Crisis of Conscience: Conscientious Objectors in Canada during the First World War (review)

Perhaps the loneliest man in the wars of the twentieth century was the conscientious objector. He was conscripted, coerced, abused, and ridiculed as a coward, an idiot, and a traitor. Yet in Canada the government offered specific groups exemptions from military service, and tribunals where they could make their case for exemption. Over 300,000 hearings were held under the Military Service Act (msa), and 86,000 exemptions granted. Of those denied, about 42,000 appealed to Justice Lyman Duff, half of them successfully. Whatever their personal sincerity, the rest were refused, for their religious communities were not listed in the Military Service Act. They claimed obedience to a higher authority than the Crown, to obey God rather than governments. Their otherworldliness exhausted the patience of many military officers and ncos who too often turned to the bully boys.

Amy Shaw's examination of the stark realities of these Canadian objectors, especially those not protected by the mas, is a welcome addition to Canadian historical writing. Her task was not easy: Justice Lyman Duff and his assistant threw away the tribunal records after the war – enough to make any historian seek easier pickings. Instead, Shaw developed a matrix of newspaper accounts, military records (especially those of objectors forced into service), and scholarly studies done in the United States and Great Britain, producing an illuminating table of conscientious objectors, and criteria by which to examine them. She begins with the Mennonites, Doukhobors, Quakers, and Amish singled out in the mas as exempt. Canada kept its pledge to these groups, even though it so badly needed men in early 1918 that it broke its promise to farmers and their sons. Other pacifist religious groups not named in the Act had to lobby on their own for recognition as 'peace churches.' Most of this was in vain, especially for International Bible Students, later known as Jehovah Witnesses. Few tribunal judges, newspaper columnists, or local officials had much patience for their objections. Christadelphians made the case successfully that their movement was organized as a pacifist denomination in the United States during the Civil War. Their church was added to the mas list, though members already conscripted met with very harsh treatment in uniform and in prison, while Plymouth Brethren, Tunkers, and Pentecostals, like the Bible Students, received short shrift.

The objectors who were perhaps the most abandoned in the dock were those belonging to the mainstream churches: Anglican, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist. These bodies were anything but peace churches in the Great War, and all had jettisoned their naive pacifism to proclaim the war an apocalyptic crusade. Already influenced by the cult of religious manliness, they had little good to say of their brethren who took a pacifist stand. Their position was simply denounced as selfish, wrong, effeminate, and treasonous. Their fate was to be pariahs: undefended in tribunals, supported only by families and friends, vilified in the press, ignored by their denominations or condemned by them. Here Shaw depicts the all-consuming and co-opting nature of total war. For a liberal society to justify war, wrote Michael Howard, it must view the war as a crusade. Shaw vividly describes how public crusading by their own communions hemmed them in. Only towards the end of the war did the press turn away its wrath, expressing admiration for those who had stuck to their principles. Perhaps one of the greatest legacies of the war was the bad conscience about treatment of religious objectors, and how it motivated both peace church leaders and the government of Canada to offer more reasonable alternative service in the Second World War. Conscientious objectors, too, learned from their history, organizing far more effectively than in the First World War. Thus, Shaw is persuasive when she claims that the Great War objectors had been in the vanguard of individual rights in Canada, judging by the room for manoeuvre granted objectors in the...