Battles of Conscience: British pacifists and the second world war, by Tobias Kelly
Author: Tobias Kelly. Review by Lucy Pollard.
Making the choice to be a pacifist can never be easy, but being a conscientious objector (CO) in time of war must be much harder. In world war two, COs were generally treated with more sympathy than they had been in world war one, but their decision was often complicated by their belief that the cause was just. This book by Tobias Kelly, an anthropologist by training, emphasises that there was not an either/or of pacifists and non-pacifists, but a continuum of attitudes. Indeed, for some of those who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), working in uniform alongside soldiers, it seemed as if there was little difference between them and their fighting colleagues.
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