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Conscience, Doubt, and the Militarized Body in Pain

The Military Service Acts of 1916–18, passed under the more general Defense of the Realm Act (1914), implemented conscription throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. Opposition to conscription led to the imprisonment and abuse of thousands of conscientious objectors, who were in an ambiguous legal position, subject to punishment from both military and civil law, but protected by neither. While the combat poetry of writers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen first brought the unprecedented violence of the war to the popular imagination, and the enduring literary symbol of the war’s legacy has been the shell shock victim, the “problem” of the conscientious objector seemed to disappear with the armistice, and the few literary representations of conscientious objection have received scant attention as such. However, the interwar period did produce several significant modernist representations of conscientious objection which rise above the prosaic propaganda of wartime pacifists such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. Moreover, the liminal legal space of the conscientious objector accords well with high modernism’s engagement with the structural breakdown that was both the war’s cause and its legacy. Modernist writers who lived through the war, such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Basil Bunting, in the UK, and e.e. cummings, in the US, foregrounded, in certain works, the conscientious objector’s body as the locus of the struggle between the will of the state and the will of the individual. In the 1990s, Pat Barker would make the treatment of conscientious objection central to her Regeneration Trilogy (1990–95), particularly in the second novel, The Eye in the Door (1993). In this struggle over the internal identity of the subject, the state’s final weapons are corporeal humiliation and pain.

The wording of posters announcing the Military Services Act reveals ambiguity and discomfort about the state’s motives and how the state wanted citizens to understand conscription. Far from issuing a simple Hobbesian mandate in the name of sovereign right, posters announced that men had two options: they could either enlist right away or join the “group system,” and be called up with their military group. Despite only giving these two choices, the poster goes on to explain that “if he does neither, a third course awaits him: he will be deemed to have enlisted under the Military Service Act on Thursday, March 2nd, 1916” (fig. 1). The passive voice obscures the injunction, allowing an unofficial, extra-legal space for enforcement of the Act at the individual level. The discretion to decide on whose objections were valid, furthermore, was left to local military boards.

Recognizing the precarious legality of the bill, and the difficulty of enforcing it, a few Members of Parliament objected to its passage. Some thought conscription could be more trouble than it would be worth; others objected to the fact that the bill legally enforced an attitude that men must take toward their own identities regarding military service. In his short book For Conscience Sake (1917), Alfred Bishop, the brother of an incarcerated conscientious objector, argues against conscription’s juridical legitimacy. In the book’s introduction, John Clifford states that “[o]ver 4,500 ‘Conscientious Objectors’ have been made into soldiers against their will, arrested, handed over to Military Authorities and subjected to Military law and whatever that involves. Of these, nearly 3,700 have been court-martialed; over nine hundred who have completed their first sentence have been court-martialed again, and returned to prison.”[1] Clifford shows that the tribunal system designed to determine which objectors’ grounds were truly “conscientious” created an inescapable cycle of increasingly severe sentences.[2] He points out that “the spirit and the letter of the Military Service Act provide exemption for the citizen who refuses to be made a soldier from a deep sense of religious duty” and so concludes that the actual treatment of conscientious objectors, under the state’s own definition, is “illegal”(Bishop, For Conscience Sake, 3).

The legality of this treatment, or whether legality even applies, could depend on how one reads the “exceptionality” of Britain’s situation and what becomes of legality in the paradox of law’s legal suspension during an emergency. Carl Schmitt argued that sovereignty is defined by the ability to decide on the exception to any law.[3] Giorgio Agamben analyzes this claim, arguing that this state of exception has been increasingly deployed as a political tool, revealing that it is “the constitutive paradigm of the juridical order.”[4] Furthermore, the cases present a legal problem because the act sets up a law and provides a possibility of exemption from its provisions, but remains deliberately vague about verifying or defining who may be exempt. As some opponents in parliament argued, if conscription is a law, it would need to be absolute. If it provided a secure means of being released from service, it would be more a suggestion than a law, and the point of the Act was that suggestion had not been enough. Thus, the Act intervenes into the subject’s very psychology by ambiguously creating a law about how the subject must see himself and his position in regard to the state, and what the state “deems” his position to be. But is the tenuous legislation of DORA (the Defense of the Realm Act), or the almost noncommittal wording of the Military Services Act, adequate to clear the kind of extralegal space that Schmitt and Agamben theorize as law’s essence? The conscientious objector is not stateless, and he cannot be attacked or killed with impunity, like Agamben’s Homo Sacer.[5] Yet, the usual laws protecting the treatment of his body do not apply. Rather than being symbolically consecrated to the underworld by removal from state membership, with no vital protection, the conscientious objector is publicly tortured, not only with impunity, but with the understanding that his torture is necessary for the protection of the population.

The interiority of subjectivity, and its relation to bodily obligation, was particularly significant in debates about conscription and the treatment of conscientious objectors whose arguments frequently, but not always, represented corporeality as subordinate to an essential, intangible, and not necessarily religious attitude toward combat. As in Elaine Scarry’s famous dictum on the uncertainty of pain, to have a conscientious objection may have been a certainty to the objector, but to the tribunal tasked with determining that objection’s validity, it immediately inspired skepticism.[6] With no externally legible signifier of a moral objection to combat, the military’s solution was to foreground corporeality to the point of eradicating complex interiority.

The military attempted to reduce the unexcused conscientious objector to the “docile body” of a soldier by physically putting his body through a soldier’s motions in infantile displays of physical bullying.[7]

Throughout the war, a regular newsletter called The C.O.’s Hansard compiled hundreds of descriptions of the treatment of objectors. The story of G. Beardsworth, which was reported in September 1916, exemplifies the form of torture used on conscientious objectors. The report first describes how, after being brought from the tribunal to the barracks, Beardsworth refused to submit to the medical exam or to cooperate in any manner. When soldiers forcibly attempted to dress him in a khaki uniform, he eventually submitted to put the uniform on himself, but refused to put on the puttees, and was handcuffed so soldiers could put them on him. When the handcuffs were removed, however, he took them off. This extreme treatment of the conscientious objector exaggeratedly presents him as a wayward child who must physically be shown how to occupy the role of the soldier and then produce the soldier’s movements. Although he could easily be court-martialed for his refusal to comply, the army intends, as he is told repeatedly, to break him. His treatment arises from his being “deemed” to have enlisted. However, in some paradoxical way, he is deemed unentitled to the due process available to voluntarily enlisted soldiers because of the involuntary nature of his enlistment.

Beardsworth’s torment continues the next morning when the army employs the same absurdly literal attempt to make his body act as they deem necessary. During drill, soldiers walk behind him kicking his ankles in the right direction until his ankles are “swollen and a source of torture.” When Beardsworth reiterates his objection to a major, he is “handed over to the gym squad for a further course of ‘discipline.’” The report continues:

The exhibition of the next hour beggars description, and it took place in a public park before a large number of men and women and children. . . . He was dragged to the rail, roughly bundled over, and as he refused to leap, he was pushed time after time into the water . . . he was seized and harried round the field by fresh men as fast as they could force him . . . he was taken to the next stage of torture. This was a palisade 7 feet high . . . Five men seized B…… and threw him bodily towards the top, but being a fairly big man instead of landing him clear they caught him on the top, and as he fell over on the other side they caught him. This was not “efficient” enough for the officer. He was dragged back, hurled bodily over the top and as the men ran to catch him, this officer shouted “stand clear,” and he was allowed to smash to the ground like a log . . . In a state of physical exhaustion B…… was seized on every side and forced at full length up the sloping plank. No brutality was spared, and no restraint of any kind was shown. At the top he was turned head over heels time after time, and finally dumped on the ground, helpless and bleeding.[8]

Because the objector’s crime is not to think of himself as a soldier, the punishment forces him through the actions of soldiers, with the infantile and misguided hope that anybody who is forced to wear a uniform and forced to do drill and training will eventually see himself as a soldier. As in Louis Althusser’s reading of Pascal, which enables him to “invert the order of the notional schema of ideology,” corporeal action comes first, and inscribes absolute law on the subject’s psyche.[9] Imprisoning objectors as citizens who had broken a law would validate their objection by handling it within the prescribed, non-exceptional juridical order. Without the language of absolutism, the state decrees how citizens must construct their essential identities, and physically carries out this decree. As Scarry demonstrates, the structure of torture is designed to generate a “wholly convincing spectacle of power” (The Body in Pain, 27). In this case, that spectacle not only shores up the regime’s sense of its own power, but conveys that message of power to a larger public, and inverts the objector’s sense of self by making his own body into the agent that is supposed to change his mind and cause him to “deem” himself a soldier. The interrogatory aspect that forms an essential part of torture by making the subject of torture “betray” himself (and thereby his cause) is explicitly about the subject’s identity. The only question is “are you a soldier?” and the only acceptable answer is “yes.”

Although there are far fewer literary representations of conscientious objection than of combat, shell shock, and myriad other elements of the Great War, those that exist, from the interwar period and beyond, share a focus on the centrality of corporeality, pain, and spectacle, on the attempt, as Scarry describes in her analysis of torture, to erase the subject’s will and turn his body against his world. Although there is not space here for a sustained reading of any one work, I would like to adumbrate, through several brief examples, the recurring elements of the literature of conscientious objection.

A similar instance of conscientious objection is depicted directly in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), the first of Gibbon’s socialist Scots Quair Trilogy (1932–34). The novel follows young Chris Guthrie as she grows up under a harsh patriarch on a Scottish farm. When her father dies and she is left alone, she marries Ewan Tavendale. The idyll of their marriage is soon destroyed by the outbreak of War. Ewan resists pressure to enlist at first, but his resolve breaks down. On his first leave, he returns transformed completely from a taciturn, innocent farm lad to a coarse brute who brags to his young wife about his drunken licentiousness and the prostitutes he’s slept with, terrifying their toddler son. When he departs from his last leave, Chris does not even say goodbye, although she mourns his death.

In contrast to Ewan, Long Rob of the Mill, a local bachelor, is directly opposed to the war, and sees all the propaganda as cant from a group of nations that are “all tarred with the same black brush.”[10] Rob’s pacifism gets him into trouble when, as the novel’s narrator describes it, “Parliament had passed the Conscription Act, that meant you’d to go out and fight whatever you said, they’d shoot you down if you didn’t” (Gibbon, Sunset Song, 208). When a police officer and two soldiers arrive to force Rob to join, like Beardsworth, he practices passive resistance and is carried from his home. He is returned however, having successfully resisted the army’s attempt to make him into a soldier against his will:

[H]e had never given in, they had put him in prison and ill-used him awful; but he wouldn’t give in whatever they did, he laughed in their faces, Fine, man, fine. Last he went on the hunger strike, that was when you just starved to death to spite them, and grew weaker and weaker. So they took him from prison to a doctor childe and the doctor said it was useless to keep him, he’d never be of use to his King and country. (219)

Although the army cannot make him a soldier, his community does succeed in “breaking” him by boycotting his mill entirely and shunning him. He finally tells Chris, the only person left in Kinraddie who will speak to him, that “the world had gone daft and well he might go with the rest, there was neither trade nor trust for him here, or rest ever again till this War was over, if it ever ended at all” (232). His stand against the war does not end with his coming to terms with it, or reconciling it to his conscience, but rather with a renunciation of all reason in the face of its implacable folly. In the end, like the shell shocked and transformed Ewan Tavendale, and the socialist of the village, Chae Strachan, Rob is killed in France and memorialized at the novel’s closing.

Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting offers a more personal engagement with conscientious objection than Gibbon in his first major poem, “Villon” (1925), which owes a stylistic debt to Eliot and Pound. “Villon” is a densely allusive high modernist poem that includes a section about Bunting’s imprisonment as a conscientious objector in 1918. Born in 1900, he was only barely eligible for military service during the war, but when the time came, he chose conscientious objection of the strictest sort, refusing even to do noncombatant labor, as that would free up another man to fight in his place. Bunting is not known to have been handled as roughly as Beardsworth, nor was his family made to suffer, but, like the fictional Long Rob, he did resort eventually to a hunger strike, and was subjected to corporeal degradation.

Though Bunting’s pain is not made public, his treatment shows that the locus of his struggle to assert his will in the face of conscription is his body, which is reduced to the barest elements of hunger and nakedness. This excerpt includes many of the images and tropes associated with conscientious objectors by those who were sympathetic to their cause:           

I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave,

fettered to a post in the damp cellarage

[. . .]

Only the military tread and the snap of the locks.

            Mine was a threeplank bed whereon

I lay and cursed the weary sun.

They took away the prison clothes

and on the frosty nights I froze.

I had a Bible where I read

that Jesus came to raise the dead—[11]

The lines about the “prison clothes” being taken away refer to the practice of leaving conscientious objectors naked with an army uniform, and not giving them any alternative clothing. The body is reduced to its animal nature, taken out of the social contract by its refusal to bear the contractual uniform of the sovereign. But in conflating the army uniform with “prison clothes,” Bunting indicates that military service is also a form of imprisonment. The uniform would trap its wearer in a false identity, as his tormentors tried to trap the hapless Beardsworth. Furthermore, the association of the conscientious objector to Jesus is established when the speaker recalls his time in the grave. The lines about Jesus raising the dead, with their slip into a simple rhyming iambic tetrameter, can be read either as ironic commentary on the lack of “Christian” virtue in his treatment, or as a more positive statement on the conscientious objector’s fulfillment of Christ’s commitment to nonviolence.

Similar themes are evoked in cummings’s “i sing of Olaf glad and big” (1931), the most famous modernist text to deal with conscientious objection. In cummings’ poem, the pain to which the conscientious objector Olaf is submitted is not only corporeally crude and scatological, but also involves an element of sexual degradation, as well, suggesting the effeminization of the conscientious objector (and his transformation into an object) by his tormentors, who in addition to “evok[ing]/ allegiance per blunt instruments,” go on to:

kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”[12]

This treatment demonstrates a foregone conclusion in much of the population, on both sides of the Atlantic, that the objector must be homosexual, or cannot, at any rate, be a “real man.” Sodomizing the objector with a red-hot bayonet suggests not only that his political or moral decision has placed him outside of the political and military assumptions of the day, but outside of the heteronormative culture mainstream. It is as crude as a playground taunt, and no doubt meant to be as effective in the minds of an observing public. Olaf is ultimately sent to prison by the president himself, the commander in chief of the army and the highest power, signifying that this corporeal punishment and effeminization of the objector goes to the root of state sovereign power, circumscribing legal avenues of objection. Olaf, however, is ultimately commemorated for his bravery, proven by statistics: nearly everybody who was conscripted went without question, whatever happened to them in France. Very few, the poem suggests, were brave enough to resist, and face torture, imprisonment, and death at the hands of their own countrymen.

Looking back to the Great War from the 1990s, Barker’s second novel in the Regeneration trilogy offers one of the most sustained fictional presentations of the bravery of conscientious objection in the First World War. While the main focus of Regeneration (1991) is shell shock, and The Ghost Road (1995) turns to protagonist W. H. R. Rivers’s prewar life as an anthropologist, The Eye in the Door focuses on Billy Prior’s relationship with his childhood friend, Patrick MacDowell, or Mac, who has become central in an effort to resist not just conscription, but the entire war effort. The novel depicts the military’s struggle to contain the working-class threat to the war effort, a threat consisting of the Independent Labour Party, the No Conscription Fellowship, all conscientious objectors, pacifists, deserters, and socialists. The imprisonment and persecution of these groups and individuals also plays out alongside the ongoing Pemberton-Billing controversy, demonstrating the conflation in the minds of some military officers and politicians of conscientious objection and homosexuality.

The fictional Billy Prior, who was treated for shell shock alongside the fictionalized Sassoon and Owen in Barker’s/the trilogy’s first novel, had been partially raised by a working-class shop owner named Beattie Roper when his mother was suffering from tuberculosis. As the novel opens, Beattie and her son have both been imprisoned; she has been accused of an improbable attempt to assassinate David Lloyd-George, and her son has not been granted an exemption because, as Beattie tells Prior:

they don’t like moral objectors anyway. If you’re religious—doesn’t matter how batty it is—you can say you’ve got the Holy Spirit in a jamjar on the mantelpiece—that’s all right, that’s fine. If you say, “I think it’s morally wrong for young men to be sent out to slaughter each other,” God help you. The Chairman of the Board actually said to our William, “You can’t be a conscientious objector because you don’t believe in God, and people who don’t believe in God don’t have consciences.”[13]

Although Beattie in this case is incorrect that a religious claim can easily get an objector exemption, her son William is given the same treatment as the actual Basil Bunting, stripped and left alone in a freezing cell with an army uniform.

The distinction between conscience and morality is tenuous, but the threat posed by anybody unwilling to “do their part” is not separable from the larger threat to bourgeois, imperialist England presented by socialists and labor organizers. Like the virile Long Rob in Gibbon’s novel, Mac, the primary target of the military’s investigation into the anti-war movement, is strong, muscular, courageous, and outspoken. Because of Billy Prior’s role as a double agent, moving between his military position and the working-class community from which he came, as he moves between men and women in his sexual encounters, he is able to speak freely to Mac, despite his ostensible job of investigating his anti-war activities. Mac reveals to Billy what is obvious to most conscientious objectors: conscription is simply the appropriation of labor, and of bodies, by the bourgeois state. Rather than thinking about the objector’s struggle in terms of effeminacy or religion, objection is resistance to the illegitimate appropriation of labor, to the point of probable death, by the state. Ultimately, this battle is fought at the most personal level, the corporeal. Mac says of his political and personal struggle against the war: “It’s a bit like Medieval trial-by-combat, you know. In the end, moral and political truths have to be proved on the body, because this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are” (Barker, The Eye in the Door, 112). Mac and other antiwar fighters, like conscientious objectors, are ready to fight that battle at the level of the body. As the punitive, painful, and humiliating treatment of objectors by the military indicates, so is the state.

Notes

[1] Alfred Bishop, For Conscience Sake (London: Headley Bros. Publishers, 1917), 3.

[2] Once a conscientious objector submitted and agreed to his involuntary enlistment, any further resistance could be punished by military law. If a one‐time conscientious objector were deemed to have deserted, he would certainly be shot. Will Ellsworth‐Jones relates the story of John William Hasemore, for example, who was shot for disobeying military orders in a training camp (We Will Not Fight: The Untold Story of the First World War’s Conscientious Objectors [London: Aurum, 2007], 153).

[3] Schmitt argues that, regarding legal arguments, “What is argued about is the concrete application, and that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state, public safety, and order, le salut public, and so on. The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at least be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually or made to conform to a preformed law” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 6).

[4] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7.

[5] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

[6] Scarry writes that “‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty,’ while for the other person it is so elusive that ‘hearing about pain’ may exist as the primary model of what it is ‘to have doubt’” (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 4.)

[7] Michel Foucault coins the term “docile bodies” in Discipline and Punish, stating that the production of docile bodies is at the heart of military discipline, in both senses of the word: Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 135.

[8] “Report XLIV” (164), C.O.’s Hansard, Imperial War Museum, London.

[9] Althusser writes that “Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus scandalously inverts the order of things.” The suggestion that internal acceptance does not lead to actions, but rather that actions lead to internal acceptance animates the military’s elaborate and veiled torture of conscientious objectors (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001], 298).

[10] Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1988), 195.

[11] The allusions to Christ are notable as a common trope of pacifist literature of the era. In poems such as Sassoon’s “The Redeemer” a suffering soldier is compared to Christ. In Eva Gore‐Booth’s short story The Tribunal (1916), distributed as a one‐penny pamphlet, Christ appears as an objector before a tribunal, which dismisses his objections. Basil Bunting, Complete Poems, ed. Richard Caddel (New York: New Directions, 2000), 25–26.

[12] e. e. cummings, Selected Poems, ed. Richard S. Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 142.

[13] Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1994), 35.