Clive Bell is better known as a writer on art than on war and peace, yet his opposition to conscription and his activities on behalf of conscientious objectors during the First World War were as important to him at the time as his championing of modernist art – indeed, in some ways they were aspects of the same belief in the inviolable nature of individual liberty. In Peace at Once, his banned pacifist pamphlet, Bell laid out an argument from which he would hardly waver throughout his life: that war was always the worst possible evil. His pacifism was shared by many in his circle in 1915, but by 1939 he was in an isolated minority of absolutists and appeasers. But his forthright conscientious objection to war was always rooted in the broader conception of liberty he articulated in On British Freedom, published by Chatto & Windus in 1923: ‘It is for civilization – for which, by the way, we are supposed to have fought the war – that I am pleading: and though I am aware that liberty alone will not give it us, yet I am certain that no nation can be truly civilized till it possesses a far greater measure of personal freedom than is to be enjoyed in this or any other Anglo-Saxon community’ (86).

Chère Baronne,

I am sending you some grouse to prove that there are things I don't mind killing. For that matter, I don't so much mind killing or being killed Germans, French, Russians or English. What I do mind is watching the collapse of civilization. For the next fifty years noone is going to take much interest in the things for which we care. All the more reason why we should care for them very much so please take me into your confidence about your play. If I may judge from your letters – and why shouldn't I? – you write extremely well. Even your hand-writing is as full of force and character as mine is of sweet inefficiency; all the same mine has one obvious advantage.