Few people gain from war meaningfully

ALL the wellpublicised privations suffered by Archibald Baxter, in my view, ought not to be celebrated by the construction of the memorial being touted by some.

Noone likes war, and few ever gained from it in meaningful ways.

It robbed our country of much of a generation during World War 1. Some of those, brighteyed at the prospect of teaching the ‘‘Boche’’ a lesson and still being home by Christmas, disregarded the fact that the

Hapsburg Dynasty, although in decline, still had massive clout, and their gungho attitude towards the impending disaster was quickly dispelled by the failure of the Dardanelles campaign at Gallipoli.

An old soldier once put it to me this way — ‘‘they were so pleased with my contribution during the Gallipoli campaign, (he was a farrier who was there to keep the horses shod), that they rewarded me by sending me to the Somme’’, a statement not without its irony.

However, some distinction must be drawn between Archy Baxter and his mates (plus the members of New Zealand’s firstever Labour cabinet, who skulked behind barbed wire or were happy to languish in prison for the duration), and those of equally firm conviction who refused to take the lives of their fellow humans by shouldering arms but performed heroic service as stretcherbearers, tending to the wounded and retrieving bodies from noman’s land, which was frequently under heavy fire.

Those are the people who should be celebrated. The treatment meted out to Baxter and some of his contemporaries could not be countenanced today, by any society which was not, in itself, barbaric. But I feel that a memorial, should it eventuate, ought to focus upon those who made a sacrifice which was genuinely conscientiously motivated, but not those merely trying to make a ‘‘political statement’’. Ian Smith

Waverley