Walter Bone was a book finisher and binder living in Birkenhead when conscription was introduced in 1916. Under the group system, where men were called up in discrete batches according to age and marital status, Walter, a 38 year old married man, was faced with conscription in early 1917 and it took until June 1917 for him to have a Tribunal hearing. Walter applied for absolute exemption as a conscientious objector on religious grounds. A member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he believed that his religious principles meant that he could not participate in war.

Walter’s application was turned down and he was passed “exempt from combatant service only”. This meant that he would still have to join the army, albeit in a unit set up for Conscientious Objectors - the Non-Combatant Corps - that provided logistical and labour support behind the lines. Walter, as an absolutist, refused this option, probably as he believed that providing help to the army, in effect taking a man’s place who would otherwise be in a fighting role, was morally equivalent to directly fighting and killing as a soldier. He was arrested soon after his tribunal hearing and escorted to the Cheshire Regiment depot in Chester.

As an absolutist CO, Walter was determined to resist all military orders. In his career as a CO, he was sent to Army depots three times and each time shortly after his arrival he would be in trouble, charged with “when on active service, disobeying a lawful command given by his superior officer”. Each time he faced a court martial, was found guilty and transferred to civilian prisons.

Walter served his first sentence for disobeying orders in Wormwood Scrubs, where he refused the offer of the Home Office Scheme. He may have felt that the scheme, where COs were released from prison to work camps where they were expected to carry out work of national importance, was too much of a compromise for his principles. Immediately after refusing the scheme, he was sent back to the army, this time to Aldershot, and then to another court martial and his second prison sentence.

Many COs went through this cycle several times, but for Walter his third prison sentence was to be his last. He was sent to Winchester on the 23rd of November 1918, two weeks after the Armistice. There, deprived of food and exercise, kept in cramped, wet and cold conditions, he was easy prey for the flu epidemic sweeping the country and fell ill along with many other Conscientious Objectors at Winchester at the time. Medical provisions, food and warmth were few and far between and Walter would die of a secondary infection on the 23rd of February 1919, mere weeks before the death of Paul Gillan at the same prison.

Walter’s death was made all the more tragic by the callousness of the military. Walter, as he had died in Winchester prison, was deemed to not have died due to the fault of the military, though it was the inflexible and cruel system of military punishments that had locked him away. His widow, Mary, was denied any compensation, notified by a quickly scrawled letter where “as the ____ which caused the death of _____ was his own fault” had been crudely crossed out.

He is remembered along with the other COs who died during the war on the Conscientious Objector memorial plaque. The plaque carries an inscription that holds true to the spirit of the Conscientious Objection and the right to refuse to kill in war that Walter died for and tells us today to carry on the struggle against militarism - “it is by the faith of the idealist that the ideal comes true”