"I have suffered to the limit of my endurance, but I will never in my sane senses surrender to the evil power that has fixed its roots like a cancer on the world."
While others rallied eagerly to the British Empire’s call following the outbreak of war in 1914, Otago farmer Archibald Baxter was determined never to become a cog in a killing machine on a scale the world had never seen before.
Nevertheless, in July 1917 he and 13 other conscientious objectors, including two of his brothers, were kidnapped and shipped off to France where Baxter was threatened, beaten, starved and tortured for his refusal to wear a military uniform.
His story has been told in his classic memoir We Will not Cease and in the 2014 made-for-TV film Field Punishment No. 1.
In 2014, the Archibald Baxter Memorial Trust was set up to honour Baxter’s memory, and the courage shown by all New Zealand’s conscientious objectors in all wars, through a memorial peace garden in the heart of Dunedin, an annual peace lecture and ongoing educational work.
When I was only semen in a gland
Or less than that, my father hung
From a torture post at Mud Farm
Because he would not kill.
James K. Baxter, Pig Island Letters 8