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Hamilton, August 1970
Both the marches I am going to describe took place in Hamilton on the third weekend in July. The first happened on a Friday. I think of it as the skull march because the students carried poles with poster banners showing white skulls on a black background. The blackness of the roughly painted banners could obviously be associated with mourning. It made me think also of the effect of fire-bombing on the human body.
My own comments on this march and the one that followed it on a Sunday are deliberately non-political, for I have no wish to build up an argument of false opposites, and I think the student demonstration involved factors that are, at least in the narrow sense, wholly outside conventional politics.
Few of those who participated in the marches would have any clear political conditioning, apart from the moderate Rightism or Leftism of their page 210 respective homes, and a university atmosphere where New Zealand social norms and a subconscious reaction against those norms provide a very usual kind of conflict. I think that the motives which brought most of them to the marches were in the main subconscious. I myself had come there to be with the students in a group event that made sense to them.
They assembled on the bank of the Waikato River, close to a band rotunda, in a most orderly fashion. Some of them wore armbands. One or two organisers told them that they would need to keep silence if the march were to be effective. But there was none of the strident manipulation of people which I have seen, to my regret, in marches overseas, which were being organised by the extreme Left.
This factor leads me to the conclusion that the Hamilton demonstrations truly rose from a feeling of protest already present in the student body at large and not from the effect of artificial political stimulation. Perhaps all student protests are basically anarchistic (I do not mean anarchic, for that would imply a lack of intention and order) both in their origin and their mode of action.
Those people who fear that the students of today are falling into Communist hands are mistaken. The students I walked with had undoubtedly strongly developed social consciences, but if they had any political affiliations, those affiliations were heterogeneous.
When they marched, they had a strong group rapport. We were walking three abreast, my friends and I, like the rest of the procession. A girl joined us and walked inside our group. She was young. I think she feared the possibility of physical assault from the onlookers who stood on the pavement, though fortunately no such episode occurred, and one heard only the occasional aggressive shout: ‘Why don’t you go to Vietnam?’
For me personally, who had come there with no great expectations, the ritual gravity of the skull march was almost overwhelming. Earlier in the day I had heard statistics quoted through megaphones, and had been unimpressed. That level of comment always seems to me ill-directed and trivial, since it sets aside the self-criticism which is part of social maturity, concentrating on the inevitable atrocities of modern warfare rather than on root causes. A claustrophobic peace breeds war as a dead body breeds maggots.
The Vietnam War is a far-off event for most of the students. Only a few are moved by so strong a humanitarian sympathy that the death of a million Asian soldiers and civilians – or the death of many thousand American soldiers and one or two New Zealanders – has kept them from sleeping at night. This might lead one to suppose that their protests against New Zealand participation in the Vietnam War are in fact shallow and insincere. But this is not in fact the case. There is a second hidden factor in the equation.
An extraordinary sense of purpose and vitalised tranquillity was present among the skull marchers. I suspect that this was because they had chosen page 211 the perfect symbol. A skull represents both a dead man and a depersonalised human being. And these students, children of the moderately affluent who are also perhaps immoderately respectable, had all experienced the effect of depersonalisation on their inner lives.
Their fathers would feel at times that they were indispensable cogs in the economic machine. Their mothers would feel at times that nobody cared in an absolute neighbourly sense whether they lived or died. And loneliness is the student disease. The skulls on the posters represented, as well as a million Vietnamese and American dead, the student girls who sit at bar-room tables waiting for a man who will regard one or other of them as a total person rather than a garbage disposal unit, or the student boys who are conscious of having been mass-produced on the educational assembly line. Thus the skulls linked the students with the dead of Vietnam, victims of the massive depersonalised military machines that serve ostensibly to protect our modern nations.
The children of the affluent, suffering an inward death by depersonalisation, at times amounting to an anguish of apathy fathered on them by the demon of obsessive materialism we tend to obey and worship, were joined to the dead children of the Vietnamese townsmen and mud farmers, collectively ruled and collectively killed, and the American servicemen dead through an enforced obedience to a collective military machine.
The key word is destitution. Our spiritually destitute children – who had eaten the poisoned wedding cake that married them to our society, with its filling of materialism and its thin coloured icing of cloudy altruism – were joined to the dead of Asia, destitute because death itself is the final destitution.
It would be useless for me to describe the fathomless peace that filled my heart as I walked barefoot in their company. They had found their true banner and symbol. I think their march through those lighted, traffic-filled streets was a nonpolitical and spiritual procession. I set down most ineptly the spirit of the skull march in the words of a nonpolitical poem:
The white skull faces of Vietnam
Are carried on our flags along the street
Quietly, quietly walking – and the faces of my friends
Are transformed by the ritual of speaking for the dead,
No longer caught in the web of an unloved education
Or the cold bog of a Varsity party –
Our children of the void, for whom I die each moment
As for the young calf tumbled by the cold river
Until it drowns and dies – but the faces of my friends
Have found their equipoise, they are themselves
At last, the children we kill with poisoned money,
Bribes, drugs, and a thousand lying fables,
Have found their equipoise in pity for the dead,
And the zeros in the eyes of the cold skulls
Reflect the coldness of a city
Where the soul and the body are treated as a thing
To be bought and sold – Oh you many watchers,
Feast your eyes on your children walking upright at last!
(‘Procession’, CP 491)
They did walk upright, for that half-hour at least, as if they had found the meaning of their lives, some alone and some holding others gently by the hand, marching like medieval penitents under the skull flags, through the centre of the town that had told them that money and respectability and education were a suitable diet for the human heart. The police officers were helpful and polite. The crowds on the pavements did not shout much abuse at them.
The second march occurred on a Sunday evening. It began near the university village, in a vacant area covered with mud heaps and pools of water. The air was bitterly cold but the sky was full of high winter stars and lighted by a moon nearly full, with a few clouds on the horizon. This time we marched holding torches made from poles with tins taped to their ends. The tins were filled with burning kerosene and rags.
Again the symbol was highly appropriate. Fire has been used extensively in Vietnam to kill people. But here fire was being used for its original purpose, to light people on a night journey. I remembered the words of St Francis:
Be praised, O my Lord, through Brother Fire
By means of whom You lighten the night –
He is handsome and joyful and powerful and brave –
(Extract from ‘The Song of the Sun’, CP 486)
and Brother Fire did light us well, symbolising perhaps the Pentecostal fire of the group love which is Divine in origin.
The stewards of the fire march were careful. When a hot tin burned through its taping and rolled into the gutter, they were quick to stamp out the burning kerosene and wadding. This time my bare feet were sore as well page 213 as cold, since the road metal, embedded in tarseal, was rough, unlike the smoother road of the first march. I was glad about this, since I had a formal talk to give at the Cenotaph – a talk about wealth and poverty and the causes of war and the meaning of a good peace. To do this even passably well, I needed the detachment that comes from physical penance. And there were my own faults to consider – faults of excess, faults of bragging vanity – as well as the faults of the civilisation to which I belong.
At the cenotaph a wreath was laid with an inscribed dedication to the dead of Vietnam. There were prayers and brief speeches. I gave my own talk. Some heads of the university and civic officials were present. I think they were reassured by the gravity and orderliness of the marchers and the speeches.
After the service a young student whom I had never met before came up and embraced me. ‘I have the motor car my father lets me use,’ he said. ‘You are an old man, Jim. Look after yourself. Take these.’ And he gave me the sandals he was wearing, to put on my bare feet. They were a trifle big for me, but I was glad to wear them. Such things happen when the group love – that invisible power made invisible by the fire march – moves in human hearts.
The demonstrations would not, of course, halt the war in Vietnam. But I think they helped the students to love one another. They also helped them to express in visible symbols their own invisible situation as children of the depersonalised abyss. That is all I expect or ask from such occasions.
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