Henry Firth had been in prison for nine months when he was transferred to the Dartmoor Work Centre. As a conscientious objector who had agreed to do 'alternative service', he was set to work breaking stones. Before long, he went to the camp doctor and said he was ill. The doctor told him there was nothing wrong with him. The next time, the doctor said he was selfish.
Firth collapsed several times while working in the quarry over the next two months. On 30 January 1918, he was admitted to the camp hospital. On 6 February, Firth's friends asked for permission to send a telegram to his wife about his condition. Permission was refused. A few hours later, Henry Firth was dead. He was 21.
He was one of more than 6,000 British people who were imprisoned for their opposition to the First World War. Most were conscientious objectors who were denied exemption from joining the army or who refused to accept the conditions for partial exemption. Others were imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm Act, rushed through Parliament after the outbreak of war and extended over the following years before reaching its most extreme form in 1918.
In the early months of that year, the government introduced tighter censorship rules and the police raided pacifist organisations. Three leading Quakers were imprisoned almost immediately for publishing a pamphlet without submitting it to the censor.
Another Quaker, Violet Tillard, was locked up for 61 days for refusing to tell the authorities where anti-war publications were being printed. The philosopher Bertrand Russell was given six months on the pretext that he had harmed relations with an ally of the UK by criticising the US army. Leading Scottish activist John McLean was sentenced to five years for 'sedition'. A year earlier, peace campaigner Alice Wheeldon had been convicted on fabricated evidence of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister.
Until recently, opponents of the war appeared in histories of the conflict as a footnote at best. More recently, historians such as Cyril Pearce and Adam Hochschild have suggested that opposition to the war was stronger than is often thought. Despite this, Britain's political prisoners are rarely mentioned. They are repeatedly overlooked by those who speak of Britain's traditions of free speech.
Henry Firth was one of seventy-three conscientious objectors who died in prison, work centres or military detention. Of course, the number is very low compared to the unimaginable thousands killed in the war that the peace campaigners wanted to stop. It's important to remember that stopping the war was their aim. Pacifism is not passive; it seeks to change society. That's why British pacifists made links with anti-war campaigners in Germany and several travelled to the Netherlands in 1915 for the International Women's Peace Conference.
Many people today – Michael Gove aside - look back on the First World War as an avoidable and outrageous waste of millions of lives. Isn't it time to pay more attention to those who said so at the time?
Take Harry Stanton, a conscientious objector who experienced imprisonment, torture and a death sentence – all before his twenty-second birthday. Shortly after the sentence was commuted to ten years in prison, he was feeling proud and joyful to be 'one of that small company of COs testifying to a truth which the world had not yet grasped, but which it would one day treasure as a most precious inheritance'.
Whether you love peace activists or loathe them, you can't tell the story of the First World War without them.
Symon Hill is a Christian pacifist writer and campaigner. He is teaching a course on the peace movement in the First World War for the Workers' Educational Association. He edited the White Feather Diaries, an online storytelling project exploring the lives of pacifists in the First World War.