HIS prisoner number was 8171. The tag still survives, as does some of his letters home, and a Christmas card, and together, they tell one small piece of a big remarkable story: the story of the men and women who defy the conventions of war, by refusing to fight, or refusing to conform, or refusing to love the person they’re told to love. The name of prisoner 8171 was Tom Burns.

Tom’s story – and the story of other men and women like him – was one of the inspirations for my novel What He Never Said, which is set just after the First World War. The popular images of the war are young men happily signing up in groups, inspired perhaps by the pointing finger of Lord Kitchener, or young men dying because of incompetence of futility. But 16,000 people refused to fight between 1914 and 1918, and in the Second World War it was even more: during that conflict, some 60,000 British men and women said: no, not in our name.

Their reasons were varied. Some objected on the grounds of their socialism and one simple question: do the ordinary working people of Britain have a fight with the ordinary working people of Germany?

For others, it was their pacifist or Christian principles that drove them, which meant some refused to do anything at all that would contribute to the war effort, including driving ambulances. And for some Scots, their nationalism was the important issue – they simply did not want to fight for the British state.

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In the case of Tom Burns, the driving motivation was his pacifism – something which his daughter Lucy Metcalfe explained to me when I talked to her about her father. “My father was passionately pacifist and always was,” she told me. “He didn’t believe anybody had the right to kill anybody else. But at the same time he wasn’t going to sit back and do nothing when the war broke out. He was motivated by wanting to help people.”

What Tom did in the end was volunteer for non-combatant duties which meant that, after the Second World War broke out, he was sent to Finland to drive ambulances and it was by no means the safe option. Lucy told me how her father was often shot at and bombed and had to leap out of the ambulance and bury himself in the snow to avoid being killed. “He saw full-on combat,” she said, “but he played it down massively because he didn’t want people at home to worry.”

Tom later ended up in a POW camp when he was captured by the Germans and was sent to Stalag VIIIB in what is now south-west Poland. Lucy has read the letters he wrote from there and says she is hugely proud of her father. “I do understand why people would think ‘it was the Nazis, it wasn’t like the First World War, it was something that had to be got rid of.’ But I also feel that the approach he took was brave. Would I go as far as to say it was right? I just never questioned that it was the right decision.”

I have to say it's hard to forget a story like that when you hear it first-hand and it was thoughts of Tom that led directly to What He Never Said. The idea was to put a conscientious objector at the heart of a crime novel and a whodunnit; I wanted to make him the hero but I also wanted to explore some of the prejudice and punishment he would have faced. Some of those who refused to fight in the First World War were sent to a desolate quarry in Dyce near Aberdeen where they slept in freezing tents during the night and broke stones during the day.

What He Never Said also tells the story of some of the other people that war forgot. My detective, Second Lieutenant JP Allgood, has come back from the Front shattered by what he saw there but he is also trying to come to terms with his sexuality. In the novel, he has to read and censor the letters of his men knowing that he himself is hiding a secret – and has to. Hundreds of men whose sexuality was exposed were court-martialled and imprisoned.

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Others, of course, kept their sexuality a secret and died in the trenches and we cannot possibly know how many. We do know some of the stories: the poet Wilfred Owen for example, whose death had the cruellest of timing: he was killed one week before the Armistice. Or Edward Brittain, who was killed in the Battle of Piave River in 1918, the day after the censors had opened a letter that revealed he’d had affairs with men. Had he survived, he would have been court-martialled.

Parts of all of these stories made their way into my novel and my hope is that it reflects the extraordinary pressures that existed on young people over issues that we now take for granted, although they are by no means entirely resolved. It occurred to me as I was writing the book that I don’t really know what I would do if the government told me to fight. I asked Lucy, Tom’s daughter, the same question and she told me she would do exactly what her father did 70 years ago. “I wouldn’t be able to kill anybody,” she said. “I definitely wouldn’t be able to do that.”

In the end, the ultimate question for the hero of my novel, Harry Baker, is how he can start to have an ordinary life back in the civilian world after refusing to fight. But there are other questions in the novel as well. The book starts with the death not of hundreds of thousands in France but the death of a single woman: a young actress stabbed to death in the theatre in front of her friends. So one of the questions in the book is why some people refuse to kill. But the other question is why some people want to.

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What He Never Said by Mark Findlay Smith is published by Sharpe Books at £6.99

Mark is appearing at the Bloody Scotland book festival as part of Crime in the Spotlight on September 19th at 5.30pm. bloodyscotland.com