discuss the next step to be taken. “Naturally I should help you in every way possible,” he said. “I have always regarded all wars as acts of criminal folly, and my hatred of this one has often made life seem almost unendurable. But hatred makes one vital, and without it one loses energy. ‘Keep vital’ is a more important axiom than ‘love your neighbour.’ This act of yours, if you stick to it, will probably land you in prison. Don’t let that discourage you. You will be more alive in prison than you would be in the trenches.” Mistaking this last remark for a joke, I laughed, rather half-heartedly. “No; I mean that seriously,” he said. “By thinking independently and acting fearlessly on your moral convictions you are serving the world better than you would do by marching with the unthinking majority who are suffering and dying at the front because they believe what they have been told to believe. Now that you have lost your faith in what you enlisted for, I am certain that you should go on and let the consequences take care of themselves. Of course your action would be welcomed by people like myself who are violently opposed to the War. We should print and circulate as many copies of your statement as possible. … But I hadn’t intended to speak as definitely as this. You must decide by your own feeling and not by what anyone else says.” I promised to send him my statement when it was written and walked home with my head full of exalted and disorderly thoughts. I had taken a strong liking for Tyrrell, who probably smiled rather grimly while he was reading a few more pages of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread before going upstairs to his philosophic slumbers.
Although Tyrrell had told me that my statement needn’t be more than 200 words long, it took me several days to formulate. At first I felt that I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin. But after several verbose failures it seemed as though the essence of my manifesto could be stated in a single sentence: “I say this War ought to stop.” During the struggle to put my unfusilierish opinions into some sort of shape, my confidence often diminished. But there was no relaxation of my inmost resolve, since I was in the throes of a species of conversion which made