My Brother's War

by Hill, David

The two of them watched Edmund. He spoke and was glad to hear his words come clearly. ‘Thank you. He is a fine young man, and we have always been proud of him.’

  The officer nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure your family want to be proud of you, too, Mr Hayes. After all, you’ve made your stand, and I don’t doubt you believe in what you’ve been saying. Now, you can save yourself and your brother and mother a great deal of trouble. There’s a uniform over there.’ He nodded at a small table. ‘Just say you’ll wear it, and we can put all this unfortunate business behind us.’

  Silence in the room. Edmund realised he was gazing at the neatly folded pile of khaki on the side table. His mind was spinning. Captain McGregor was right. He could save his family so much pain and worry. He could make his brother proud of him. He could do what so many other conscientious objectors had done: join the Army, but serve only as a stretcher-bearer, someone who didn’t ever carry a gun. It would be perfectly sensible; nobody would ever blame him.

  Nobody but himself. A glow, a firmness seemed to flood his whole body. He gazed steadily at the officer. ‘No. Thank you, but I’ll never serve in an organisation which aims to kill my fellow men.’ He felt startled at his own words. I sound just like one of the pamphlets I’ve read, he thought.

  Captain McGregor sighed. ‘Think carefully, Mr Hayes. A very difficult time lies ahead if you hold to these beliefs. And what will you achieve? You won’t stop the war. Nobody will take any notice of you.’

  He waited. The room was still; Edmund could hear the escort breathing. He said nothing, but he looked at the officer and the solicitor, and he shook his head.

  A shrug from the officer. His voice sounded hard suddenly. ‘As you wish. You have only yourself to blame for what follows.’

  William

  In the first days after William enlisted, people kept coming up to him in the street to shake his hand. The whole town seemed to know about it. Women smiled at him. Two pretty girls in big flowered hats whispered to each other, rushed up and kissed him on the cheek, then hurried away giggling. William didn’t mind that at all.

  Men invited him into the hotel for drinks, and he had to find ways of refusing. ‘Sorry, but I have to be at work,’ he told them. ‘The factory is short-handed because of all the blokes who’ve already joined the forces.’

  It was true. He didn’t know how Mr Parkinson would manage, now that another bunch of them had signed up. He’d heard people talking about women taking over jobs while the men were away. Women working in factories? It made William laugh just to think about it.

  There were some things he didn’t enjoy. ‘You’re heroes, blokes like you,’ people told him. William shook his head. The New Zealanders who’d fought at Gallipoli, battling the Turks on bare, high ridges, going without food and water for days, surviving in trenches with their dead friends lying out in the open in front of them – they were the real heroes. Could he be like them when it came to battle? He didn’t know.

  Sometimes he lay awake at night, remembering stories he’d heard of strong men who threw themselves on the ground when the first shots cracked past, tried to dig themselves into the earth with their fingernails. Would he be one of them?

  He didn’t like the flags waving everywhere, either. Or the banners across streets and in house windows, reading:

  THE ONLY GOOD GERMAN IS A DEAD

  GERMAN … SHOOT A HUN FOR ME, BOYS.

  A woman’s dress shop had a petticoat hanging outside its front door, and a sign:

  MEN:

  IF YOU DON’T SIGN UP TO FIGHT,

  YOU SHOULD BE WEARING THIS!

  A music teacher wrote to the paper saying she had ripped up all her music that was written by German composers. One of William’s friends had heard of a man who had grabbed his neighbour’s little dachshund, shouted that there was only one way to treat a dog with a Hun name, and threw it in the river.

  Most of all, William didn’t like thinking about Edmund. He knew his younger brother was opposed to the war and the Army. They’d argued about it for the last three years. ‘You and your peculiar ideas!’ William had joked at first. ‘You’ll soon start thinking sensibly.’

  Instead, the arguments grew fiercer and angrier, until their mother told them they weren’t to talk about it at home. Now William didn’t talk about anything to Edmund; he hadn’t spoken to his younger brother for almost a year. I’m ashamed of him, he kept telling himself. Ashamed, yet unable to forget him.

  The letter ordering William to report for military training came two weeks after he signed up. Before then, he had written two letters himself. One was to his mother and Jessie, with some money Mr Parkinson had given him. William hadn’t wanted to take it: ‘I’ve already cost you a lot by leaving the factory so suddenly.’

  But the older man insisted. ‘I’d go myself if I were thirty years younger,’ he said again. ‘This is the least I can do. And your womenfolk are going to need help without … without a man to support them.’ So he knows about Edmund, William realised.

  The second letter was also for Jessie and his mother, but he left it with Mr Darney. ‘I’ll be proud to look after it,’ the solicitor told William. It was a letter to be delivered to his sister and mother if he didn’t come back alive from the war. It said how he loved them, how he didn’t regret what he was doing, because everyone must do their bit against the evil Hun. He asked to be remembered to relatives and neighbours. He didn’t mention Edmund.

  Another person tried to give him money as well. When his landlady Mrs Purchas asked him to buy some meat at the butcher’s, Mr Hansen wouldn’t take the money, gave him twice as many chops as he’d asked for and tried to hand him some pound notes from the till as well. ‘Good to see there’s one son in your family who’s not afraid to do his duty.’

  William felt his face go hot. Edmund was wrong and foolish, and a shame to the three of them, but he was still his brother. He pushed the pound notes and his landlady’s money back across the counter. ‘No, thank you. Mrs Purchas wants to pay.’

  It was the butcher’s turn to go red. ‘It’s not for her – it’s for you! We’re proud of you!’ He tried again to thrust the money into William’s hand, but William shook his head, and said ‘No, thank you’ once more.

  Mrs Hansen, who’d been watching silently, stepped forward. ‘William is right. But take the extra chops, my boy. You young fellows have keen appetites. And give our good wishes to your family. All your family.’

  As William left the shop, he saw husband and wife behind the counter. One waving his arms and shouting; the other staring silently into space.

  Two of the other men from the factory, Herbert Blunden and Jack Kahui, had to report to the Drill Hall at the same time as William. A corporal greeted them and checked their names. ‘Hayes?’ he went to William. ‘We had a bloke through here last week with that name. Relation of yours?’ Then he seemed to remember something. He glanced at William’s stony face and bent over the form he was filling in. Jack and Herbert gazed at the scuffed floorboards and said nothing.

  A train took them to camp, picking up young men from stations all along the line as it steamed through the countryside. They still all wore their civilian clothes, and some of them grumbled about this. ‘The girls love a uniform,’ one red-headed bloke went.

  ‘So why didn’t you join a pipe band instead?’ asked someone, and there was laughter through the carriage.

  Their uniforms were waiting for them at camp: scratchy khaki trousers and tunics, khaki shirts, leather belts and straps with pouches hanging everywhere. ‘These boots feel like they’re made of lead!’ the red-haired soldier grumbled.

  ‘They are!’ Jack Kahui grinned. ‘If you run out of bullets, you fire your army boots at the enemy.’

  They had to polish the heavy footwear every evening, until they could see their faces reflected in the black leather. ‘Though Heaven knows why you horrible little men want to see such an ugly sight!’ roared Sergeant Molloy, the NCO in charge of William’s platoon. They were issu
ed with their lemon-squeezer hats: the stiff cloth ones that rose to a point in the middle with dents on either side, but they were allowed to wear those only on leave or on formal parades. The red-headed bloke, whose name was Jerry O’Brien, grumbled about that, too.

  They marched every day. There was drill on the parade ground. Sergeant Molloy’s voice started as a shout and rose to a bellow. ‘Step off with the left foot! The left! Don’t you horrible little men know your left from your right?’

  They learned how to turn and about-turn, how to come to attention so exactly that thirty pairs of boots all crashed down on the ground at the same moment. It was boring and their feet ached, and it seemed nothing to do with stopping the Germans.

  ‘Are we going to beat the Huns by marching over the top of them?’ Jerry demanded.

  ‘You can just boot them out of their trenches,’ Jack told him. ‘Or go “Shoe, you nasty Germans! Shoe!”’

  There was marching on the roads, too. Marching that took them for miles, away from the straight lines of round canvas tents and square wooden buildings that were the training camp. They trudged along, packs on backs, rifles on shoulders, boots thudding through the dust. Sweat poured down their faces. Blisters swelled on their feet. They grumbled under their breath until, as they finally slogged back into camp, a brass band formed up ahead of them and marching music filled the air. Then William felt his head come up, his arms swing higher, and knew that every soldier around him was doing the same. After three weeks, he was fitter than he’d ever been in his life.

  On one march, they passed a troop of cavalry, sitting high on their gleaming horses, rifles in long sheaths by their sides. There were calls and jokes from both sides. ‘What’s the weather like down there on the ground, lads?’ ‘Was that the horse talking, or the bloke on it? The horse looks more intelligent.’ William had read in the papers how cavalry were little use in this war; how, in 1914, lines of them had charged the enemy, only to be shot down in hundreds by machine guns. Now they were kept mainly for reconnaissance.

  By the end of the first month’s training, they’d also started learning how to kill.

  With their .303 rifles, they lay or knelt or stood at the butts, aiming, firing, pulling the bolt back to expel the used cartridge, ramming the bolt forward to insert the next round, aiming and firing again. They shot until their rifle barrels were too hot to touch, until their nostrils were full of the bitter smell of gunpowder, until they were so deaf that Sergeant Molloy had to shout into their faces before they could hear him.

  They threw Mills Bombs, standing in waist-deep trenches dug into bare ground a mile from camp. With sweating hands, they slid the detonator into position beside the explosive-packed metal head. Then they gripped the wooden handle, stretched their arm back and swung it forward like a bowler in a cricket match, sending the bomb curving through the air to land as close as possible to a group of man-shaped wooden cutouts stuck in the ground twenty yards away.

  ‘Aim! Throw! Down!’ the Training NCOs yelled. ‘Aim! Throw! Down!’ Three of them threw at a time, then crouched in the trenches as the bombs burst with an evil CRACK! Iron splinters flashed overhead and black smoke blew past. By the time the platoon of thirty men had all thrown, the wooden cut-outs were just fragments of shredded wood, scattered across the ground.

  William couldn’t throw a Mills Bomb without thinking of Edmund. His younger brother had been the cricketer of the family, the one who was good at all sorts of games and adventures, running faster and throwing further than William ever could. So why had he turned his back on this greatest adventure of all?

  Mostly, though, William tried to keep Edmund out of his mind. He didn’t know what was happening to his brother. ‘I don’t want to know,’ he’d told his mother. ‘If Edmund is in trouble because of his foolish conscientious objector views, then that’s his problem. If everyone was like him, there would be no armies at all!’ The last words echoed eerily in William’s mind.

  Bayonet practice gave him other things to think about. They stripped to the waist, fixed the slim, eighteen-inch-long steel blades to their rifles, and charged at sawdust-filled sacks hanging from posts or lying on the ground. They plunged their bayonets into the sacks, tore them out, plunged them in again. They screamed and yelled as the NCO in charge told them to. ‘Louder! It’s not a sack! It’s a Hun! A filthy German. Kill him! Kill him!’

  After half an hour, they were all panting, hearts pounding. Jack patted Jerry on the shoulder. ‘Easy, chum. Calm down now.’ William saw that the red-headed soldier’s eyes were wild and staring. Here was one thing he never would – never could – describe to his mother and sister.

  Rumours kept running through the camp. ‘There’s going to be a big attack in France,’ one voice said. ‘We’ll all be shipped over to take part.’

  ‘No,’ said a second voice. ‘We’re going to the Eastern Front – to save the Russian armies from the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians.’

  ‘No,’ came a third voice. ‘We’re going to make another attack on Turkey – same place as the 1915 Gallipoli campaign.’

  The corporal in the Uniform Store had fought at Gallipoli. He had only two fingers left on his right hand where a shell fragment had hit him. When he heard the last rumour, he shook his head. ‘They won’t go back there. That was a slaughter-house.’ William listened and wondered again how he would handle battle when he faced it for the first time.

  Other rumours talked of new weapons that would win the war before William and the others even finished their training. Enormous armoured machines called tanks, rolling forward on caterpillar treads, had crushed the enemy barbed wire, smashed concrete pillboxes, sent the Germans fleeing in terror. The Huns in their turn were using poisonous gas, firing shells full of it that turned men’s skin yellow and rotted their lungs, so they died choking on their own blood.

  Most incredible of all, aeroplanes from both sides were now fighting in the skies above France, shooting at one another with rifles and Lewis Guns, while the infantry stared up from their trenches below.

  William didn’t know what to believe. ‘Just let me knock off a few Huns with my rifle and bayonet, and I’ll be happy,’ said red-haired Jerry. Some of the others murmured agreement. Some were silent.

  At the end of their first month’s training, they were given five days’ leave. They put on their lemon-squeezer hats and marched to the railway station with the band playing, while the children of NCOs living in camp marched along beside them.

  For the first two days at home, William felt strange and unsettled. His civilian clothes felt so light after his uniform and boots. He kept waiting for a bugle call to tell him when it was time to do things. He even found himself almost standing at attention while he talked to Jessie and his mother, until his sister burst out laughing and threw her arms around him.

  ‘Oh, William, William! You really are a soldier now! I’ll invite Violet and the other girls over so they can fall in love with you!’ William pictured Jessie’s chattering, bright-faced friends from the tennis club and realised he was blushing.

  He felt strange also because of the things he couldn’t talk about – not to his friends or those of Jessie’s who did come over, even though dark-haired Violet Casey was quiet and sensible; not to the neighbours and relatives who came to congratulate him and wish him well.

  The bayonet training was one of those things. And the stories of poisonous gas, and men crushed to death by tanks or burned by terrible-sounding weapons called flame-throwers.

  ‘It must be hard for you,’ said Violet, as she handed him a cup of tea. ‘You’ll be thinking of what lies ahead.’

  William nodded. ‘I almost wish I were already in Europe.’ Violet said nothing. William glanced at her dark eyes and hair. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in Europe after all.

  Most of all, William couldn’t talk about Edmund. Nobody mentioned him, until lunch on his last day, when he and his mother and sister sat around the kitchen table, drinking tea, eating col
d mutton and potatoes. William glanced at his watch, half-wishing he didn’t have to go, half-longing to be gone, remembering what he’d said to Violet.

  Finally, he spoke the words he hadn’t thought he could. ‘Have you heard anything of Edmund?’

  His mother stood without a word and left the room. Jessie watched her go, then turned back to her brother. ‘Yes. Yes, we’ve had a letter.’

  PART 2

  Before Sailing

  Dearest Ma,

  Now don’t be upset, Ma, but I’m in prison!

  You never thought your younger son would say that, did you? No, it’s not one of my jokes. I’m in Mt Eden Prison in Auckland.

  The police arrested me at Mr Yee’s and handed me over to the Army. I told the officer I wouldn’t put on a uniform, so they gave me three days in the Drill Hall cells. When I still wouldn’t accept military orders, I was returned to the police and sentenced to twelve weeks’ hard labour for ‘disobeying a lawful military command’. The Army and the police like me so much that they’ve both invited me to stay in their prisons.

  Don’t be downhearted, Ma. I’m not. I had an interesting free trip to Auckland in the train! I saw some scenery I’d never seen before. I’m working in the prison quarry, helping break stones to make new roads. Hard labour? It’s labour, but it’s not too hard. It’s good to work in the fresh air, almost like being in the market garden in some ways.

  I’ve met so many other chaps who feel the way I do about war. A lot of COs have been sent here. I think the Army and the government don’t know what to do with us!

  Some of the fellows are objectors on religious grounds. Others are like me, and believe nobody has the right to order us to kill others.

  There’s an excellent bloke called Archie, quite a lot older than me. He was a keen member of his church, ’til he ran into trouble. What did he do? The minister was sick one day, and so Archie preached the sermon. He talked about a mother whose son was killed in battle while he tried to save another soldier. She kept his room at home exactly as it was and hoped he would somehow return to her. Then at the end of the sermon, Archie said it was a German mother and her son he was talking about. Isn’t that amazing? But people in the church complained, and he was asked to leave. The funny thing is, I’d already met him earlier. I’ll tell you how it happened, sometime.