Where have all the conscientious objectors in literature gone?

Ford Madox Ford wrote about them. So did Lytton Strachey and Sarah Waters. Help us to celebrate Conscientious Objectors Day by 

Moira Redmond

Thursday 15 May 2014   theguardian.com

'What’s it to anyone else if I won’t fight?’ asks Alec in Sarah Waters' novel The Night Watch. Here is a scene from the BBC2 adaptation. Photograph: John Rogers/BBC

Today is International Conscientious Objectors' day, and the pacifist group Peace Pledge Union are holding their annual ceremony in London to mark the event. PPU has a fascinating and affecting archive of testimony from COs, but it occurred to me that conscientious objectors are underrepresented in the literature of war. There are many references to conscience: to soldiers who signed up but later doubted the rightness of the cause and to deserters, to those who were, by our standards, wrongly accused of cowardice. But references to actual conchies, as they were (not always affectionately) known, are thin on the ground.
Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End, produced in the 1920s, has some mention of them.

'The son,' Tietjens said, 'is a conscientious objector. He's on a minesweeper. A bluejacket. His idea is that picking up mines is saving life, not taking it.'

This might not fit everyone's definition.
Historian and writer Lytton Strachey was famous for having faced down a tribunal to get conscientious objector status – and his reputation survived this. Strachey's biographer Michael Holroyd says the correct version of a famous anecdote is that he was asked: "What would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to rape your sister?" Strachey replied: "I would attempt to come … [significant pause] between them."
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