| |
Auckland
2010
––––––––
Libby mourned as she read the official military personnel records of William, Henry and Fred, men she’d never met. Men who as pacifists were labelled traitors, shirkers and cowards, and whose families were treated like pariahs. Men like Archibald Baxter, who wrote in his autobiography We Will Not Cease:
... war can do nothing but harm to every nation that engages in it. But in peacetime a nation must so live and act towards other nations as not to provoke war. We must be prepared to make sacrifices but they will be nothing like the sacrifices a nation has to make in war, to gain nothing by them but the prospect of further wars.
Whatever failings they might have had, cowardice is not what Libby would have called it. In hindsight, they were as brave as any of those who, filled with bravado, went to fight unprepared, not knowing or understanding what awaited them. It took courage and determination above the norm, whichever stance they took.
As she read historical texts on the computer, Libby was conscious she knew more than Daniel and Emma about what had happened to their boys.
Whenever Libby had asked members of the family about it, they all said the men had not talked about their experiences. As grandchildren they knew nothing and had never heard their parents talking about it either. Maybe the brothers spoke amongst themselves, maybe not. We’ll never know now. She doubted the sons ever told the full story of what happened to them. If Baxter hadn’t written his account, Libby wouldn’t know as much as she did. Except, perhaps ... Libby remembered, Emma knew Harry Holland.
The electronic text of the 1919 book Armageddon or Calvary, penned by the MP Harry Holland, held Libby’s attention. Holland made no bones about the duplicity of the government of the time. One section jumped out at her. She read it again then grabbed the telephone and punched in the number, excitement rising all the time. Without preamble or introduction, she said. “Tell me that story about Granny Adin again. The one about her knowing those politicians before they formed the Labour Party, and the one about her going to Wellington.”
She listened as the stories were repeated. Names of labour organisers and union activists were reeled off. Names like Holland, Semple and Fraser, who became famous, and others, not so famous, who stayed with Daniel and Emma. About the day she went to Wellington.
“Granny was quite politically aware, you know. Far more so than Grandfather Adin. She was the one who held the strongest socialist views,” said her aunt on the other end of the phone. “I told you all this before.”
“Yes, I know and thanks. I wanted to confirm a couple of things.” She hung up and reread the article. The more she read it, the more convinced she became. The woman Holland wrote of had to be Granny Adin – it had to be. The other names didn’t fit. Even so, Libby would never be able to prove it.
The mother of one CO came to me ... wrote Harry Holland. She had three sons, all of whom were conscientious objectors. The whole three had been called up ... two of them had gone to prison – one for 28 days and one for 84 days, while the third had just given himself up to the military authorities.
It’s true.
William had given himself up to the authorities and had been discharged on medical grounds. Henry had been sent to prison – for 28 days – but that wasn’t the end of the story. The records showed he was convicted more than once and imprisoned for a further eleven months with hard labour. He received his third sentence just six months before the end of the war in April 1918, of another two years and eight months with hard labour, much of it in the South Island. His decision meant he spent more time in prison, often in solitary confinement, during and after the war than many of those poor, wretched soldiers spent in the midst of cruel battle. He would not be released until 1920. He never talked about it.
Libby questioned if either situation could be considered worse than the other. Objectors and soldiers alike would be scarred for life.
She checked the records again.
Fred was a different story. Fred was the one convicted for 84 days following on from a 28-day detention. One sentence carried out in March 1917, the other followed less than a month later in April. She read on:
On the Tuesday evening the mother had come to Wellington for the purpose of visiting her sons on the following day. On the Wednesday morning, however, she heard that some conscientious objectors had been forcibly deported; and, ... with fear in her heart, she learned that one of her boys was among them. She had received no intimation that her son was to be taken away, and she was given no opportunity whatever of seeing him before he left. Her tears fell like rain, and the sobs that welled from the depths of her broken mother’s heart proclaimed the magnitude of her hurt.
Libby let out a sob of her own. She could feel a mother’s anguish.
A group of objectors, who later became known as ‘The Fourteen’, were marched through the streets of Wellington and herded onto the ship Waitemata in the early hours of one July morning and transported to England. Some walked. Some were pushed. Some were dragged. Fred was one of those men. ‘The Fourteen’ included Archibald Baxter and his two brothers. Oh, that poor mother. Three Baxter sons transported. How awful.
They were locked into a small cabin above the propeller with no windows, not enough bunks, nowhere to sit – no facilities at all. The seas were rough and men became seasick. Sometimes they were allowed to use the latrines on deck, sometimes there was no alternative but to vomit on the floor, or to soil themselves. The humiliations never ceased. The shame became an inescapable burden. Life was excruciating and still they refused to don uniforms – to become soldiers. The Waitemata stopped off at Cape Town where the South African authorities declared the ship unfit. Fred and some others were moved and put on the Norman Castle for the rest of the journey. If anything, the punishments worsened.
Everything Libby read said the men were pushed, pulled or dragged everywhere. Openly humiliated, stripped of their clothes and forced into uniform, no matter how many times they refused, and left either in their underwear or paraded naked if they removed the uniforms. The men’s heads were shaved by force or they were hosed down with high-pressure hoses, handcuffed and locked in solitary confinement shivering with the cold. The food was appalling, if they were given any.
How the authorities thought such harsh treatment would make these men change their minds was beyond Libby. Surely, it would just harden their resolve? She was thankful that even then, among those meting out the punishments, there were some who condemned such methods. Baxter had written he was alive thanks to the kindness of individuals. Harry Holland was one of those men:
Search all the long history of the ages, and you will find nothing more tragic than the spectacle of that bereaved mother – the light gone out of the years of her life – bowed down beneath the burden of sorrow endured by the mothers of the world through all the centuries of sin and suffering that stretch from the foot of Calvary’s Cross to the gangway of a Twentieth Century Transport. To me it was as if the Mother of God stood there uplifting a protest to Heaven against the crucifixion of Humanity, and levelling an accusation against myself and all the rest of New Zealand for the Wrong we had made possible.
As far as Libby could work out, a man was deemed a soldier whether or not he had taken the oath, or passed a medical test, even if he refused to sign up. The powers-that-be had ruled that all men should have taken the oath, regardless of any personal reasons. If anyone refused, he was labelled ‘deserter’ and treated accordingly.
She read how the high command were afraid of a mass mutiny or mass desertions. They were even terrified of their own war-weary soldiers who, having survived years in the field and suffering from shell shock, wanted to go home. They, too, were considered some sort of threat and a sign of a Bolshevik mutiny. Instead of sending them home, these brave men were set before the courts for punishment. The authorities of the time held such abject fear of so few men – for fear it must have been – that oppression and harsh discipline was considered necessary.
Holland wrote how he had challenged Massey in parliament in 1919, about men who were convicted more than once for the same offence, which was against the law in this country. Massey denied it, even though there was evidence to the contrary. Henry and Fred’s records proved that. But Massey was adamant. He blamed the men for refusing to obey orders. Each refusal was treated as a new offence.
Libby wasn’t surprised to read that Archie, who returned a broken man suffering mental illness, was the father of James K Baxter, one of New Zealand’s best-known poets. Of ‘The Fourteen’, Archie Baxter, Mark Briggs, Lawrence Kirwin and Garth Ballantyne were the most stalwart. They were also the most targeted and severely punished men of the group. Their treatment was torturous. Baxter was subjected to Field Punishment No. 1 – the worst of all punishments, lashed to a pole in all weathers for hours on end, day after day – more than once.
The more she read, the more Libby was at a loss to understand the level of controls put in place. At one time there were more soldiers investigating, rounding up and guarding the objectors, than there were objectors. Surely, she thought, those soldiers would have preferred to be fighting the real enemy, and the objectors would have been more use at home doing the work of the men who had gone to war voluntarily? Helping to keep the country running.
But the law forbade anyone to give objectors work; she learnt that his own mother was liable to gaol, with harsh penalties including three years hard labour if she gave him shelter; his friends were liable to lesser penalties, fines and imprisonment if they knew where he was and didn’t tell the authorities. All his civil rights were taken from him for years – even after the war. The wives and children were ostracised and derided by their peers, and made to suffer for what their menfolk had chosen to do.
Regardless of whether the woman was the loved one of a soldier or a pacifist, they all suffered in one form or another. Forced to take on their man’s role, the women struggled to keep the home going, to work and feed their children, never knowing where their man was or when he might be allowed to return to them. Worried he might be lying injured or dead somewhere in a strange land.
Libby closed down the website, unable to read any more. She needed time to digest what she’d discovered and struggled with thoughts of the inhumane treatment those men received. She tried to imagine how Daniel and Emma would have felt. They would have read in the papers about the war, the atrocities and the loss of life. Seeing their sons’ names in the paper and not knowing where they were or what was happening to them must have been horrendous for them. She knew how she would feel if it had been her son. Would society never learn? It seemed not, given all the stories of other wars, other prison camps, other atrocities.
Libby tried to talk to Ben about it later that night.
“It made for such sad reading, Ben. I can’t understand how they believed sending all those men in the trenches of France ‘over the top’ would achieve anything. It was nothing short of mass murder. How could they miscalculate the strength of the enemy as they did, or land them on the wrong beach, like at Gallipoli?” Her mind jumped from incident to incident and memory to memory without cohesion.
“We know that now,” Ben explained, “but it wasn’t until after the events that people began to comprehend what a waste of life there’d been. It must have been dreadful. Decisions were made that held no relevance to the situation or landscape. Without any thought of the destruction it wrought.”
“How terrifying it must have been for those men. Living in appalling conditions, watching others being killed all around them and being told, more or less, it’s your duty to die!”
“Slow down. Where did that come from? Are you angry about the way the objectors were treated or the way the soldiers were treated?”
“Both,” Libby answered, her voice quiet, and her heart heavy. She shook herself. Getting upset about the past wouldn’t change what happened.
“I respect those soldiers who fought for what they believed in. They lived through terrible and terrifying times, with fear and despair their constant companions. But how would sending men to war who believed war was wrong make it better?”
“You know the answer to that. They were scared that if they let some men off there’d be a mass following and they’d be overrun by deserters,” Ben explained.
“But these were peaceful men. I still can’t see how abusing them would make any of them think they were in error and change their ways. More like it would anger their families for generations to come, and all of them would be objectors forevermore.”
“In many cases that proved to be so,” Ben agreed. “What else happened to Fred?”
“When he arrived in England, he was sent to Sling Camp where the Kiwi soldiers were stationed. He went from being a fit, healthy 21-year-old to a sick, beaten, withered and desperate man in the space of months.” Libby picked up another page from the pile of papers on the floor beside her.
“Listen to this. It’s part of a letter Fred wrote to his sister – I guess that would have been Amy. It sounds even more pitiful reading his words:
I hope you won’t think ill of me for doing what I have done, but it was a matter of life or death. A few weeks more of imprisonment would have killed me. I was nothing but skin and bone when I came out of the hospital, and I could not have stood it if I had gone back to prison. Nobody knows what we put up with on the trip across and after we arrived here. I could tell you something that would startle you, but it is over now, so I will say nothing about it.”
Libby took a deep breath. “Holland went on to say that Fred had hoped his action would not make it harder for his two brothers, COs in New Zealand. In a later letter to his mother, he wrote: Now I have given in, I shall be able to write to you ... So, according to this, his mother never heard from him or knew what had happened to him for nearly two years.”
Libby put down the page and picked up some others.
“His military records, state he was in and out of detention like a yo-yo. He would come out of 28 days solitary confinement and the same day be charged with disobedience and put straight back. Then he was in and out of hospital just as often. Sometimes stretchered in but always marched out. Sometimes with bronchitis, dysentery and colitis, then with trench mouth or what they called Vincent’s Angina – all sorts of things. Then on 27th April 1918, only six months before the war ended, he was sentenced to a further 168 days detention. More than five months! When he was released, they made him an apprentice cook and he served out his time in the kitchens. He wasn’t discharged until mid-October 1919. Nearly a year after the war was officially over.”
“I had heard he’d spent the war in the kitchens, now you mention it, but I never realised the extent of what he went through,” said Ben.
“There’s more,” she said with a catch in her voice, “you can read the rest,” and handed the papers to Ben.
