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By Root 1105 0

Britain in Germany's image, while killing and maiming men by the millions and making certain an embittered and dangerous postwar world. He not only lent his enormous prestige to the No-Conscription Fellowship; for much of the war his thick shock of graying hair was a familiar sight at the NCF headquarters each day, for he became the group's acting chairman when its head went to prison for refusing the call-up. He attended the courts-martial of COs, visited them in prison, and devoted hours to the most mundane office tasks, writing numerous "Dear Comrade" letters to branches around the country, signed "Fraternally Yours, Bertrand Russell." And he made clear to all that he was as willing to sacrifice his freedom for what he believed as were the younger men and women around him. When the government began prosecuting people for distributing an NCF leaflet, he immediately wrote to the Times: "Six men have been condemned to varying terms of imprisonment with hard labour for distributing this leaflet. I wish to make it known that I am the author of this leaflet, and that if anyone is to be prosecuted, I am the person primarily responsible." For this he was fined £100 (which he refused to pay, forcing the authorities to seize some of his property), dismissed from his post at Cambridge, and denied a passport for a trip to lecture at Harvard. The government was still uneasy about the bad publicity in the United States that would come from throwing such a prominent intellectual in jail. Incidentally, like thousands of people in Britain at this time, Russell came from a divided family: his first cousin was a War Office official who at one point ordered a raid on the NCF headquarters.

Believing—correctly—that sooner or later most of its leaders would be arrested, the NCF set up a "shadow" structure modeled on that used before the war by the Pankhursts' WSPU. If any officer was jailed, someone else, designated in advance, would automatically take his or her job. Similarly, wrote one member, "in various secret places, buried in an orchard in Surrey, or locked in an unsuspecting city merchant's safe, or at the back of the bookshelf in the house of a remote sympathiser ... were duplicates of every document likely to be seized." These included a daily bulletin on the numbers of men arrested, court-martialed, and imprisoned, and file cards showing the whereabouts of every CO. Any instance of their mistreatment was recorded and turned over to one of the small band of sympathetic MPs willing to ask questions in the House of Commons. Communications were often in code: if a telegram said that a meeting was to be at Manchester, it in fact meant Newcastle. Basil Thomson's Scotland Yard agents frequently raided the NCF office, so its staff took care to leave enough unimportant documents on the desks and shelves so that the police would think they were seizing something valuable.

The draft resisters in prison served their sentences at hard labor. For the first two weeks, a prisoner was given no mattress to sleep on in his seven-by-twelve-foot cell. Prison labor usually consisted of sewing a daily quota of thick canvas mailbags with a big, skewer-like needle. NCF members who were free organized relief for families of those behind bars, and groups gathered every week and on special occasions like Christmas Eve to sing hymns and labor songs outside prison walls. "The singers can have little idea how eagerly we looked forward to the evening when we imagined them due," a CO at Wormwood Scrubs Prison wrote to the NCF's lively weekly newspaper, which at its peak had a circulation of 100,000. "I can never thank these unknown friends sufficiently."

Anyone claiming exemption from the draft for whatever reason, whether as a conscientious objector or because he was engaged in labor "of national importance," had to go before one of many special tribunals around the country. The military representative on one tribunal asked a socialist militant, "Are you doing work of national importance?" "No," came the reply, "but I'm engaged on work of international importance."