KEY POINTS:
War inevitably brings tales of courage to the fore. David Grant tells the story of Mark Briggs and Archibald Baxter, two of 14 New Zealand conscientious objectors who were clapped in irons in 1917 and sent to the front lines at the Somme and Passchendaele in an effort
to force them to fight.
After treatment that would not look out of place today at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, only Baxter and Briggs remained unbroken. Baxter, an independent-minded farmer and later the father of the countercultural poet James K, and Briggs, a militant Labour activist, had different reasons for refusing to fight.
Baxter was a pacifist, while Briggs aligned himself with those who thought the war was only in support of capitalism. Both were subjected to appalling treatment which is graphically - if soberly - recounted by Grant.
Haunting paintings by Bob Kerr of key figures and events help keep the narrative from becoming mired in cold masochism. The title of the book, Field Punishment No 1, was devised as a "humane" alternative to flogging by the British Army. It involved the subject being tightly bound to a pole, to the extent that a prisoner's hands turned black from lack of circulation, for hours at a time, even in the freezing winter.
Baxter and Briggs were repeatedly subjected to this procedure, and the latter had additional punishments that could easily have been ripped from Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ screen directions. Briggs, refusing to walk to the front, was dragged more than a kilometre over barbed wire and suffered severe cuts and gashes that he would never fully recover from.
Grant sketches a New Zealand in the first half of the 20th century that almost appears to be on another planet. The Herald greeted the start of World War I with an editorial including the line: "War! There is no conception more inspiring, no condition nobler, no call that rings more grandly in the ears."
White feathers were posted to men not yet enlisted and the Bay of Plenty Times called for conscientious objectors to face execution by firing squad. Xenophobia reigned. "Enemy aliens" were interred on remote islands and professors with German-sounding names were hounded from universities. Grant writes with cutting understatement of Lady Stout, founder of the vocal and vicious Anti-German League that, "The dear lady was reportedly triumphant when a Nelson teacher with a German name committed suicide." If all this sounds quite unlike the New Zealand of today, Grant's bold argument that Baxter and Briggs helped to fundamentally change society becomes all the more compelling.
From the gung-ho devotion to martial sacrifice that characterised New Zealand during the Great War, today the country takes pride in our anti-nuclear stance and supports a military that exists primarily to supplement United Nations peacekeeping efforts. Compulsory military service was officially abolished in 1972, and the sedition laws that jailed so many anti-war protesters have been scrapped.
Where the government used to spend 15 per cent of its revenues on defence, the figure is today closer to four per cent. Field Punishment No 1 is a sometimes disturbing, always interesting, and important contribution to the evolution of New Zealand identity. Sometimes the most courageous are those who choose not to fight.'
Field Punishment No 1
By David Grant (Steele Roberts $34.99)
* Matt Nippert is an Auckland reviewer.