World War I is presented through several sharply different encounters with wartime responsibility rather than through a battlefield account. For Simone Weil, the war prompted an early refusal of comforts unavailable to French soldiers; for Thomas Kelly, it tested how a pacifist might serve amid a conflict he opposed; and for Dag Hammarskjöld, it forms the political setting for a family legacy of duty. Together these episodes show the war reaching into private habits, religious conviction, and public service.

The war enters family life

When war broke out in 1914, Simone Weil’s father, Dr. Weil, was called into the French army, and the family followed him wherever practical. In this unsettled family circumstance, Simone began to identify her own conduct with the deprivation of those at the front. She refused sugar while French soldiers were deprived of it, and the account describes this as an early instance of a lifelong practice: denying herself what the most unfortunate people did not have. The gesture did not alter soldiers’ circumstances, but it made wartime privation a standard against which she measured her own consumption.

The conflict also belongs to Dag Hammarskjöld’s family history through his father, who served as Sweden’s prime minister during World War I. His father represented an old conservative Lutheran outlook and believed strongly in doing one’s duty. The account contrasts this sense of obligation with his limited capacity for warm personal contact. It does not describe a particular wartime decision by him; instead, the war-era political role helps establish the inheritance of duty against which Dag’s own religious and public life would later be understood.

Kelly’s pacifist service

The United States declared war on Germany in 1917 while Kelly was studying at Hartford Theological Seminary. As a pacifist, he applied to serve in a British YMCA canteen and counsel troops, seeking a form of service consistent with his religious commitments. His decision placed him near the military without making combat his role: he hoped to offer the troops a Christian influence rather than participate in fighting.

Kelly was later transferred to work with German prisoners of war in England. He regarded this prison work as more closely aligned with his understanding of Christ’s life and motives. From there he worked in the London office and made weekly inspections of prison camps. The progression—from a canteen to work with prisoners and then to camp inspections—shows his service taking shape around care for people on different sides of the conflict, rather than around military allegiance.

In December 1917, Kelly and his YMCA associates were relieved of their duties and sent home. The military regarded the presence of antiwar pacifists as dangerous because it might demoralize troops by encouraging them to think about killing enemy soldiers they did not know. The dismissal therefore exposed a conflict between Kelly’s intention to serve and the military’s concern that pacifism could weaken the willingness to fight. His work ended not because the account records a change in his convictions, but because those convictions were seen as incompatible with military morale.

Postwar consequences and remembrance

The war’s aftermath also appears in Kelly’s later service. After completing his studies, he accepted a position at Earlham, but delayed the appointment to go to Germany with the American Friends Service Committee. The committee wanted Kelly and his wife to nurture an infant Quaker movement there. They found that many Germans had become attracted to pacifism after the horrors of World War I, and a permanent Quaker center was established in Berlin. The account thus links wartime destruction not only to Kelly’s earlier noncombatant work but also to a postwar religious community organized around pacifism.

These episodes preserve different scales of consequence. Weil’s refusal of sugar records the war as a daily ethical measure; Kelly’s dismissal records the institutional limits placed on pacifist service during wartime; and the German Quaker center records a postwar response among people drawn to pacifism. Hammarskjöld’s father supplies a further, more indirect connection: the war is the period in which his public office and conviction about duty were situated. None of these accounts offers a comprehensive history of the conflict. Their focus is the way its pressures entered individual lives and continued to shape service, belief, and memory.