Most of the men known as Conscientious Objectors were conscripted under the 1916 Military Service Act, but some COs had joined Non-Combatant sections of the army well before the introduction of conscription. These men became Conscientious Objectors during their time with the army. They may always have been pacifists, or they might have developed a Conscientious Objection to combatant service that they never had before the war.

Wilfred Knott was one of the former. He was a clerk and a member of the Salvation army in 1914 and was only 17 at the start of the war. Soon after war was declared, he volunteered, but into the Royal Army Medical Corps rather than a combatant regiment. Around 500 other COs would join the RAMC throughout the war, most after conscription was introduced in 1916. Wilfred trained as a stretcher bearer in the UK until April 1915 when he was sent out to the Eastern Mediterranean where he would work transporting soldiers that had been wounded and killed in the bloody failure of the Gallipoli campaign. He stayed with the RAMC until he was posted to Egypt in 1917 as a nursing orderly.

Wilfred may have joined the RAMC out of a determination to save lives instead of taking them and a desire to help people at the time they needed aid most, just as many COS who joined the RAMC and Friends Ambulance Unit after conscription did. However, it was only at this point, after his arrival in Egypt, that Wilfred became a Conscientious Objector.

When in Egypt Wilfred, along with a large group of other RAMC men, was threatened with forcible transfer into a combat unit. This would mean transfer out of the RAMC, where he could not be forced to carry or use a weapon, into a front-line fighting unit where he would be expected to kill others - the exact opposite of his medical work and training. Wilfred and the other men faced with this transfer resisted and after a short period of imprisonment most of them were granted Conscientious Objector status just as if they held a certificate of Non-Combatant service from a Tribunal. Wilfred was allowed to stay in his non-combatant role, but other COs were sent to military prisons for their refusal to be forced into fighting units.

With his status as a Conscientious Objector confirmed, Wilfred spent the rest of the war in the RAMC - working to save lives but never to take them.