Mennonite Central Committee

Profiles of Historic Conscientious Objectors

 

Shortly before the beginning of World War I, Archibald Baxter of New Zealand had a dream. In his dream he saw a "vast forest of trees, straight and slim and tall, growing towards the sky..more beautiful than any I have ever seen." A man in his dream said to him, "Yes they are beautiful, but I am full of grief when I look at them. Those are the young men of the world, but the lords of the forest have sold it to death."

In 1916 at age 33, Baxter began a journey that would show him what death had done with it's purchase. He saw young men fighting, killing and being killed. He saw wills broken, minds destroyed, men gone mad, and wasted bodies. He saw inhumane living conditions, torture, starvation, prison cells, disease, cruelty, and of course the imprint of death almost everywhere he went. However, Baxter was not an observer. He too was imprisoned, tortured, tricked, beaten, humiliated, insulted, deliberately starved, and sent to the front lines of war in the military's senseless effort to break him down and destroy him in any way that it could. "It's your submission we want, Baxter, not your service," he was told.

Baxter was a conscientious objector to war. From 1916 until autumn of 1918, Baxter was passed from officers to sergeants, from New Zealand to England to France, from prisons to hospitals to the front lines to mental institutions. Every step of the way he held strongly to his pacifist beliefs and made them known to all he met through his words and his refusal to take any part in the actions of the military.

"..war can do nothing but harm to every nation that engages in it. But in peacetime a nation must so live and act toward other nations as not to provoke war...I am fighting for a warless world where peoples can live together in peace and friendship"

For these beliefs Archibald Baxter was subjected to horrible suffering. One of the most worst punishments he was forced to undergo was called No. 1 Field Punishment. "He took me over to the poles...and placed me against one of them. It was inclined forward...he tied me to it by the ankles, knees, and wrists...he knew how to pull and strain at the ropes until they...completely stopped the circulation...My hands were taken round behind the pole, tied together, and pulled well up it, straining and cramping the muscles...The slope...brought me into a hanging position...I was unable to move." He was placed on this pole for hours every day.

"..the foundation to my philosophy, is: Do as you would be done by, and war seems to..deny that and to include everything evil that is in the world. The only lasting victory that we can win over our enemies is to make them our friends."

For more information, visit the following Web sites:
We Will Not Cease, Archibald Baxter, Eddie Tern Press, 1980
www.goodbks.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi