Writing The Biology of War in the thick of World War I, G.F. Nicolai characterizes the non-combatants who were left behind as the "blind, deaf, and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, scrofulous and impotent persons, imbeciles, paralytics, epileptics, dwarfs and abortions—all this human riffraff and dross" (82). 1 In Nicolai's outlook, the intellectually, morally, and physically "unfit" were left behind to sap national vitality, as they reproduced and took the jobs of their stronger and braver countrymen who had gone off to war; it is this potentially damaging eugenic outcome that forms the backbone of his anti-war argument. What is most striking about Nicolai's account is that this class of the congenitally "damaged" is set in sharp relief from those disabled as a direct result of their service in the war—the disabled combatant retains his dignity, his access to gainful employment, and even the right to reproduce, unlike those "blighted" by nature alone. As the war progressed, this division between the two classes would become even more strongly marked, as civilian (or "everyday," congenital) disability came to be overshadowed by the hypervisiblity of war disability.

While a number of scholars have sought to examine the relationships between disability, war, and masculinity in recent decades, including Joanna Bourke, with her expansive study Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996), and Ana Carden-Coyne's more recent Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (2009), there has been little attention focused on the civilian disabled population in Britain that continued to coexist with those returning from the front during the First World War. 2 This civilian disabled population consisted of men, women, and children who were by necessity non-combatants, and were barred from directly participating as soldiers. Even as they were occasionally called upon to help train ex-servicemen for their dramatically altered lives, they were more frequently displaced from their schools and institutions in order to accommodate the war disabled (Bourke 49).

It is unsurprising that a number of male novelists and memoirists who had served in the war continued to be haunted by the horrors that they had witnessed on the battlefields, returning time and again to the specter of male war disability and disfigurement in their works from the 1920s and 1930s. While Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy; Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, and Frederic Manning's Her Privates We all feature conspicuous (and frequently gory) examples of dismemberment, bodily disintegration, and disability, civilian disability is all but absent from these works, appearing only in our fleeting glimpses of the "unfit" relatives and schoolmates who must remain behind, out of the action. While war-related disabilities (both physical and mental) would come to dominate and even serve to structure the texts of these combatants, "everyday" disability continued to be represented in the works of female novelists who opposed the enterprise of war. In Rose Macaulay's Non-Combatants and Others (1916) and Rose Allatini's Despised and Rejected (1918), characters with physical disabilities become mouthpieces for the anti-war movement as they openly and actively combat the "logic" of the war. Besides making these disabled bodies visible again, these novels also interrogate what fitness signifies on sexual, intellectual, and physical grounds, and lead us to consider what it means for the "unfit" to reject a war that they are barred from participating in in the first place. By placing characters with congenital disabilities alongside those who have been disabled and shattered by war, Allatini and Macaulay also interrogate the ways in which models of rehabilitation and public care are shifting, and point to how civilian experiences of war can be similarly damaging. While a number of other female novelists would go on to offer domestic representations of civilian disability in their works written during and after the war, including Rebecca West with The Return of the Solider (1918) and Djuna Barnes with Nightwood (1936), I am most interested in exploring the connections between disability and the peace movement here.

"England's need must come first"

Before looking to the novels of Macaulay and Allatini, I would like to examine the ways in which understandings of disability shifted during the First World War, and point to how the experiences of the civilian disabled population changed during this period, for better or worse. Though the focus of her study is on war-related disability, Joanna Bourke remains sensitive to how ex-servicemen displaced a number of disabled women, men, and children from the institutions and schools where they had resided. As she notes, the war greatly "exacerbated the shortage of accommodation for disabled civilians as the war-maimed were often sent to recuperate in the workshops and homes that had been established for civilians" (49). While some men and boys were asked to remain behind in order to help train the former soldiers in how to adapt to the challenges of their new lives, women and children were generally sent back to their families. Even as some specialized institutions for the disabled were requisitioned by the war effort, others voluntarily shifted their focus from civilians to soldiers, as was the case with Agnes Hunt's home for disabled children in Shropshire. As soon as war was declared, Hunt made the statement that "England's need must come first and that of course the women and children must be sent to their own homes" (Bourke 49). Beyond receiving coveted positions in rehabilitation settings and residences, the war-maimed were also far more likely to be offered employment after they had undergone vocational training programs, programs that were also often attended by male civilians (disabled or otherwise). As the historian Seth Koven has noted, "the needs and interests of female cripples remained on the fringe of public discussions of disability" before, during, and after the war, in large part because policymakers assumed that they should be the responsibility of their fathers, brothers, or husbands (1193). Inversely, disabled veterans were often better educated that their civilian counterparts, and came to represent a growing segment of voters. In light of their power as a block of the electorate and the high-flying patriotism of the war years, it is hardly surprising that returning soldiers were given a larger portion of medical, educational and vocational resources.

Degenerationist anxieties also continued to create a divide between the congenitally disabled and the war-damaged. As Bourke argues, contemporary "rhetoric favored the war-maimed: men rendered disabled in war were 'unnaturally abnormal' while those who had been born with physical disabilities were 'naturally abnormal'" (41). While those with congenital disabilities were often looked upon as being incapable of taking on remunerative labor and sexual reproduction, the returning soldier was viewed in an entirely different light. He was looked upon as needing to be "fixed" and rebuilt, in order to regain his independence and masculine dignity. As Marina Larsson has noted in her examination of family caregiving, both "during and after the war, single women were encouraged by patriotic publications to marry the war disabled," and to embrace roles as nurses and helpmeets. The Everylady's Journal went so far as to advise women to think of their future husbands as they would "think of a little child," noting that with her "most tender care" she could win him "back to happier ways, to brighter thoughts," and masculine strength (77-78).

The influx of crippled and shell-shocked ex-servicemen back into society would come to dramatically change disability discourse in Britain, the U.S., France and Germany in the years following the war. As Trudi Tate has suggested in Modernism, History and the First World War, as more than 1.6 million wounded British soldiers returned home, the "wounded returned soldier became a spectacle in civilian society—a sight of both fascination and dread," representing "the powerful social ideal of manhood," even as "the act of soldiering had damaged the bodily basis of masculinity, leaving him scarred, mutilated, paralysed or blinded" (96-97). Over 41,000 of these war wounded lost a limb, while some 60,500 had damage to the head or eyes (Bourke, 33). 3 But, war did not only make disability "visible" on an unprecedented scale, it also changed society's expectations for those living with disabilities—in terms of both education and economic autonomy.

According to Frederick Watson, who released his interwar study Civilization and the Cripple in 1930, the return of the wounded soldier brought about a "worldwide conversion in the attitude of the public towards a sympathetic understanding of deformity," as "there was not a village street all over Europe and America without a personal acquaintance with a cripple." Watson claims that as maimed ex-soldiers returned to the factory floor and their former jobs after spending time in rehabilitation programs and curative workshops, they gave the longstanding myth that "the cripple should be preserved from labour" a "rude knock" (21). In his outlook, the war was also instrumental in bringing about compulsory education for physically disabled children in the 1920s (32). That said, while the civilian disabled population did stand to benefit from some of the medical and educational programs that were developed and refined for veterans during the war, they were under increasing pressure to locate employment, as disabled veterans came to claim the lion's share of jobs open to those with physical disabilities. Veterans were similarly given priority over disabled children where medical care and charitable assistance were concerned (Bourke 44). Seth Koven has argued that this prioritization of maimed veterans was so extreme as to create "two competing categories of disabled persons" after the First World War, with "peace" and "war" cripples comprising two sharply defined classes (1200). A self-proclaimed "Cripple from Birth" would explore the divide between the two groups in an essay for the Cripples' Journal in 1926 entitled "The Making of a Cripple," where he writes about how his life has changed—for the worse—after the end of the war. With a note of despondency, he declares that "Everywhere I found that disabled soldiers always got preference…A civilian cripple has no chance beside them" ("The Making of a Cripple" 291). He continues to remark that "in these days of reforms, pensions, and National Insurance," no one has thought of "peace" cripples, who remain excluded from most governmental aid programs (291). While disabled veterans were being rebuilt in the nation's orthopedic facilities, fitted with prostheses, trained for new careers, pensioned, and released into the workforce, a large portion of Britain's civilian disabled population continued to feel that it had been forgotten and left behind.

Tales of Provocateurs, Outsiders, and "Peace" Cripples

In recent decades, both literary and historical scholars have associated the Liberal, rationalist, discourses of the war with a form of collective madness that was capable of transcending party and class lines—a collective madness that was cloaked by logic and Enlightenment ideals. 4 Whereas Daniel Pick's War Machine (1996) is expressly concerned with tracking the "particular tie between the historical understanding of industrialization and destruction, 'rationalization' and madness" (170), Vincent Sherry's The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003) highlights the ways in which Liberal rationalist discourses were coopted and transformed to serve the war effort. As these discourses broke down after 1914 and came to be emptied of their meanings, this so-called "Liberal" cause and its abiding language was parodied and combatted by pacifists, Modernist writers, and artists alike.

If the war machine itself is associated with the perversion of masculine, rationalist discourses and the taint of collective madness, it seems only fitting that its "antidote"—the peace movement—came to be connected with physical disability, feminism, and Modernist impulses. While feminist texts written both during and after the war would explore the idea that women had an obligation to work for peace, perhaps no one would go so far as Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1938). In this text, published two decades after the end of World War I, Woolf recommends that women reject mere pacifism to found a "Society of Outsiders," set apart from the petty concerns of patriotism, national struggle, and empire. This "Society of Outsiders" would not be constrained by personal or national ties, since as Woolf argues, "as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world" (109). In No Man's Land Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that while Woolf's Three Guineas has much in common with other feminist pacifist texts of the period, "her Society of Outsiders constitutes perhaps the most fully elaborated feminist vision of a secret Herland existing simultaneously within and without England's 'splendid Empire,' a rightful and righteous woman's state founded on the antiwar passions the war produced in women" (307). While Gilbert and Gubar are content to read Woolf's Three Guineas as a simple "feminist vision" of a "secret Herland," I think that it is also important to interrogate the very premises that this "outsider" society is constructed upon.

In Woolf's outlook, "pacifism is enforced upon women" since they were barred from engaging in combat in the First World War, while "men are still allowed liberty of choice" (fn, 177). It follows that since women are unable to consciously "choose" war, by default the broadest and easiest avenue of action open to them lies in "waging" peace. Woolf believes that it is not enough for women to simply reject a war that they are already cut off from participating in due to their gender and outsider status; they must work to construct an alternative, underground "outsider" society, which is opposed to both the rationalist, patriarchal order that embraced the war, and the "official" peace societies that came to manipulate power and public ties in the interwar period. As she argues, the "main distinction between us who are outside society and you who are inside society," is that "whereas you will make use of the means provided by your position," including "great names, and all such public measures as your wealth and political influence place within your reach—we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private" (113). The emphasis that Woolf places on the need for this outsider society to remain "private," external, and oppositional seems to anticipate many of the arguments put forth by Nancy Fraser in her famous piece "Rethinking the Public Sphere" (1990). Woolf's "society of outsiders" bears a number of similarities with what Fraser calls "subaltern counterpublics," which are characterized as "spaces of withdrawal and regroupment" outside of the public sphere, "bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics" (68).

While Woolf's Three Guineas, at its roots, seeks to answer the question of what women can be equipped to do to prevent war, it also encourages readers to think more expansively about what factors in contemporary British life led to the creation of this categorical "outsider" in the first place. In Woolf's reconstruction of history, she tells of sisters who have been sacrificed for brothers; of women who have been given inadequate educational training and have been barred from most vocational opportunities; of individuals who have not been entrusted to lead an independent existence. Although Woolf's "outsider" history is largely concerned with the inequalities faced by women in British society, it is difficult to read Three Guineas and not be reminded of other segments of the population that faced analogous barriers—other "outsiders" who were barred from direct participation in the war, and who were deemed incapable of controlling their own lives. Even within Woolf's small circle, the Bloomsbury Group, this question of what it ultimately meant for one to reject a war that had already rejected them comes to the fore for men and women alike. When conscription went into effect in 1916, her husband Leonard Woolf was deemed medically unfit, as was their close friend Lytton Strachey (Briggs 88). 5 While Strachey would go before the Hampstead tribunal to testify to the grounds on which he objected to the war, one must question how effective his act of public protest really was, if only because he was already exempt from participating due to his physical state. Nonetheless, this episode points to the fact that it was common for the categories of "pacifist" and "medically unfit" to overlap during the First World War. One study of conscientious objectors in the American context estimates that "about half" of C.O.s there were "found unfit for service" on medical grounds, and while only 16,000 would register as conscientious objectors in Britain, it is believed that many more of those deemed unfit also objected to the war on a moral and ethical basis, as Strachey had (Yolton, 126). 6

The Despised and Rejected of the Great War

Although Woolf's acquaintances were not exempted from service because of visible physical disabilities, but due to more subtly marked incapacities (Leonard Woolf's tremors and Strachey's ill-health, weakness, and "aberrant" sexuality), a number of female novelists writing during the war would forge connections in their works between disability and pacifism. Koven's designation of "peace" and "war" cripples is an especially apt classification here, as feminist and queer authors made characters with disabilities act in vocal opposition to the madness of war. Rose Macaulay's and Rose Allatini's "peace cripples" in Non-Combatants and Others and Despised and Rejected are quite literally just that: active pacifists and outsiders who are shown to be discontent with remaining all but invisible in a society at war. While the physically disabled characters that Macaulay and Allatini depict are already "damaged" when Britain goes to war, they come to suffer additional emotional and psychological trauma as the war progresses—pointing to the fact that even secondhand war experiences are capable of causing pain and turmoil for the civilians who remain behind. Both novelists also position their "peace cripples" in the midst of larger intellectual and artistic communities, exploring whether it is possible to continue to produce meaningful work in a time of total warfare, and stage encounters between disabled civilians and the war-maimed.

While Rose Macaulay would attempt to do her "bit" as a VAD and a land girl, she eventually landed in the Ministry of Information's Department for Propaganda in Enemy Countries (Crawford 18). Even as she was engaging in work that supported the war, Macaulay wrote Non-Combatants and Others (1916), which features a physically disabled female protagonist who opts out of assisting in the war effort, not only because of her physical limitations, but because of her objections to militarization and the overarching (il)logic of the war. Unlike her heroine Alix who had a consistent and thorough aversion to the war from its very beginnings, Macaulay only came around to a pacifistic position over time. Throughout the first years of World War I, she attempted to grapple with the fact that she had not been given the chance or the opportunity to directly participate, as a woman.

This frustration over being left out of the action is clearly reflected in both her fiction and poetry from the earliest parts of the war. Her poem "Many Sisters to Many Brothers," published in the Westminster Gazette in October of 1914, can be looked upon as an attempt to come to terms with the fact that women had not been given the same rights to defend their nation. In the poem, Macaulay addresses a fictitious brother who sits in the trenches, while she is "knitting/ A hopeless sock that never gets done," a brother who "could not climb higher," "ride straighter," or "run as quick[ly]" as she could. Despite her natural aptitudes and gifts, she must remain at home, which gives rise to the accusation that while "I sit here…you're under fire." In Women's Poetry of the First World War, Nosheen Khan argues that this poem "sums up the disappointment of girls who viewed their sex as a disability in war-time" (139), and "transmits Macaulay's sense of the injustice of a system which excludes her from an experience for which she feels she is as well, if not better, qualified than her brothers" (140).

But if a woman, by virtue of her gender, is "disabled" in being excluded from this war (as Khan suggests), what more can we say of a woman who is physically deformed, as Macaulay's protagonist Alix Sandomir is in Non-Combatants and Others? The novel follows Sandomir, a painter and intellectual, as she attempts to find her place in a society at war, and struggles to produce creative work in a world that is unrecognizable. While Alix tries to remain disconnected from the events that are occurring at home and abroad in the first months of the war, she soon learns that this willful detachment is nothing short of impossible (especially once shell-shocked and maimed family members and friends begin to return from the front). As she is confronted with the realities of the war, and sees how her loved ones have been transformed in the trenches, Alix begins to experience a similar decline in her own psychological state—a state that some critics have likened to shellshock. By the end of the novel, Alix has resolved to fight for peace and to rejoin the Christian church, and informs her older brother Nicholas that "As I can't be fighting in the war, I've got to be fighting against it. Otherwise it's like a ghastly nightmare, swallowing one up" (292). While Alix continues to recognize that the war in progress is not her war and denies any ownership over it, she does come to join forces with the peace organization that her mother runs, recognizing it as the only official venue where she can air her views.

While most of her friends, family members and loved ones work to do their bit for the war effort, Alix aligns herself with other "outsiders" as she refuses to further a cause that she fundamentally objects to. Early in the novel, her cousin Margot goes so far as to complain that, "Alix is hopeless; she does nothing but draw and paint. She could earn something on the stage as the Special Star Turn, the Girl who isn't doing her bit. She doesn't so much as knit a body-belt or draw the window-curtains against Zepps" (9). Her cousin's complaint is undercut by the fact that Alix has already been identified as lame at this point in the novel, and her disability has been described as having originated in a "diseased hip-joint as a child, which had left her right leg slightly contracted" (5). As Margot complains about all that her cousin is not doing for her country, the Belgian refugee who is staying with them admits that she thinks that Alix should be exempt from any sort of labor on the basis of her disability: "Mais elle est boiteuse, la pauvre petite…What can she do?" (9). 7 While Margot evidently believes in Alix's ability to engage in productive war work, the Belgian girl approaches Alix with pity, and references her incapacity and immaturity, in spite of the fact that Alix is over twenty-five years of age, and her senior. It is notable that Alix is consistently called "child" or "girl" throughout the novel, although she is a fully-grown woman. While she does not require institutional care, she remains dependent upon her upper middle class family for her maintenance, and spends the bulk of her time pursuing (non-paying) artistic activities in the midst of a community of other "unfit" noncombatants.

As an artist, intellectual, and a disabled woman, Alix is "othered" in multiple ways, and set in an oppositional relationship to the society that surrounds her. Debra Rae Cohen has argued that "Alix's lameness does not merely underscore her femaleness as disqualification from combat, but also sets her, in a sense, twice removed, unsettling the notion of gender as the first and most important designation" (31). If she can be seen as a sort of exemplary outsider for her refusal to lift so much as a finger in support of a cause that she believes to be senseless, it also becomes clear that her attempts to insulate herself from the war and ignore its presence are both psychologically damaging and unrealistic. She is confronted at every turn with reminders that the war is in motion, and that she is barred from having any direct part in it. Macaulay stages several strange and jarring encounters with recruitment posters and war propaganda—encounters that serve to remind Alix of her "unfitness" on several levels. As Alix waits for the bus early in the novel, she inadvertently "met the hypnotic stare of the Great Man pictured on the walls, and turned away, checking a startled giggle. Anyhow she was lame, and not the sex which goes either, worse luck. (On that desperate root of bitterness she never dwelt: that way madness lay.)" (58). While these recruitment posters were directed at able bodied males, Alix's encounter acts as a reminder that the probing eyes of the "Great Man" were capable of exerting a not-too-subtle pressure on all Britons.

The war also dramatically alters her prospects for love and a "normal" life as it changes standards of beauty. When Alix's romantic interest returns from the front after having two fingers amputated, her "frail," "pale" prettiness no longer appeals to him. Basil is drawn to her vibrant and healthy cousin Evie instead, for her "wholeness" and strength. After his time in the war, he admits to wanting a "healthy sort of girl, with all her fingers on and nothing the matter anywhere. He was sick of hurt and damaged bodies and minds; his artistic instinct and his natural vitality craved, in reaction, for the beautiful and the whole and the healthy…" (115). As she watches Basil's affections shift to a woman who is healthy and strong, Alix comes to realize that the war has taken away even more from her than she had imagined it could, and burns with resentment: "Alix hated him because she was lame and he hated lameness and loved wholeness and strength" (142). Ana Carden-Coyne has argued that this desire for wholeness and beauty was a common impulse in the aftermath of the First World War, and was something that was closely connected to the revival of classicism. As she suggests, this classical revival was intimately bound up with "the need to reconstitute the body fragmented by war, replacing weakness with strength, destruction with restoration, and disability with physical perfection" (38). Having seen so much suffering and bodily destruction, Basil can no longer tolerate Alix's imperfections, either as a man or as an artist, and replaces her, with her weak and irreparable body and disordered mind, with her cousin, who is healthy and happy.

Alix does not only suffer the loss of her relationship with Basil, she also comes to exhibit the symptoms of shellshock after her encounters with those returning from the front. After her cousin John comes back from the trenches with a head wound and a stammer, she discovers him late one night "barefooted, in pink pyjamas," "crying, sobbing, moaning, like a little child, like a man on the rack" (27). His episode causes her to experience a breakdown of her own, and in the moments before her collapse she develops a stammer, which is certainly reminiscent of John's: "Alix stammered, 'John-John. He's walking in his sleep…out there…He's crying—he's talking…go and stop him'" (28). After finding John help, she collapses in her room, "most suddenly and violently sick," and is later found by her cousin Dorothy "huddled under the bedclothes, exhausted, shuddering and cold" (28). Alix continues to be plagued by what John revealed to her that night, and to dwell on the story of his discovery of a leg in "the chaos of earth and mud and stones which had been a trench…thinking it led on to the entire friend, finding it didn't, was a detached bit…" (32). As John's nightmarish vision of bodily disintegration begins to absorb her waking hours, she seeks solace and escape in London. But her mental health continues to erode as she comes into contact with men who have been broken and damaged by the war, and especially after she learns that her younger brother Paul has died a dishonorable death as he attempted to give himself a "blightey."

In The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War, Angela Smith has argued that "Alix's neurasthenia operates on more than one level," as it highlights "her spiritual sensitivity and artistic isolation," and links her to Paul, who suffers an emotional collapse of his own in the trenches, and dies a coward's death (144). Months after the War Office informs her of her brother's death in the line of duty, a friend of a friend inadvertently tells Alix the tale of an anonymous young officer who "simply went to pieces when he'd been in and out of the trenches for a few weeks" (156). As the story goes on, Alix comes to the horrific realization that they are speaking about her brother. He was the "unfit," "nervous, sensitive" chap from the story who was not "strong enough in body or mind"; he was the one who "ought never to have come out" to France (156). This "unfitness," this fatal "nervousness" and "sensitivity" is something that is shared by all of Alix's siblings. Her older brother Nicholas is described as being most "probably medically unfit," while she is exempt because of her gender and disability. Their mother Daphne is the only member of the Sandomir clan who is shown to be vigorous and strong: "physically, mentally, morally, it was certainly Daphne who had the advantage" in the family (235). While the Sandomir children are all marked with a similar lack of vitality, they share a negative outlook on the war. Although Paul didn't discover how he felt about war until he was in the thick of it, Alix and Nicholas both reject it from the very beginning. By the end of the novel, Alix has committed to combatting the war in an official and active manner, while Nicholas continues to treat it with a more covert cynicism in his newspaper columns and in his book reviews of the "commonplace patriotic clap-trap" that was then in vogue in the literary world (71).

Despite their disagreements over the best way to end the war, Alix and her brother come to the joint conclusion that noncombatants have a very different experience of things, as their non-action comes to be looked upon as an affront to the patriotic. As Nicholas's best friend (a clergyman) argues, while "combatants are to be pitied," "non-combatants are of all men and women the most miserable" (292). This is certainly true for Alix, who loses her brother, her mental health, and her chance for love thanks to the war. Somewhat ironically, her "everyday" physical disability becomes even more marked and unacceptable in the midst of a war that has dismantled and destroyed thousands upon thousands of male bodies. To escape from feelings of loss and powerlessness, she must choose to act in the only way that she is capable: by making the attempt to "try to fight war" in the best way possible. When the novel closes, Alix explains her new rationale to her brother Nicholas, and we see them together for a final time. Hope and optimism carry the day, as "the paradox in the faces of both brother and sister was resolved, and idealism wholly dominated cynicism" (292).

While Alix is won over to the peace movement gradually over time, Rose Allatini's "peace cripple" Neil Barnaby in Despised and Rejected (1918) is convinced of his duty to actively oppose the war from its first days. Barnaby does not only edit and run the pacifist newspaper The Dove, he also acts as the spokesperson for the anti-war contingent in London, supporting conscientious objectors and anti-war agitators of every stripe (including artists and intellectuals). Although Barnaby is only a secondary character in the novel, he is positioned at the center of a diverse group of outsiders—a group that includes those with congenital disabilities, the constitutionally "unfit," gays and lesbians, anarchists, and socialists. He becomes the moral and ethical voice for this band of outsiders, and delivers a number of impassioned speeches on what the war stands for to the "despised and rejected." Like Alix in Non-Combatants and Others, Barnaby is not expected to engage in war work due to the severity of his disabilities, and unlike the C.O.s that he advises, he does not have white feathers cast in his direction to accuse him of cowardice; he is "immune from that delicate sort of attention" thanks to his "deformity," with his "fine massive head sunk between rounded shoulders; [and] one leg shorter than the other…" (156). While he is exempted from combat on the basis of his disabilities, he avows that he would still be engaging in the same type of work (in opposition to the war) even if he were able bodied: even "if my physical disabilities hadn't been so blatantly apparent to the naked eye," "I should be doing exactly what you're doing now—or rather, what you're not doing" (156). Later in the novel, Barnaby discounts his own anti-war efforts, arguing that he is "out of the running, altogether, but I envy you fit men for having the chance to do your bit in the cause of peace" (244). Barnaby regrets the fact that he is not given the ability to choose whether or not to participate, and believes that his rejection of the war is less valuable and less meaningful coming from his "tainted" body. By declaring himself to be "out of the running," Barnaby sidesteps (or willfully omits) the fact that he has been doing more than anyone else he knows to work towards peace.

Barnaby, a man of letters, and an erstwhile playwright and novelist, believes that art and intellect are being destroyed in the face of the war. He encourages his disciples to continue to pursue their artistic and intellectual passions, even if British society castigates them for it. He advises his friend Dennis, a composer, to continue with his work in spite of "the opinion of your next-door neighbours," and suggests that artistic work should be of the utmost value in a society at war: "Get on with your opera. That's the 'bit' for you to do, and a 'bit' which only you can do…Let's at least preserve art from the general wreckage" (157). He also makes the argument that the artist is naturally or constitutionally unsuited for the enterprise of war, declaring that

There are thousands of men being forced to fight, who are physically and mentally unfit to be of the least use in battle, but whose brains might have given us scientific inventions that would have benefitted humanity, works of art, books, music…No, they won't let them stop at home and do what they can do, but must send them out to do incompetently things against which their whole nature rises in revolt. (241)

In this speech, Barnaby applies pressure to the very notion of "fitness," suggesting that there are sensitive and intelligent individuals who have no place on the battlefield, yet who are entirely capable of leading successful and productive lives as civilians, and as artists. He places a far higher value on their intellectual and artistic labor than on their potential uses in war, arguing that "it's the sacred duty of everyone who's got the gift of creation to try and keep it intact…That's rendering a greater service to mankind than putting your life at the disposal of the war-machine" (242).

After most of his friends and colleagues have been hunted down, imprisoned, and forcibly conscripted, Barnaby stands alone as the voice of reason at the novel's end. Unlike Woolf, Allatini doesn't believe that women, by themselves, are the effective antidote to warfare. Instead, through Barnaby, she argues that "all sorts of poor little deformities and abnormalities" of the present day are necessary for "the production of the higher type" in the future; a new "species" that will possess the dual nature of man and woman combined, the "power and intellect of the one with the subtlety and intuition of the other" (348). This type of individual comes to stand for reason and truth in Barnaby's outlook, and would possess the foresight and wisdom to never again enter into war. Angela Smith has argued that it is fitting that Barnaby ends the book with this speech, as his "crippled body and overt wisdom render him effectively sexless and an appropriate spokesman for an 'advance guard of a more enlightened civilisation,' 'who stand mid-way between the extremes of the two sexes'" (154). It is significant that Barnaby would choose to associate both present-day "deformity" and "abnormality" with future wisdom, morality, sanity and peace. His speech also serves to reveal his belief that his band of outsiders, those who are "despised and rejected," should rightfully inherit the earth, after the liberal, masculine order's failure to prevent war.

It is striking that both Allatini and Macaulay allow for physically disabled characters to have the final word in their novels—shifting both Alix Sandomir and Neil Barnaby into highly visible and highly public roles as peace activists and visionaries. We must question why disabled bodies were needed to stand up to the machinery of war within these works, to counteract the collective "madness" that had absorbed British society. While Allatini believes that it is the artist's duty to continue producing work in spite of overwhelming pressures to enlist, Macaulay suggests in Non-Combatants and Others that intellectuals must keep their wits about them, since they're "fast losing even such mental coherence and concentration as we had" as a society; "People are more than ever like segregated imbeciles" (74). By staging encounters between their congenitally disabled characters and the war maimed, Macaulay and Allatini have drawn attention to how "peace" and "war" cripples have already been divided into two opposing camps. Rather than emphasizing Barnaby and Alix's innate physical incapacities, both novelists draw attention to what their disabled characters are capable of accomplishing with their anti-war activities. While both are shown to be outsiders on a number of levels, their mental fortitude and creativity are revealed to be more necessary than ever before in the midst of a society struggling with war.