He did not have the option to quietly sit through a local conscription tribunal, to try to privately explain his position and conscience in the town hall. He was to be publicly and relentlessly baited like a bear. The tribunals were set up to look into men’s hearts, but man is a tricksy beast. Very few are pure. How could the local doctor and mayor tell if a man was battling with his conscience or his nerve? The entire tribunal process quickly disintegrated into a farce. Local bigwigs, stuffed with prejudice and wielding axes they wished to grind, could hardly be expected to judge the market gardener who insisted his work was vital or the Cambridge student who asked for a closer inspection of the New Testament. Certainly not the playwright who had simply seen too much. The process was perhaps well intentioned, maybe even worthy, but not very effective, and certainly not just. Clerics, choirmasters, councillors and such – men who sat with their heads in their hands and looked for all the world as though they wished they were somewhere else – did not have the answers. No one did. Two and a half million men had volunteered to take up arms for King and country. A few thousand refused. Why? It was vile, despicable, unfathomable.

Objectors were ordered to work at munitions factories or to load ships, or were sent to the Front as part of the Non-Combatant Corps – soon to be dubbed the No-Courage Corps – where they laid barbed-wire fences and could be easily picked off by German snipers. Some absolutists refused to cooperate with any aspect of warfare. They wanted nothing to do with it, largely on religious grounds, sometimes political. They would not load ammunitions on to ships or even peel potatoes in the officers’ mess. What could be done with these slackers, these deviants?

They were sent to prison.

Howard seemed to particularly frustrate and disgust those who settled this sort of matter. His height and physical magnificence taunted, aggravated them. They needed men like him the most and they disliked needing him almost as much as they disliked his refusal to help. Of course they must make an example out of him. It was what the mob demanded.

‘Do you believe in God, Mr Henderson?’ asked the elderly local dentist who was the designated chairman in charge of Howard’s tribunal. He was neither elected nor a military man, but these things were settled by whoever would take them on, because trials were work-intensive and manpower was scarce; that was the irony.

‘I believe in humanity.’

‘I’m trying to understand. Are you a religious man?’

It wasn’t that Howard was a holier-than-thou sort. He’d done things that some might question morally. When he’d been a playwright (was he ever? It didn’t seem real or possible. Was that another man?), there had been fringe benefits and he’d taken advantage. He was flesh and blood, after all. He drank, swore, lied if necessary. Not over big things; he only lied about trains delaying his journey to work when really he’d stolen an extra half-hour of sleep or sex and had been reluctant to leave the warmth of his bed. He was decent enough and that had been adequate then, before the war. Not especially godly or moral in the way that the tribunal might understand the word, but he was a thinker. Always a thinker. The thing people said to him most often (besides complimenting him on his big blue eyes) was that he thought too much. There was no such thing; for a writer it was impossible to overthink. That was his oxygen: to foresee, to second-guess, to imagine.