In April 1918, Archibald Baxter woke to find himself in a hospital bed in Boulogne. He had been unconscious for several days. The medical officer working in the ‘mental ward’ was troubled by his patient’s condition. Baxter’s body was ‘emaciated, fleshless, with the skin drawn over the bones’. Though barely 27, he looked much older – his nerves had gone to pieces, his muscles had wasted away, and he had clearly lost several stone. Every serving doctor in France had seen badly damaged men, but this particular case puzzled him. There wasn’t an inch of Baxter’s body that wasn’t battered and bruised. ‘How have you come by those marks on your body?’ the doctor asked. ‘Had you been blown up by a shell?’

‘No,’ Baxter replied in a ‘hollow whisper’, ‘I am against this war, I am against all wars.’1

The enemy did not exact the wounds the doctor examined that day. Nor were they self-inflicted. Several of the men admitted to the mental ward had shot themselves to escape the fighting. The doctor’s job was to nurse them back to health, so they could be tried for ‘cowardice’ and shot again. But Archibald Baxter wasn’t a soldier – even if the New Zealand Army insisted on treating him as one. Baxter was a conscientious objector. He had been starved, beaten and tortured at the behest of senior army officers. His own countrymen – not the Germans – had done all this to him.

‘I told him what had happened to me,’ Baxter remembered some years later. ‘I watched his face. It altered. . . ’ At several stages in his story, the doctor stopped him, wondering if Baxter might be suffering from delusions, hoping none of this could actually be true. But it was. Archibald Baxter had refused to fight, disobeyed his orders, and cast aside his uniform. The authorities were determined to maintain army discipline, discourage dissenters and ‘make an example of him’. A principled man’s unwilling service became an almost unrelenting regime of physical and psychological abuse.2

It began back home in Otago. By 1916, voluntary recruitment was failing. The New Zealand Army had suffered 7473 casualties of the 8556 who served on Gallipoli; losses on the Somme the following year were even worse. With men increasingly reluctant to enlist, the government claimed it was unable to meet its quota for reinforcements. Despite considerable opposition, a conscription bill was pushed through the parliament. Unlike Australia, there was no chance to vote ‘No’ in a referendum. Even more severe than British legislation, New Zealand’s Conscription Act allowed for few exemptions.

A Christian socialist who attributed war to greed and empires, Baxter’s opposition was deemed ‘political’ and he was sent to prison. So too were 272 others. In late 1916 Baxter was transferred to an army camp near Wellington. Trentham was his first taste of military discipline. Refusing to work, or to wear army denims, he was sentenced to solitary confinement and allowed only bread and water. He then faced a court martial and a further eighty-four days’ hard labour. Baxter remained defiant, despite yet another sentence of forced detention in the barracks. That principled intransigence – and the overcrowding problem posed by so many dissenting men – convinced the camp commandant to send some of the ‘conscies’ overseas. There the British Army would no doubt know how to deal with them.

Fourteen dissenters were spirited onto the troopship Waitemata, the authorities hoping their forced deportation might be kept a secret. Baxter and his compatriots were confined to the ship’s clink. A tiny cabin, ‘stuffy and ill ventilated’, it soon stank with the vomit of seasick men. They were issued with uniforms – and again refused to wear them. They were marched on deck, stripped naked ‘in front of men assembled to watch’ and forcibly dressed in uniform. Baxter later wrote in his memoirs:

The feeling of the crowd appeared to be mixed. There was some laughter, some jeering and a gramophone somewhere played ‘Onward, Christian Soldier’ but there were also shouts of, ‘Stick it out! Stick to your principles!’ The hands of the man who put the uniform on were trembling . . .  ‘Don’t blame us,’ he murmured. ‘We don’t want to do it, we have to.’ 3

It says much about the character of Archibald Baxter that he remembered these compassionate voices amongst the violence and ridicule, the ‘gentleness and humanity’ that challenged the ‘military machine’.4 He believed most soldiers were decent men, compelled to do indecent things.

The Waitemata arrived in Plymouth on Boxing Day, 1916. For a time Baxter and the ship’s other detainees were confined to freezing prison cells in Britain. Their refusal to wear a uniform left them virtually naked, while a poor diet (and little of it), forced labour and abuse took a steady toll. Then Baxter was shipped across the Channel to France. And the closer he came to the fighting, the more brutal his treatment became.

In October 1917, Baxter found himself in Étaples, a training camp where men were made accustomed to conditions up the line. The commander, Lieutenant Colonel George ‘Hoppy’ Mitchell, was a ‘war hero’ twice wounded in battle. He was determined to break Baxter’s spirit, and sentenced him and three others to suffer Field Punishment No. 1. The soldiers called it ‘the Crucifixion’. Baxter explained why:

The crucifixion: War Office instructions on inflicting Field Punishment No. 1. When it was first introduced, soldiers’ arms and legs were spread across the wheels of a gun carriage – outstretched limbs formed a cross. Field Punishment No. 1 was common in all the Allied armies. As Baxter explained, crucifixion cut off the flow of blood through the body – many men suffered gangrene and had feet or hands amputated after a spell on that cross. Courtesy War Office, London, 1917.

[The sergeant] tied me to [a post] by the ankles, knees and wrists. He was an expert at the job and he knew how to pull and strain at the ropes till they cut into the flesh and completely stopped the circulation. When I was taken off [many hours later] my hands were always black with congested blood . . . I could get no proper grip with my feet on the ground . . . was strained so tightly up against the post that I was unable to move body or limbs.5

The punishment continued over several weeks, regardless of Baxter’s deteriorating health and a sharp turn for the worst in the weather. One day, Baxter and another particularly ‘difficult’ prisoner were tied up in a blizzard:

In a short time we were white with snow from head to foot. . .  The cold was intense. . .  A deadly numbness crept up till it reached my heart and I felt that every breath I drew would be my last.6

Baxter survived this, only to face violent beatings by men brutalised by war. He was also exposed to heavy shelling near the front line.

Alongside this physical punishment was psychological abuse. Every day began with orders and reprimands barked in his face. Every day food was withheld, promises broken and arbitrary punishments exacted on a whim. One particular sergeant repeatedly raised his revolver to Baxter’s head and threatened to pull the trigger. And all the time the threat of execution hung over Archibald Baxter. Five New Zealanders were executed during the war, for ‘cowardice’, desertion and simply being unwilling or unable to fight. Baxter never signed the enlistment papers thrust before him; he never admitted that the New Zealand Army had any legitimate authority over him. Had he done so he may well have been tied to another post and shot.

Tied to a post: The memorial flanking the old execution post at Poperinge. Britain issued a posthumous pardon to men executed for ‘cowardice’. Five New Zealanders were shot by their own side during the war. These men were posthumously pardoned in 2000. Courtesy Rohan Gerrard.

The authorities never broke Baxter’s spirit. In the end it was simpler to declare him insane. In mid-1918, Baxter was transferred from Boulogne and admitted to a mental hospital in Middlesex, England. Another doctor diagnosed extreme ‘melancholia’; that would lead eventually to a discharge on medical grounds. ‘His ideas about war amount to an insane obsession,’ the doctor recorded in his case notes, ‘[patient is] dull, depressed and apathetic. [His] memory [is] poor [and he] is indifferent to everything.’7 But Archibald Baxter had not forgotten his principles, refusing to obey orders or shoulder a rifle to the end. Nor was he ever indifferent to the human cost of war.

Archibald Baxter was sent home towards the end of the war. In the 1920s, he resumed his political work and was active in the New Zealand Labour Party. He remained a pacifist all his life and represented Aotearoa/New Zealand at the War Resisters’ International Conference in Copenhagen in 1937. His eldest son, Terence, followed in his father’s footsteps and was imprisoned for opposing compulsory military service in World War Two.

In 2014, the New Zealand government digitised Baxter’s service records, along with those of several other conscientious objectors deported during the war. Ironically they can be accessed today on a website called ‘Discovering Anzacs’. Archibald Baxter was never an Anzac – and courage is not monopolised by those who carry a gun. His testimony reminds us that it was not just soldiers who suffered for their convictions. And that in order to ‘defend freedom’ governments were prepared to sacrifice freedom itself.

Courage is not monopolised by those who carry a gun: A portrait of Archibald Baxter after the war. All his life he worked for the cause of peace. 1/2-037732-F courtesy Te Puna Matauranga O Aotearoa/National Library of New Zealand.

SOURCE AND FURTHER READING: This account is largely based on Archibald Baxter’s service record and autobiography, We Will Not Cease: The Autobiography of a Conscientious Objector (Whatamongo Bay: Cape Catley, 1980). Another useful primary source i s Harry Holland’s impassioned defence of civil liberties, Armageddon or Calvary: The Conscientious Objectors of New Zealand and ‘The Process of their Conversion’ (Wellington: Maoriland Worker, 1919). There are a number of useful studies of conscription in Aotearoa/New Zealand including Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription and the Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988); PS O’Conner, ‘The Awkward Ones – Dealing with Conscience 1916–18’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1974, pp. 118–133. For comparable studies in Australia, see Bobbie Oliver, Peacemongers: Conscientious Objectors to Military Service in Australia, 1911–1945 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997). The authors have also drawn on Chris Pugsley’s study of discipline in the NZEF, On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Penguin, 1991). Above all we thank David Grant whose brilliant study of Baxter and Mark Briggs inspired this story, Field Punishment No 1: Archibald Baxter, Mark Briggs & New Zealand’s Anti-militarist Tradition (Wellington: Steele Roberts Publishers, 2008).

1 Archibald Baxter, We will not cease: the autobiography of a Conscientious Objector (Whatamongo Bay: Cape Catley, 1980), pp. 152–3.

2 ibid.

3 ibid. pp. 56–7.

4 ibid. p. 6.

5 ibid, pp. 105–6.

6 ibid, p. 115.

7 Baxter, Archibald McColl Larmond, WW1 47814 – Army, R22273524, Military Personnel Files, New Zealand Defence Force, Personnel Archives, Archives New Zealand.