24.04.05 - We will Remember Them

I was in my late teens and early twenties when I got to preach my first sermons. The minister of my home church generously invited me to preach every now and then once I had been accepted as a student for ministry. In those halcyon days, even when you were a university student doing any old degree ?± arts, science, it didn??t matter ?± if you had been accepted as a student for ministry you were given a bursary. Maybe I was invited to preach the occasional sermon to earn what the national church was paying me.

It was so easy in those days for a young preacher. Everything was so straightforward, so clear-cut, and so black and white. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I knew much more than I know now. And one of the things I knew was that war was wrong, full stop. New Zealand was becoming entangled in the war in Vietnam, and that gave me and others of my generation who knew more than the older generation that war was wrong, plenty of opportunity to speak about the evils of war. On one occasion that I remember I told my home congregation just that. The organist, who clearly had a confused mind, told me afterwards my sermon was a well-spoken load of rubbish, or words to that effect.

I hadn??t grown up in an immediate family with particular memories of the war. My father was in what was regarded as an essential occupation and was too old for conscription anyway. He was a member of the Home Guard. The few stories I remember him telling me about his experiences in the Home Guard, romping around the Makara hills behind Wellington with make-believe guns, made the later TV series "Dad??s Army" ring true. Like all Home Guardsmen he was awarded a couple of service medals at the end of the war. He tucked them away in a drawer. He felt he hadn??t deserved any medals, certainly not in comparison to people he knew who were actually in the war.

One of my mother??s brothers served in South East Asia, and had been a Japanese prisoner of war. It was only ever referred to obliquely, but my father would never buy anything Japanese. One of my stepmother??s brothers had served in the RAF, was shot down, and was a German prisoner of war. He ended up in Stalag Luft III, the prison camp made famous by the "Great Escape". My father??s Home Guard service was insignificant in comparison with what his two brothers-in-law experienced, and his medals were an embarrassment.

Every year on Anzac Day my father would put on his best suit and attend the local civic Anzac ceremony. He never talked about what it meant, and I wasn??t curious enough to ask. But then, he would also put on his best suit to go and vote each Election Day. There seemed to be something that required him to wear his best suit on Anzac and Election Days. I feel that somehow, in his mind, the two were linked.

Perhaps the two were linked in his mind when he never expressed disapproval when his younger son at the tender age of 15 or 16 discovered the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and learned about going on marches, or a couple of years later when this turned into marches opposing the war in Vietnam. I suspect my father might have had the same mind as the principal of Onslow College when as a prefect I went to ask permission for a group of students to attend during our lunch-break what was possibly the first anti-Vietnam war demonstration outside Parliament. The principal, wearing his RSA badge, looked thoughtful then said, "I suppose if I am supposed to be educating you to be citizens of this country I have no choice. Yes, you can go."

It was with these experiences behind me that I could, with all the knowledgeable self-assurance of a twenty-or-so year old tell my home congregation how truly evil war was, as if they didn??t know about it. Of course, they did know about war. There were returned servicemen and women amongst them as there were in every congregation in New Zealand. There were families where someone had not come home from the war. There was also a man who had been imprisoned for his conscientious objection. He was an elder, and a Bible Class teacher. I am not sure whether it was him or another elder who gave me a book ?± and I can??t remember whether it was before or after my "load of rubbish" sermon. The book was a 1968 reprint of Archibald Baxter??s We Will Not Cease. It made quite an impact on me.

Archibald Baxter was the father of poet James K Baxter. He is particularly remembered as a Word War One pacifist, and the book is his record of his experiences after being arrested in 1915, eventually taken by troopship to France, and undergoing barbaric experiences in an attempt by the military authorities to get him to change his mind. The way the authorities dealt with conscientious objectors in the First World War, and also in the Second, is not a proud part of our nation??s history.

Curiously, the title We Will Not Cease is taken from the war-like imagery of the hymn "Jerusalem" ?±

The book was first published in London in 1939, and few copies reached New Zealand before the outbreak of war. It remained relatively unknown in New Zealand for almost 30 years. The Blitz of 1941 destroyed the remaining original copies held by the publisher. It was reprinted in 1968 at the height of opposition to the war in Vietnam. Baxter, by then aged 81, wrote a forward to the new edition. I wish to quote two sections of it."This book contains the record of my fight to the utmost against the power of the military machine during the First World War. At that time to be a pacifist was to be in a distinct minority. But today ?± as war, which was always atrocious, becomes more atrocious and anti-human ?± to be a pacifist is to be a spokesman even of a confused majority who have begun to see that, whatever the national issue may be, all wars are deeply atrocious and no war can be called just. Though methods of warfare have changed, the military machine remains essentially the same; and the record of my battle against that machine, on behalf of my fellow-humans, is therefore relevant to this time also."

"A greater barbarism than any human race has known in the past has risen among the nations?ñ Reports from the present Vietnam War indicate that eighty per cent of the casualties are occurring among civilians. War has at last become wholly indiscriminate. The military machine is turned against that communal life which is the seed-bed of future generations of mankind. The only apparent justification that war ever had was that by destroying some lives it might clumsily preserve others. But now even that apparent justification is being stripped away. We make war chiefly on civilians and respect for human life seems to have become a thing of the past." (1)

Well, that was 1968; this now 2005. The Vietnam War is long over. In the wars we have seen since, apart from the bizarre Falklands War the proportion of civilian casualties is higher. I am no longer a twenty-something know-it-all. In the nineteen sixties, I was in the generation that could be sent to fight wars. Now I am in the generation that does the sending. War is no less atrocious than in Archibald Baxter??s experience and understanding. War is no more able to be declared ?´just?? than it was in 1968. The final sentence of the quotation from Baxter is almost prophetic: "We make war chiefly on civilians and respect for human life seems to have become a thing of the past." It has taken a sinister turn with the potential for all-but total civilian casualties. 9/11 showed us that. Terrorism can bring war from off of our television screens and literally into our own lives. Bali showed us that.

Tomorrow is Anzac Day, with that recent phenomenon of support for the commemorations from large numbers of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who fought in the Second World War. The Prime Minister at Gallipoli tomorrow will be in the company of large numbers of young Kiwis. Anzac Day, which not so long ago some predicted would fade away as the old servicemen and women faded away, has ?± as commentators have suggested ?± become our de facto national day. A day free of the controversies that surround Waitangi Day, it is a day for remembering and honouring our war dead and those who served and came home and carved out a new life for themselves and their descendants, and it is a day for affirming ourselves as a nation and the core values of our nation.

Those core values include, I believe, honouring the right to dissent, and the right not to be penalised for dissenting. In the early twenty-first century, Anzac honours the spirit of those who went to the wars on their nation??s behalf, and especially those who never came back; can it also, I wonder, honour those who dissented, the conscientious objectors on religious or other moral or political grounds who refused to go. Some of these Pacifists, in the Second World War anyway, gave service in the YMCA or in Ambulance Units. One of them was an elder in my parish in Christchurch. His experiences serving in medical units in Asia, especially in China, were as every bit as dangerous and required every bit as much courage and sheer bloody-mindedness as was required of those in direct combat with the enemy.

At memorials up and down the country tomorrow, people like us will gather. Wreaths will be laid, prayers said, tears shed honouring our war dead and the combatants who came home and who worked to build New Zealand as the free land our national anthem speaks about. There are no memorials to the conscientious objectors. Perhaps their memorial is that described by Archibald Baxter in 1968 as the "confused majority who have begun to see that, whatever the national issue may be, all wars are deeply atrocious and no war can be called just."

There is a wreath on our church??s war roll of honour, commemorating those from this congregation who went and did not come back, as well as those who went and returned and shared our life shaping this faith community, Auckland and New Zealand. Poppies have been placed on the plaques on the front wall, in front of the three oak trees, remembering the three St Lukan young men who lost their lives in World War Two. The wreath on the roll of honour includes remembering Ormond Burton, St Lukes Bible Class young man and winner of the Military Cross in World War One, Methodist minister and imprisoned as a conscientious objector in World War Two. For me, it honours his courage in both wars.

To my mind, in a small way, that recognises those who for reasons of conscience could not and would not take up arms. Their courage in the face of official opposition and persecution, and often also of popular condemnation, is part of the total story of the wars which shaped New Zealand??s consciousness and identity. Honouring those who served does not preclude honouring those who in conscience would not serve; nor does honouring the conscientious objectors detract from deeply honouring our war dead and their brothers and sisters in arms.

In his Penguin History of New Zealand, Michael King quotes Ormond Burton, already imprisoned in Mt Crawford prison, Wellington, watching the first New Zealand volunteers setting sail for the other side of the world and war in 1940:

"In my mind??s eye I could see the battles that were to come and how the strong and exultant young men who crowded these decks would be broken under the barrages. I found it very moving, as one always does when one senses the willingness of men to suffer and die for a cause that seems to them right. So, standing in the garden in my prison dress of field grey, I gave the general salute with my long-handled shovel ?± very reverently." (2)

I do not have a best suit to wear on Anzac Day. But my heart is dressed in its best, and salutes the courage both of those who fought and of those who would not fight. May they all rest in peace.

1. Archibald Baxter. We Shall Not Cease. The Caxton Press. Christchurch. 1968 pp5-6

2. Michael King. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Penguin Books. 2003. pp392-393