STRIKE AGAINST WAR: The little girl in this photograph is Ruby Crane. From the age of 3-years-old Ruby walked blind soldiers around a rehabilitation center called St Dunstan’s at Brighton in Sussex. Ruby’s Father was the head gardener. She knew they were blind and had recently returned from the trenches of the Western Front.

Whilst wandering the grounds she would take a hold of their hand and ask them where they wanted to go (individual workshops) and guide them there.

People were so affected by Ruby walking the blind soldiers around they would send her dolls and toys as a thank-you for all the support she gave to the men and women affected by sight loss. Little Ruby was rewarded with a long life as she passed away in her late nineties as recently as 2011.

Ruby recalled, ‘I always remember how my little hand seemed so small in their big hands. They were so pleased to have a child come and talk to them. It was something different away from the monotonous grind of being unable to see things I think.’

Ruby was so popular that she was featured on the front page of St Dunstan’s first Annual Report for 1915/1916 and later Flag Day emblems incorporated a similar design that featured Little Ruby.

QUOTABLE QUOTES: ‘Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings!

Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction! Helen Keller. – Source: Told to an audience at Carnegie Hall one year before the United States entered World War I. From ‘Declarations of Independence’ by Howard Zinn page 75.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own’   – Aldous Huxley – English novelist and critic, 1894-1963.

American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century’s major wars. In the First World War, 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in the Third World War, 90-95 per cent would be civilians: Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action.

What a stupendous, incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment inflicts on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose: Thomas Jefferson.

‘Battle doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left. We destroyed fascists, not fascism; men, not ideas. Our triumphs did not serve as evidence that democracy is best for the world any more than Soviet victories proved that communism is an ideal system for all mankind.  Only through our peacetime efforts to abolish war and bring a larger measure of freedom and security to all peoples can we reveal to others that we are any better than our defeated opponents.’  – Peter Bowman ‘Beach Red’