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The NCF scored another rhetorical point when, in the course of one legal case, a lawyer on the government side, Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who later would get James Joyce's novel Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England), thundered accusingly that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong." Delighted, the NCF proceeded to issue a poster with exactly those words on it, credited to Bodkin. The government then arrested an NCF member for putting up this subversive poster. In response, the NCF's lawyer demanded the arrest of Bodkin, as the author of the offending words. The organization's newspaper—named, with deliberate irony, the Tribunal—called for Bodkin to prosecute himself, and declared that the NCF would provide relief payments to his wife and children if he sent himself to jail.

In the spring of 1916, a succession of desperate telephone calls to the NCF office revealed a crisis that was no occasion for humor. When conscription first began, if a tribunal refused a man's application for CO status, he was considered to have been drafted into the army—where, once at the front, the wartime punishment for disobeying an order could be death by firing squad. One such group of COs found themselves forcibly inducted into the military and, when they refused to follow orders, were put in irons, fed bread and water, and locked up in the darkened rooms of a granite-walled fortress at Harwich, built by prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. One day an officer told them that they were being sent to the front in France. "Once you are across the Channel," he said, "your friends in Parliament and elsewhere won't be able to do anything for you."

The 17 men were put on a train headed for the port of Southampton. As the train trundled through the outskirts of London, one of them tossed a note out the window. Luckily, it was found by a sympathetic member of the militant National Union of Railwaymen, who telephoned the NCF office, which promptly went into action. When questioned in Parliament two days later, Prime Minister Asquith swore he knew nothing of the case. Lord Derby, director of recruiting, gave the impression—rightly or wrongly—that he did, claiming that the army was fully justified in its actions, and that, as for the 17 hapless COs, "if they disobey orders, of course they will be shot, and quite right too!"

More protests came from liberal voices in the press, which the War Office countered with a propaganda barrage of its own. Bertrand Russell joined a delegation that visited Asquith to plead for the men's lives. "As we were leaving," Russell wrote later, "I made him a speech of denunciation in an almost Biblical style, telling him his name would go down in history with infamy. I had not the pleasure of meeting him thereafter." Meanwhile, horrified family members and fellow pacifists could get no news of the men's fate. The mothers of nine of them, desperate for help, visited Sylvia Pankhurst, who went to lobby on their behalf at the War Office. In late May, the army sent several additional groups of COs from different parts of the country across the Channel, some in handcuffs. It now appeared that almost 50 COs were in France, and could face firing squads if they refused to fight. As one cluster was taken out through the gates of an army camp in Wales, a band played a funeral march.

"In France a court-martial can be held and an execution carried out without the knowledge of the public at home," Russell wrote to a newspaper. "The name of the victim can be simply published in casualty lists, and the truth need not leak out until the war is over."

The families and supporters of the prisoners had no news of where they were. Then one day in early June 1916 the NCF received a clue: a Field Service Post Card, designed to save army censors the time it took to read mail. Tens of millions of these cards were issued to troops overseas, with half a dozen printed messages that a soldier could either underline or cross out. This postcard was signed by a 27-year-old