Thought for the Week: Lions and donkeys

David Boulton reflects on International Conscientious Objectors Day

Next Thursday, 15 May, is International Conscientious Objectors Day, which this year has special significance as the nationwide centennial commemorations of the first world war get underway. London’s Tavistock Square, home of the memorial to Conscientious Objectors (COs), will be filled with peace activists, including many descendants of the 16,600 men who defied the Military Service Act of 1916 – the lions who refused to be led by donkeys. Just round the corner, Friends House will be hosting a series of events celebrating the courage of the young men, some only teenagers, who defied the warfare state and fought for the right not to kill. As Priyamvada Gopal wrote in the Guardian recently: ‘They did so in the face of enormous social disapproval and institutional pressures… Fighting for peace earned you anything from vitriolic accusations of cowardice and treachery to job loss, state-abetted mob attacks, arrest, imprisonment, hard labour, courts-martial, show trials and even execution orders… Their sacrifices must not go unsung.’

The COs themselves were the first to insist that their sufferings (seventy-three died in prison or as a direct result of inhumane and degrading treatment) were as nothing compared with the terror and mass-slaughter of the killing fields in France. Some of the Quaker absolutists opposed attempts to alleviate the sufferings of their fellow-COs, urging that the aim of the peace movement was to abolish war, not to turn the No-Conscription Fellowship into a society for the abolition of cruelty to COs. It was more important, they argued, to focus on ending the slaughter in the trenches rather than making life easier for those who had conscientiously chosen to face the consequences of refusing to fight.

Attempts were made at the time, and have continued since, to mark a sharp distinction between those motivated by religious faith and those who based their objection to killing on political grounds. No one argued the distinction more forcibly than Wyndham Childs, a major-general at the War Office, who urged that religious objectors should be treated humanely and political objectors (‘anarchical atheists’) dealt with under the Mutiny Act and shot. In fact, of course, the distinction was unreal: religious objectors were often involved in the socialist and trade union movements, the Liberal party or organisations like the Union of Democratic Control, while many political objectors had Quaker, Methodist or other church affiliations. The essential inseparability of religious and political idealism was neatly summed up in some graffiti scratched on the walls of a cell at Richmond Castle, where a group of COs was held while awaiting shipment to the front in France. The anonymous message referenced both The Red Flag and the Bible: ‘Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer / We’ll keep Christ’s banner flying here!’

But, of course, it isn’t enough merely to remember the peacemakers of a hundred years ago. The war that was supposed to end all wars turned out to be the overture to a century of conflict. Versailles led to Hitler and the global map was redrawn in the victors’ favour, only to spark new conflicts, which continue to fester to the present day. In March 1916 Archibald Bodkin, the crown advocate prosecuting members of the No-Conscription Fellowship, told the accused COs that ‘war would become impossible if all men were to have the view that war was wrong’. Whereupon the No-Conscription Fellowship suggested it was his patriotic duty to prosecute himself. Archibald Bodkin’s message, unintentionally subversive of all armed conflict, is as true today as it was a century ago. As a wise teacher once remarked, blessed are the peacemakers, past and present.

Next week we begin a series on the pioneer peacemakers of world war one by David Boulton.

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