SHOT AT DAWN

‘‘Are you there, padre?’’ They put bullets in his chest but pinned medals on his memory. centenary of a Southland soldier’s execution.

B1918. ‘‘Yes, lad,’’ Rev Hoana Parata called back.

Then he started to read the Lord’s Prayer.

By one account, they didn’t even let him get to the end before bullets tore into Victor Spencer, deserter that he was.

He showed courage at the end, Parata later wrote his aunt Sarah Goomes.

‘‘I was with your nephew Victor Spencer during his last earthly hours,’’ he told her.

‘‘You will have heard of his death from the NZ authorities so I need not dwell on that ... ‘‘

‘‘You will be pleased to know that Victor met his death very bravely and never flinched at the last — he wished us to let you know how sorry he was that he was the reason of causing you any anxiety with regard his career as a soldier, and asked we convey to you his love.’’

Kindly meant, the words could hardly douse the shame Spencer’s family would feel, through the generations, that their boy died like that; the last of five New Zealand soldiers executed in World War 1, a coward in the eyes of the world.

And yet, there were reports that the execution sent a wave of revulsion through Spencer’s unit, the First Battalion of the Otago Regiment.

Writer John A Lee, himself honoured for bravery, was among those crying bullshit. He called Spencer an innocent out of his depth.

Blindfolded Bluff soldier Victor Spencer called the words from his personal darkness as the sun rose on a desolate crossroads called Mud Huts, February 24, orn in Otautau, Southland, November 1, 1896, Victor Spencer was an orphan by seven. After the death of his parents James and Mary Spencer he went to live with his Aunt Sarah in Bluff.

So keen to get to war, like many young men he’d lied about his age.

An 18-year-old pretending to be 20, he was small with it. Just 1.6m (5 foot 4in) tall, and nine and a half stone.

From his military training in Trentham in 1915 he’d sent a buoyant postcard back home after a parcel arrived from his auntie.

‘‘I can tell you the birds (muttonbirds) went all right. Did you send some socks up? If you did I have not got them yet.’’

‘‘There is great excitement up here now ... I have got a promotion to Lance Corporal, so I am no longer a private. My next step is to get corporal, which I think I shall get before I come down on leave.’’

But the promotion to a one-striper was a recommendation only, and it came to nothing. A private he remained. Then a fortnight before he sailed on August 14, he went into Trentham hospital with the flu.

Spencer served throughout the Gallipoli campaign, harrowing enough for all involved, but it was likely during frontline duty in France from May to July 1916 that his life truly turned hellish.

The Otagos suffered 163 casualties and remained in the line without relief for a harrowing 32 days. It broke many men who later became disciplinary cases.

Historian Christopher Pugsley, the author of On the Fringe of Hell, numbers Spencer among them.

The military authorities at the time did not recognise the nature of combat fatigue.

On July 10, a Minnenwerfer ‘‘whizz bang’’ shook the trenches near Spencer. He was admitted to Field Ambulance suffering from shell shock then sent to the divisional baths to convalesce.

By July 29 he was back with his unit, but promptly went missing. Captured and court martialed, he was imprisoned, with hard labour, rejoining 1st Otago on June 19, 1917.

But he had no mates, they were dead or gone. To those around him, he was a stranger with a bad record.

Spencer deserted for a second time on August 13, while his comrades were supplying parties for wiring and frontline trench work.

He was gone for the rest of the year and on January 2, military police burst into a house at Morbecque, where he had been living with a French woman and two children, and hauled him from bed.

His written statement to his court martial was nothing if not brief.

‘‘While in the trenches at Armentieres I was blown up by a Minnenwerfer and was in hospital for about a month suffering from shell-shock. Up to this time I had no crimes against me. Since then my health has not been good and my nerve has been completely destroyed. I attribute my present position to this fact and to drink.’’

The court martial must have noted that no appeal for clemency issued from his own battalion, in spite of his youth and long service.

So on January 17 they sentenced him to death — and then again on January 29. The tedious charade of a second court martial was necessary because the date of his desertion had been incorrectly recorded.

Confirmation of the sentence had to come from the highest level, this of course being the Brits and Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

Pugsley has cautioned against the idea that the fate of soldiers like Spencer was decided by some aristocratic British military autocracy. In fact most of the stony judgments proposed by NZ citizen officers —‘‘a microcosm of New Zealand society sitting in judgment of their own’’ — were quashed. But not Spencer’s, nor those of Frank Hughes, John Sweeney, and John King, executed for desertion, or John Braithwaite, for mutiny.

It was Invercargill MP Mark Peck, later to become a Wellington city councillor, who in 1998 presented Parliament with a bill seeking a posthumous pardon for the five. Technically, the men’s files were meant to be sealed for 100 years but Peck had argued that if a historian like Pugsley could get them, a legislator preparing a bill should not be denied.

They duly arrived, nice neat records, and the first one he opened was Spencer’s.

‘‘There was a file note, right there on the front page, on a piece of military notepad. Scrawled across it in heavy black pencil — same sort of pencil a builder would use to mark wood — was DEATH. ‘‘It just sent a chill down my spine.’’ The pardon campaign had a considerable knockback when an independent inquiry by retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Edward Somers instead recommended only the five be officially recognised as victims of war. The RSA didn’t like his bill either. ‘‘Not nationally, no,’’ Peck says. ‘‘But branches did. When you sat down with guys in Invercargill or Hamilton, they were so delighted someone was doing something.’’

Crucially, even though he was an Opposition MP, his bill had enough support to pass its first reading.

Well please, he entered his office the next day. ‘‘On my chair I found a white feather.’’ ‘‘Someone ... I never found out who and I don’t care ... felt so strongly abut it they entered my office at night and put it there.’’

Such were the conflicts that the idea of a pardon had stirred up. At one level, high-minded historians were concerned about the perils of revisionism. On a less elevated plain, other people clung to the stony judgment of cowardice under fire being unforgivable.

The Southland Times, in Peck’s own electorate, was hardly wholehearted in support. Far from it.

I wrote that editorial myself: ‘‘Mr Peck’s bill was based on the belief that a wrong was done to Spencer. By modernday standards it is easy to agree.

‘‘But many a court in bygone times,

Victor Spencer’s story has long since ceased to be a family secret, or shame, in the south. The Bluff Maritime Museum features his posthumously issued medals, Parliamentary pardon, and his certificate of service. A video of family members visiting his grave still draws attention.

‘‘It gets a great response,’’ says curator Trish Birch.

Most strikingly, the story has become part of a memorable piece of Southland theatre, in a production A Cry Too Far From Heaven written by actors Angela Newell Jade Gillies and Lizzie Dawson. Combining the execution stories of Spencer and Winton’s hanged baby farmer Minnie Dean, it has toured Southland, the country, and featured at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Which is better known for its comedy. ‘‘Yes,’’ says Gillies, ‘‘that was a point of difference.’’

The play has drawn uniformly strong reviews as a compelling piece, nowhere moreso than in the south where the emotional stakes were high.

Its script was rewritten a few times and, towards the end, Gillies found inhabiting the role of Spencer not just emotionally intense, but physically draining.

‘‘By then I was playing him shellshocked the whole time. On stage, shaking, for 50 minutes. That was pretty exhausting ... let alone the execution (scene).’’

It was always a challenging piece to write.

‘‘Really, at the start, we just had his last words, his court martial statement and postcard home. In the end we pieced together a story based on other accounts and I think we captured him pretty well.

Touring the production the cast would continually meet Spencer’s relatives. Perhaps fittingly the most memorable benediction came from the final audience, on Stewart Island, the front row given up to extended family members.

Proud ones, well pleased his story was being brought to the world.

Looking back at all those performances, does any moment register most deeply for Gillies? His answer is swift, emphatic. ‘‘Are you there, padre?"