Sorry, Jim: don't quite follow. The Nurnberg defence was "just obeying orders", with implication of parenthetical 'tho I knew it was wrong'. I am no committed pacifist, and didn't think it was in any way *wrong* to do National Service: just disagreeable; but like all my generation I did it because the law required it and I am a law-abiding citizen. However Ewan might have been confused over the vagaries of attitudes to USSR, he didn't attempt to declare himself any sort of conscientious objector: he simply decided he was above the law and scarpered and hid and then was lucky to get away with it on psychiatric grounds. I admire your principled stand and am sorry you had a bad time; but, as I don't happen to share your principles, I can't see where that makes me in any way culpable for having just got on with it, as we all did at the time, tiresome as we may have found it, rather than run away from it as Ewan appears to have done — AND YOU DIDN'T, but preferred to state your position and take any consequences which ensued; which, I reiterate, I find admirable even tho you were acting on convictions which I don't happen to share.