‘Do you drink?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘What time do you go to bed?’

‘I try for ten.’ He didn’t sleep. Often he was still pacing the floorboards at two or three in the morning.

‘Do you go to church?’

‘Not as frequently as some.’ Christmas was the last time. Midnight mass because his mother had wanted it. She’d come to London to be with him; it was the least he could do.

‘Do you bathe?’

‘Regularly.’

‘This man has no conscience,’ the retired officer stated confidently and definitively. ‘He’s a sly shirker and must be sent to war as soon as possible. The army will do him good. We are doing him a favour.’ It was clear that he would have liked to slam down a hammer.

The women in furs clapped and cheered; the old men groaned and waved their umbrellas jubilantly. Howard knew they needed to carry on with their shrill cheerfulness, talking about heroes and duty. He was a nuisance. Defeated, infuriated and insulted, he yelled, ‘It is callous slaughter. Butchery. Don’t pretend it’s anything other, not for a minute. Those men – good, bad and indifferent – are being cheated out of their lives. Tricked. I’m not giving mine up so easily.’

‘So this is about self-preservation?’ sneered the dentist.

Exhausted. ‘I’m making a stand. Interpret it as you will, but I’m not killing a single man. Not for you, my King or country. Not for bloody anybody.’

Howard was dragged from the court into a military van. His body was a lead weight. It wasn’t that he was refusing to walk as such; his legs just wouldn’t work. He was thinking about the corpses they’d dragged into mass and shallow graves. Sometimes he’d helped dig the graves, then stood with his cap clasped to his chest and mumbled a prayer. A ritual as much as anything. The soldiers in the van didn’t know he’d buried their comrades. They stamped on him, broke his ribs and nose through fear and frustration.

He was patched up but wasn’t sent to a military hospital; no doubt it was deemed a waste of a bed. Howard agreed and felt lucky enough that he was allowed to rest up in the barracks. Once able, he participated in the drills, shaved, kept his kit tidy, saluted, even picked up a gun and learnt to shoot it. They thought they had him, but when it was time to go to France, he would not get on the ship.

‘Not unless you can guarantee non-combatant duty, sir,’ he said to his major. Straight-backed, loud voice, meeting his eye. This request was within the major’s power, but he was an angry, rigid man.

‘You don’t get to make fucking demands.’

Howard was sent to Richmond Castle, held in a cell that was little more than a dungeon: a filthy, damp, light-deprived room with deep, bleak walls and chilly flagstone floors. He tried very hard to think about his mother and home. The green fields and trees, the cottages with thin lines of smoke towering from their chimneys; he wanted to remember that there were Sunday lunches, bank holiday fairs and bookshelves. He doubted that his place of incarceration was arbitrary; Richmond Castle housed some of the absolutist conscientious objectors, the ones who were most feared and loathed. They would not accept non-combatant war work so were starved, beaten and isolated on occasion; a rule of silence was strictly enforced because everyone was petrified of what they might whisper.