no state founded upon the Sermon on the Mount could stand for a week. It is obvious, then, that people who proclaim Christ’s teaching as the actual words of God, and yet remain bound to a civilized state by ties of obedience, fear, patriotism, or self-interest, must become entangled in inextricable perplexities and contradictions, certain to increase in time of war, when the commands of Christ and of the State are most insistent and most opposed. The difficulty defined by Hobbes is then at its worst.

The clash between the divine and social commandments has, naturally, been most violent where the State compelled military service. The early persecution of Christians was largely due to their objection to bearing arms as being contrary to Christ’s teaching. The particular cases of Maximilianus and a centurion Marcellus, executed because their consciences would not permit them to bear carnal arms in contradiction to Christ’s words (circa 300 A. D.), are well known, and were accepted even by Gibbon as authentic.² Like Socrates and Antigone, they both died as conscientious objectors, and their names were added to the roll of the noble army of martyrs. The difficulty did not frequently arise during the Middle Ages, when the compromises of the Roman Church were generally accepted, and certain kinds of war were even called ‘Holy’ by Christians as by Moslems. But it remained latent, and bishops, who were inspired by patriotic passions as violent as the present Bishop of London’s, went out to battle in person, it is true, but armed only with studded maces, which killed without un-Christian bloodshed. The expansion of individual thought, and the simultaneous return to Christ’s teaching as the final truth in the sixteenth century, produced a copious outgrowth of conscientious objection throughout Europe, and its later forms among Anabaptists, Fifth-Monarchy Men, Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Moravians, Doukhobors, Molokans, and many other sects, would make a lengthy record of obstinate resistance to the State in the name of God.

II

When the first military service act was passed in England, I was with the Allied armies in the Near East, and so cannot speak of the opposition to it from personal knowledge. But against a cabinet of all the talents opposition in Parliament was vain, and Sir John Simon remained the only Member of the highest rank who stood out. Under representations of national emergency, the trade-unions submitted. Even the religious or conscientious opposition was not so determined or well organized as I expected. For one thing, the Salvation Army did not combine against it, though Christ’s teaching of non-resistance to evil has been one of their main tenets in earlier days. Several of their members had joined the army long before the act, and their patriotism had been acclaimed by that energetic Christian, Mr. Harold Begbie, in a poem of which I recall one verse, perhaps not quite accurately: —

But when the government, under the persistent pressure of Lord Northcliffe’s organs, passed the act abolishing our voluntary system, the religious objectors found themselves reinforced by a certain number of Socialists who believed in international brotherhood, and by Humanitarians, who believed Christ’s teaching to be reasonable, if not divine. Socialism is not necessarily pacific. I was present at a Socialist congress in Copenhagen (I think in 1910), where Keir Hardie proposed a general strike of European workers if war was threatened. Many delegates accepted the proposal, but the solid body of German Social Democrats refused it as ‘unpatriotic.’ Still, a considerable number of Socialists who have not come under German influence, are inclined to regard militarism upon German lines as promising small advantage to the working classes, and tending to obstruct fraternal comradeship among the workers of all nations. As Mr. Clifford Allen, Chairman of the No-Conscription Fellowship, himself persisting in conscientious objections as a Socialist rather than a Christian, wrote to The Nation of June 10, he and others like him object, not to killing only, but to war, ‘ because it is a denial of the worth of the individual, the method by which every movement to social betterment is retarded, and it engenders a spirit of domination, bitterness, and fear.’ ³

In like manner, Socialists no less than Christians may attach some value to Treitschke’s objection to Hegel’s ‘deification of the State.’ ‘The State,’ said Treitschke, in one of those lectures which did so much to create the German spirit of State domination, ‘the State is not the whole life of man or of society. It does not and should not touch his conscience or his religion. There is an inner life which is a man’s own.’ And that saying of Nietzsche — so often coupled with Treitschke in the joint apostolate of modern Germany — is even better known: ‘The coldest of all cold monsters is called the State. Coldly it utters its lies, and from its mouth this lie issues, “I, the State, am the People.”’⁴

Thus our Government might have been prepared for a certain passive resistance from social thinkers and Christians alike; but in framing the Conscription Act they appear to have contemplated nothing but religious opposition, and to have thought chiefly of Quakers. For the self-denial of Quakers in regard to the temptations of pugnacity was familiar history, and, by self-denial in other respects, the Quakers have acquired a comfortable share in this world’s blessings, part of which they have generously devoted to the enlightenment of public opinion through Liberal newspapers. The Quakers, therefore, had to be considered, and it so happened that, at the beginning of the war, a large section of them had devised means of serving their country without offending their conscience by actual fighting. They had equipped a motor-ambulance unit, in the first organization of which I am myself proud to have assisted. It worked admirably for the Belgians and French along the front from Dunkirk to Ypres, and even the haughty British army was glad to make use of it later. As it grew, it developed two or three stationary hospitals. A large section joined the Italian army in the Trentino. Another Quaker division assisted the ruined villagers of Eastern France in rebuilding their villages and reclaiming their fields. Along these lines a perplexed Government, caught between God and Lord Northcliffe, detected a way of escape. If Quakers accepted this kind of service, let them have it! Who else could object where Quakers made a compromise?

Accordingly, the Government created a ‘Non-Combatant Corps’ into which those objectors might be drafted whom the local tribunals decided to be conscientious. The local tribunals are small bodies of from five to twentyfive men and women, not, like Love, too young to know what conscience is. They are appointed by the borough or urban council, and are usually presided over by the local mayor, with the assistance of a military representative to watch the interests of the army. By the act the tribunals have powers of granting exemption: —

Section 2, sub-section (3). ‘Any certificate of exemption may be absolute, conditional, or temporary, as the authority by whom it was granted thinks best suited to the case; and also, in the case of an application on conscientious grounds, may take the form of an exemption from combatant service only, or may be conditional on the applicant being engaged in some work which in the opinion of the tribunal dealing with the case is of national importance.’

As there was some doubt whether this wording gave tribunals the power of absolute exemption to conscientious objectors, the following explanation was added in the second act: —

Section 4, sub-section (3). ‘It is hereby declared that the power to grant special certificates of exemption in the case of an application on conscientious grounds under sub-section (3) of section two of the principal Act is additional to and not in derogation of the general power conferred by that Act to grant absolute, conditional, or temporary certificates in such cases.’

It was, therefore, the intention of the act to give the tribunals power to grant absolute exemption on conscientious grounds as an alternative to exemption from combatant service only. There was the further power of granting exemption where the objector was engaged in work of national importance, and a special committee, sitting at Westminster, with Lord Pelham in the chair (and, therefore, called the Pelham Committee) might be referred toby the tribunals to decide what work the words ‘of national importance’ might cover in each case.

The Government obviously intended the powers of exemption to be very wide, and they cannot, be accused of deliberate desire to persecute. It was in administration that the act fell short of the intention. The action of the tribunals varied according to their composition. Some refused absolute exemption as being beyond their powers. Some were overridden by the military representative, who, like the objector, had a right of appeal from their decision to an Appeal Tribunal appointed for counties by the Home Office. Nearly all agreed in regarding conscience as an unpatriotic offense which must be visited by penalties. The penalties were intended to deter shirkers and cowards from escaping under the cloak of conscience. But large numbers of the genuinely conscientious were removed from work of undoubted national importance (such as education), and set to road-making, or hospital tasks, in which they had no skill or experience.

In some cases, however, total exemption was granted (usually on grounds of health); in others, exemption for a few months, the case to be then reconsidered; in others exemption was given provided the applicant remained in his present employment. This gave the employer a tyrannical hold over the man, for, by threatening to discharge him and drive him into the army, he could compel him to any terms of work or wages. But still, in spite of much uncertainty, waste, and hardship, the exemption clause might have worked fairly well but for another class of men whose existence had not, indeed, been overlooked (for both Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Walter Long as members of the Government promised complete exemption in their case), but whose numbers and determination had been underestimated.

These are the men who refuse alternative or noncombatant service under the act. They are the logicians of conscience, the extremists of peace. They refuse to take service of any kind under the act. They will not be abettors in the crime of war, either by fighting or by performing tasks which might set others free to fight, or by acknowledging the necessity of war by obeying military orders or any orders connected with a state of warfare. How many conscientious objectors have come before the tribunals I cannot discover. About twenty-five thousand — including, presumably a certain number of shirkers — is the average estimate, but of these nearly one tenth have refused noncombatant or alternative service, and have been arrested and handed over to the military authorities. The exact number on the day of writing (August 30) is 1987. The great majority of them have been court-martialed under the Army Act for disobeying orders, and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the commonest sentence being one hundred and twelve days. While in military hands, their treatment has sometimes been brutal. As an example, I give an extract from a letter written in Wandsworth Detention Barracks (end of April, 1916). The writer was a Teddington man, named H. W. Forrester, and it is fair to the War Office to say that, apparently owing to the treatment of conscientious objectors, the colonel concerned was soon afterwards removed from that command: —

‘As soon as we got in the prison (I was first) one of them told me with an oath to take my coat off. I told him that I was not a soldier and could not obey military orders. The Colonel was standing near, and he thundered up and shouted, “What! you won’t obey me?” with a thick accompaniment. I quietly answered, “ I must obey the commands of my God, sir.” “Damn your God! Take him to the special room.” Four of them then set on me. One of them took hold of me by the back of the neck, nearly choking me, shook me and dragged me along, while the others punched and thumped and kicked me as hard as they knew how. They banged my head on the floor and the wall, and threw me into a little cell with thick walls and a small skylight.

‘ They then told me to get my boots off, but I would not do so, and the Sergeant I have mentioned deliberately punched me behind the ear, and all of them set on me again and bruised me more. They at last cleared out and slammed the door, leaving me without boots, coat or braces, lying on the floor almost exhausted.

‘ They then came back with the Colonel, who told me to stand to attention. I talked to him very calmly, but he gave me a kick with his boot, and the other fellows started the bruising again. When they had exhausted themselves and I still stood firm, the Colonel said, “ Put him on bread and water for three days to begin.” And then they left me, hinting at certain tortures they would put me through.’

I have seen a good many similar letters from other barracks or prisons, and all show that conscience arouses greater ferocity than crime. It was the same with the Suffragettes, whose treatment in many prisons was equally brutal, though few Quakers or Socialists troubled themselves much about the matter then. Jailers, and especially soldiers, are usually lenient towards drunkards, thieves, or swindlers, but directly they are put in charge of people who have yielded to some temptation unknown to themselves (such as crimes of conscience or political freedom), they are moved to violence by righteous indignation. The populace share this abhorrence of the unknown, as was seen at Chatham on July 31, when six conscientious objectors, after serving their sentence with great suffering, were temporarily released from barracks, but were set upon by a violent mob at the gates and narrowly escaped with their lives, ‘their progress traced by the blood they left behind.’ ⁵

III

In May three parties of conscientious objectors were sent to France, apparently with the object of bringing them under the severer military discipline that prevails in war zones. This measure of military authority again revealed the powerlessness of the Cabinet and Parliament in face of the Act which they had themselves created. Ministers had assured the House that no objector would be sent to France. On the very day on which they were sent the assurance was repeated. Yet the objectors had already started. Their fate in France was still less expected by an innocent Cabinet. On January 18, 1916, Sir Frederick E. Smith, Attorney-General, had stated in the House: —

‘I can give my honorable friend the assurance, on behalf of the War Office, that under no circumstances will the death sentence be pronounced or carried out on persons who come in any way within the class of “conscientious objector” as defined by this bill.’

No government undertaking could be more explicit. Yet thirty-six of the conscientious objectors taken to France were publicly condemned to ‘ death by shooting’ for disobeying orders in the face of the enemy. These sentences were afterwards commuted to ten years’ penal servitude, which they are now enduring.⁶

These facts, added to reports of ‘crucifixion,’ — attachment of the outstretched limbs, usually to wheels, — and other severe penalties inflicted upon conscientious objectors, roused so much protest among Quakers and other believers in the rights of conscience throughout the country that the Government devised various schemes for ending the scandal and relieving the army of disciplinary duties which did not conduce to success in the war. Of these schemes I need only mention the present arrangement, which the Government hoped would be final. All the objectors who are still in prison or whose sentences have expired and who would otherwise be sent back to the army, there to be put through the whole process of arrest, court-martial, and imprisonment again, are to be reexamined by a new Central Tribunal (appointed, I think, by the Home Office, and sitting in Westminster under Lord Salisbury as Chairman, but empowered to examine prisoners in various jails). If they then agree to sign a document binding themselves absolutely to obey a civil committee as to their employment, they will be sent under civil control to labor in parties or gangs, at some task of national importance, chiefly, as it seems, road-making in the country. Should they refuse to sign this document or to undertake the work, they will be returned to the army, and Mr. Lloyd George, speaking in the House as Minister of War on July 26, declared that ‘he would only consider the best means of making the path of that class a very hard one.’

The intention of this phrase was explained by Mr. H. W. Forster, Financial Secretary to the War Office, when he stated in the House (August 16) that if these objectors still refused to obey military orders they would be dealt with in accordance with the Army Act. ‘They had now got their chance; if they did not take it, it was their own fault.’ He expected that they would be sent to the front. In that case, they became subject to the penalty of death for not obeying orders, and there is nothing to show that the penalty will not now be carried out.

Perhaps I should mention that I am not a conscientious objector myself. I have been in many wars and revolutions as a war correspondent. In the present war I should certainly have taken a commission, if I had not been informed at the War Office that I was too old. I think the War Office made a mistake, for my long experience might have been set against my age. Under present human conditions, I think that even war, with all its abominations so familiar to myself, may sometimes be nobler than peace.

Nor, again, could I set myself up as a rival authority to Mr. Lloyd George on questions of conscience, for as a Nonconformist his regard for conscience is likely to be more scrupulous than other people’s; and yet he would make the path of the extreme or logical conscientious objector a very hard one, leading, as it seems, to execution by shooting.

Nevertheless, though so little qualified to speak, I fear that the Government by its action is entangling the country in a great difficulty, and perhaps in a crime which we shall afterwards repent. By facing popular contempt and ridicule, ill-treatment in barracks, long imprisonment, and in thirty-six cases the shock of the death sentence, these men have proved their convictions genuine. They have shown themselves possessed of a moral and physical courage at least equal to the common soldier’s, and far greater than most of us educated people could show. Some have disagreed with our bishops and clergy, believing that Christ’s words are the words of God and were literally intended. Others have disagreed with our social philosophers, believing that war is necessarily bad for humanity, and that it is no use talking fraternity while the working classes are trained to kill each other at the command of kings and governments.

Of course, they may be wrong. I have the greatest respect for bishops and clergy, and social philosophers — a respect only heightened by my ignorance of their subjects. But still, the Act was framed and intended to grant absolute exemption to such objectors as were proved genuine in conscience. These men have abundantly proved their conscience genuine. If the Government were wise, they would follow the words and intentions of their own act, lest they bring discredit upon both the country and the war. Even if we assume, with Thomas Hobbes, that the preservation of the State is the foremost object of human existence, and the State the ultimate judge of good and evil, none the less, as Bernard Shaw has observed, to compel a conscientious objector to undertake the duty of military service is morally the same thing as compelling a nun to undertake the duty of having a baby. And besides, what if he should be right after all? What if his path (hard though it can be made) should prove the beginning of the straightest path to the far-off salvation of mankind?