Jock looked hard at me and asked: ‘What’s been your trouble? Overstaying leave, I suppose?’
‘I’m here,’ I said, ‘for refusing all orders in the army. I have done so consistently for the last twelve months. I have never taken on anything and have no intention of doing so.’
‘On what grounds?’ he asked.
‘On the grounds that war is a bad thing and will destroy the human race. I believe that if enough people in each country stood straight out against war, the Governments would pause and be compelled to settle their disputes by other means. I also believe that the peoples of all nations are naturally peaceful until they are stirred up by the war propaganda of the governing classes. When the workers of all countries win their economic freedom, Governments won’t be able to set them on to murdering their fellows.’
‘Are you a Socialist?’
‘Too right, I am.’ There was such a rush to shake my hand that we all went down in a heap.
‘Well,’ said Jock, ‘I’m proud to shake your hand, but I can’t say I welcome you to this dog’s den of a place.’
Soon afterwards tea was brought in by Jock, who was mess orderly for the tent. Tea consisted of a small slice of bread per man, with a scraping of margarine or some kind of fat on it—it was so little one could hardly taste it—and a cup of tea. Breakfast the same. Dinner was a small portion of bully beef and pounded-up biscuit with hot water poured over it, the biscuit still retaining its rock-like consistency even after the pounding up and the hot water. On this diet the men had to do a hard day’s work with often pack drill at the end of it and every two or three days two hours of No. 1 Field in the afternoon. I got the same food as the other prisoners. It was little enough and did not suffice to keep up one’s strength under punishment. The whole time we were, all of us, almost mad with hunger. The German prisoners got porridge. Thin, watery stuff as it was, how thankful we would have been for it! The system at that compound was designed to break the spirit of the strongest; and for anyone refusing orders as I did, the punishment was intensified in proportion.
Every evening we were searched and the tent was searched for contraband such as food, tobacco, or implements with which we might have cut the wire. In spite of these precautions and the fact that he was always escorted by a guard when bringing meals to the tent, Jock, from his position as mess orderly, did sometimes manage to convey to us prohibited articles of food slipped to him by the cook, who was also a prisoner. On the evening of my second day in the compound, just as I was able to gain my legs and was making my way slowly and painfully to the tent, Jock brushed against me and I felt a slight tug at my tunic. When I got back to the tent I found a pepper tin full of hot tea in my pocket. That tea was worth all the world to me at that moment.
‘You shouldn’t run risks for me, Jock,’ I said to him afterwards.
‘Never fear that, boy,’ he replied, ‘my hands are far quicker than yon loon’s een. Allow me,’ and he managed it again several times without being detected by the guard.
One night after tea had been brought in, Jock rose and looked out of the tent door to make sure there would be no intrusion by the guards—they could hear what we said if we raised our voices and would shout to us to cut it out if we became too loud—and produced about a quarter of a pound of cheese. With an implement that he had fashioned out of some piece of tin he cut it into cubes about the size of dice and shared them round. We said we didn’t want to eat his rations.
‘It’s all right; it’s buckshee,’ he said, and described how the cook had given him the tip and he had managed to slip it off the table when the guard was looking the other way. Scotty, though he swallowed his cube, ridiculed Jock for insisting on sharing so small a quantity. Jock said it was a matter of principle. Scotty said the principle would be all right if there were more cheese. Jock said: ‘Principle is principle in much or in little, but I’ll take no more backchat from you, so shut up.’
Scotty obeyed.
The tent accommodated twelve men when it was full. We slept on the floor-boards wrapped in our blankets, a hard bed for anyone as stiff and sore as I was.
After breakfast in the morning the other men went out on their job of filling in shell-holes, usually at some distance from the compound, and I was left alone in the tent. The gate in the wire round it was left open and I walked in the enclosure containing the two tents until the sergeant came for me. Usually I did little more than an hour on the post before dinner, though sometimes the sergeant chose to come earlier and then I had longer. In the afternoon I never did less than two hours and sometimes as much as three or even four. One day I was put on shortly after dinner. The other men went out to work, accompanied by their escort. The sergeant disappeared, the guards also, and as far as I could see, not a soul remained in the compound, though, as I could not see behind me, there may have been someone there. Hours went by. No one came to release me and I began to wonder if I were to be left on all night. At last I heard voices at the gate, and the sergeant came, hurrying for once. The others told me that he had met them at the gate.
‘Surely you must be late,’ he said to the NCO in charge of the party.
‘Yes, we’re very late.’
‘And I’ve left that man on all this time,’ exclaimed the sergeant.
Jock said to me one night: ‘There’s something about your philosophy I don’t quite understand. We’ve got to go through hard punishment here and we’d do anything on earth to get out of it. You get it worse than us, and yet you’ve only got to say the word to escape it all. What enables you to hold out as you do? Is it religion?’
‘I’ll tell you, Jock,’ I said: ‘the answer is quite simple. Religion, as I understand it, and the foundation of my philosophy, is: do as you would be done by, and war seems to me to deny that and to include everything evil that is in the world. The only lasting victory we can win over our enemies is to make them our friends. You asked me what enables me to hold out? Chiefly, my belief that my attitude to war is right, and my faith that I am doing more for humanity than I could do in any other way. My fight is not against individuals, but against systems and conventions. I am doing my bit in the war by fighting the war convention.’
I had been several days in the compound when one afternoon, just as we were all going to be put on No. 1, the lieutenant in charge came over to have a talk with me. He took me round behind the buildings, out of sight of the poles. He asked me a few questions and, after listening to my views and an account of my experiences, he said: ‘We all know that war is bad and that it would be a great thing if it could be abolished, but what can a small minority do?’
‘What can small minorities do? They can spread their influence, they can grow until they become majorities. You are an Englishman and must know how many times in English history that very thing has happened.’
He laughed and admitted that it was so and gave some instances. In the course of the conversation he asked me what sort of a time I was having.
I said: ‘You are the officer in charge here. You must know what No. 1 Field is like.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I dislike the whole business so much that I never come near, if I can help it, when I know it’s going on.’
I said I could understand his not liking it, but what I did not understand was why, in that case, he should take on the job.
He excused himself: ‘Well, I happened to be offered it. Most jobs in the army are pretty rotten, and one never knows what one is going to drop into.’
We had talked so long that I only had about half-an-hour’s punishment after he had left me. It was frightful to look at that row of suffering men—men who had committed no crime against society (and if they had, would such treatment have been justified?)—who were social, self-respecting beings, subjected to such a horrible and degrading form of punishment. That in itself, apart from anything else, would have been enough to make me feel I could have nothing to do with the military machine.
We were released and lef
t, as usual, to make our way back to the tents in our own time. We had just started off when the gate swung open, and in poured a stream of German prisoners with sand-bags on their heads, looking about as war-like as a pen of hoggets. They were only little boys, fair-haired and blue-eyed, without a man among them, and they were in terror of death. They came running up to us, shouting ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’ and trying desperately to tear the buttons off their coats to give to us. They saw only the uniform and did not realise that we were prisoners like themselves. I thought of the adjutant at Sling with his lions and tigahs, and I thought, too, of the sergeant-major at Simonstown and what he had told us. The Germans were rounded up and run into their tents and we went into ours.
‘You scored this afternoon by your long talk with the officer,’ said Jock. ‘If they manage to break you here, it will be a feather in his cap.’
‘He’ll have to wait a long time for his feather, Jock,’ I said.
‘What do you think of him?’ he asked.
‘He seems a queer easy-going devil. I can’t quite make him out.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think of him,’ roared Scotty. ‘He’s a bastard. He may be easygoing in a way, but he knows how to keep a soft job, and he’s responsible for all the muck that lousy sergeant rubs into us here.’
‘Shut that gab, or I’ll shut it for you,’ hissed Jock. ‘We’ll have the guard in here and you don’t want that.’
Jock asked me one evening: ‘If they send you up to the front line, what will you do?’
‘I’ll continue to fight as I am doing here.’
‘It must be hard to fight without support. I don’t know what will happen to you in the end.’
‘It doesn’t matter what happens to me, and, as far as support goes, whenever I have a chance of making myself understood, I get it every time. You men have already been at the Front. Tell me, would those armies which are fighting and slaughtering one another, take long to fraternise if their respective Governments called a halt and came to terms?’
And the whole tent answered as one man: ‘If the war were called off, they’d become friendly in no time.’
‘You are certainly doing something,’ said Jock. ‘You’ve made a difference to this place. What I’d like to know is, what are all the preachers and parsons doing? In peace-time they preach: “Thou shalt not kill” and—“Love your enemies”, and all that, and when the nation goes to war, what happens to them?’
‘Aye,’ said Scotty, butting in, ‘I know that crowd. It’s bread and butter they’re after. Preach love and good-will in peace-time and in war-time mount a recruiting platform and preach hate and bloody murder. They’re the same in all countries, supporters of the capitalist system, hounding the workers on to kill one another. Tell me if they’re not on the side of the wealthy and the powerful, every time?’
‘I’ll tell you what I think about that,’ I said: ‘I’ve no time for recruiting parsons myself, but I know there are good men in the Churches and out of them, who have courage and sincerity, and my hope is that in the future they will get together and inspire more and more people to see the futility of war and to bring pressure on Governments in the interests of world peace.’
‘Hope!’ said the only other New Zealander in the tent, who always looked on the dark side of everything. ‘There is no hope of altering things for the better. It doesn’t matter what people try to do. We’re like rats in a trap, and no matter what you try, there’s no way of getting out. What good do you think you’re doing by your fight? Nothing, only making things worse for yourself.’
‘It may look hopeless,’ said Jock, ‘but I’m convinced that it’s not. I’ve not lost my faith in the common people and I believe that, when they come to understand better, things will change.’
He began to talk about his life in Glasgow and what a wonderful woman his wife was. He had the greatest admiration for her even when, as sometimes happened, she criticised him pretty freely. Jock never believed in despondency. Newcomers, sunk in the depths of despair at finding themselves in such a dreadful place, would be greeted with: ‘Well, mate, what’s your trouble? Overstaying leave? Ever been in an outfit like this before?’
And when they had indignantly denied this: ‘Well, you’ll find the best brains in the army here.’
Even if at first they looked on him with scornful wonder, as if cheerfulness in such a place were blasphemy, it was not long before they fell in with his ways and found things the better for it.
I had been in the compound some little time when Kirwan, one of the fourteen deported men, was brought in under escort. I hardly knew him, for he had been separated from us on the Waitemata after the first few days. As he was not in the same tent with me we did not get much opportunity for conversation, for when we were on the poles we seldom exchanged a word. He did tell me, however, that this was not his first experience of Mud Farm. He had already served a previous sentence there and had spent part of the time in the punishment cells on biscuits and water.
Soon after his arrival the weather became very cold and rough. With the change in the weather the other prisoners were no longer put on No. 1, but Kirwan and I were, morning and afternoon, as usual. I had thought nothing could make the punishment worse than it was, but I soon found that cold, stormy weather greatly increased the suffering. I began to find it almost impossible to sleep at night from restlessness and pain. I was alternately burning hot and shivering with cold, and the constant pain in my joints woke me whenever I did doze off from exhaustion. The kindness of the other men in the tent to me I can never forget. They insisted on making my bed for me, and often, I know, would put their own blankets and overcoats under me to make it a little easier for me. One man, a Canadian, was particularly friendly, and ever since, because of him, my heart has warmed to Canadians.
It is hard to say if I would have lasted out the whole of my sentence—I was going down physically every day—if something had not occurred a few days before it was up. A day came—one of those days in early March that outdo the middle of winter in cold and storm. There was a blizzard blowing, with the temperature below zero and the snowflakes freezing as they fell. I was not expecting to go out, for I did not imagine that they would tie us up in such weather. I was mistaken. The sergeant called me out. As we had never been allowed to wear our overcoats when on punishment, I did not suppose I should be allowed to take mine now, and I left it in the tent. Outside, I found that Kirwan had risked it and worn his. I thought of asking to go back for mine, but on second thoughts decided not to, as the result would probably have been that Kirwan would have been told to take his off.
We were tied to the poles as usual. The sergeant and the guards retreated to the guard hut, where we could see them through the open door, which faced away from the wind, sitting over a red-hot stove. Soon a smell of coffee came to our nostrils and we knew they were enjoying their morning cup. The storm blew in our faces and in a very short time we were white with snow from head to foot, the flakes freezing so rapidly that they clung in spite of the gale. 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. Everything grew black around me, although I was still quite conscious. I do not know how long we were there. Suddenly loud voices sounded behind us and an angry, red-faced New Zealand sergeant appeared beside the poles.
‘What’s all this bloody business?’ he shouted. ‘At first I thought they were posts; but when I went closer to look I saw the hats. I never saw such a damned thing done in all my life!’
Here the compound sergeant, who had come hurriedly out to meet him, made some remark which I could not hear.
‘I don’t care who they are or what they’ve done,’ the stranger shouted. ‘It’s what you’re doing to them I’m concerned about. I didn’t think men would do such a thing. I’ll make it known everywhere. Take them off at once.’
The sergeant drew him aside for a moment and I heard no more. Then they came back and the visitor stood by in silen
ce while we were released. Afterwards the two sergeants walked away across the road in the direction of the officers’ quarters. That ended it for us. We were not put on again.
Two days later a police escort arrived to take us back to Abeele. I would have liked to have said goodbye to the other men, but they were at work when the escort arrived. As we made our way towards Abeele, one of the military police remarked: ‘There’s been a great go about you two men up at camp. Everybody’s talking about it.’
One of the first men I met on arrival at Abeele was the sergeant who had cursed me when I had refused to plant cabbages. He came up to me and asked me to forgive him for what he had said. ‘I didn’t understand then. I do now. I’ve changed my mind.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ I said. ‘I never had any feeling against you. I knew you didn’t understand. I’m glad you’ve changed your mind, but do tell me what has made you change it.’
‘It’s Mud Farm! Mud Farm!’ he said. ‘I know—we all know—what you suffered down there.’
I held out my hand and he took it. We stood silent for a moment. His face showed his feelings. I said: ‘We won’t talk about it just now.’
We took leave of each other and I did not see him again. He, and others like him, made me feel my fight was not in vain.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 36