THE story of a conscientious objector from Swindon who endured appalling conditions in Iraq during the First World War to care for wounded soldiers, has been published by his granddaughter.

Francis Hurcom was a devout Methodist and believed taking life was wrong. But while many others who objected to taking up arms were imprisoned or put to work in agriculture, he volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps as an orderly.

It was a decision that resulted in him being sent to Mesopotamia where the British Army suffered several bloody defeats and lost thousands of men to injury, disease and dehydration.

Dianne Pane’s book, Scenes from a Conscientious Objector’s War starts on April 29, 1917 with her grandfather writing a letter home, sitting on the altar of a ruined Persian temple on the eve of the Battle of the Boot at Band-i-Adhaim.

A matter of hours later he had been taken prisoner by Arabs when he was caught in a sandstorm while on a desperate motorcycle mission to call up reserves. As a rule, the Arabs would shoot British soldiers.

But said Dianne: “I always remembered that those Arabs didn’t shoot him. He thought it was because he wasn’t armed.”

Eventually Sgt Hurcom escaped and rejoined his unit. He was eventually discharged from the army in 1920 and returned to Swindon.

Before the war he had worked at the furnace in the railway works but he transferred to the clerks’ offices. He carried on his work as a lay minister and watched his family grow up in Ferndale Road.

But the effects of what he had seen and endured never left him.

“He couldn’t stand loud noises. It affected him for the rest of his life,” said Dianne.

She explained he suffered the after effects of malaria caught while he was in the marsh land south of Baghdad and after the war had migraines and tinnitus.

“He used to get very down and cry when he was thinking of all the suffering of the wounded and the Arabs,” she said. “It was an awful trauma.”

He died in during the 1960s when he was in his 80s, but a few years ago former teacher Dianne decided she wanted to tell his story to a wider audience and aimed to publish it on the 100th anniversary of that letter to his wife.

“I was retired and had always written poetry and children’s stories. I just thought I would write down and gather all the stories together that the family had told me and do some research so I could put it into a realistic context.”

At first she started the project as a member of a writing group, but when she left and moved to Wales, the others in the group encouraged her to carry on.

Scenes from a Conscientious Objector’s War is available from Amazon and The Book Depository.