VI.—By Pathways of Sorrow.

The law—made by a handful of men in disregard of the will of the people—duly came into operation, bringing a succession of disasters in its trail. The rule of despotism never fails to lower the moral standards and depreciate the essential values. Deception now became a part of the national life; the spy and the informer functioned secretly. Even the Minister of Defence came to the conclusion that it was part of the duty of a Member of Parliament to act the part of informer. From time to time the Government published lists of the "wanted" men, and every list, was sent to each Member of Parliament with an accompanying circular signed by the Minister of Defence, which left no doubt in the mind of the M.P. as to what was expected of him. One of these circulars reads:—

"Please find enclosed herewith a pamphlet containing the lists and full particulars of soldiers who have been declared to be deserters page 20from the various training camps, and also lists of the names of missing reservists who have been drawn in the various ballots, for whose arrests warrants are still outstanding and in the hands of the police. I have arranged for these pamphlets and lists to be sent to you each month, as there is every probability that some information might come to your knowledge which would be of assistance to the military authority in tracing these men. Should any information reach you at any time, it would be appreciated if you would communicate the same to the local police or to the military authorities."

Month by month hundreds of unwilling men were forced into camp; month by month hundreds were gazetted as deserters. Month by month numbers were seized or gave themselves up—some of them going into camp and some into prison, when their places in the "Gazette" were filled by other names. It did not matter that a man had never taken the oath, that he had never passed a medical test, that he had positively refused to be a soldier. He was held to have taken the oath; he was categoried as a soldier; he was labelled "deserter," and treated accordingly. Employers were forbidden to give him work; his own mother was liable to jail with three years' hard labour if she gave him shelter; his own friends were liable to fine and imprisonment if, knowing his whereabouts, they failed to inform the authorities.

The boats carried away hundreds of New Zealand's best men—openly, immediately prior to Conscription; secretly after its enactment—to become exiles in distant lands. Thousands became fugitives in their own land. They moved from city to city, from town to town, from district to district.

Hundreds went to the hills, and in the wildness of the mountain forest found a measure of that freedom which had been so ruthlessly destroyed elsewhere. These mountain dwellers, for conscience sake and with a fortitude akin to heroism that will never be understood by their detractors, faced hardships that cannot be chronicled. In the heart of the winter the rigours of the season tested to the limit their almost superhuman powers of endurance. Betimes they lived in dug-outs; and when the torrential rains of July and August came they were literally flooded out. In the summer months the bush fires swept through the mountains and drove them from refuge to refuge. While their fellows were being hunted down in the towns by the detectives, they were being tracked through the hills by the uniformed police and menaced by the would-be informer.

Of necessity, sorrow and suffering—the ripe fruit of this national wrong-doing—came into the lives of a multitude of people, desolation and despair into a multitude of homes. The wives and mothers suffered most. In war-time it is ever the mother heart that breaks. Nor did the children escape; they were made to pay the bitter price of want and destitution.

The story will never be adequately written of the brave women page 21who cheerfully faced penury, who, with a love that was divine, left the little homes that had been won through long years of sacrifice and went to work—as teachers, as nurses, as factory workers, as waitresses, as domestic servants, as charwomen—to provide for their children when the men were deprived of the opportunity of working for them; of how they struggled through the weary months and desperate years while the men they honoured were wandering in exile or languishing in prison. Wide and varied, tragic and terrible, were some of their experiences.

For more than two years my correspondence file contained, in the form of a multitude of letters, different phases of the story of the nation's heartbreak, particularly the record of the agony of the mothers and wives. For it is one of the wide glories of the Labour movement that all who are weary and heavy laden come to us with their burden of sorrow. During the intolerable sloth of what appeared to be interminable months, there was seldom a week that some wife or mother, some sister or sweetheart, did not come to me with breaking heart and streaming eyes to tell the story of the broken hope of her life.

A wife whose husband was a C.O. in refuge, awoke on different occasions round about midnight to a find a plain-clothes police officer on her verandah, moving stealthily, and evidently intent on discovering whether the husband was home.

The mother of a C.O. was taken ill and died. The CO. (who was sheltering in the bush) arranged that a friend should visit his home and perform certain rites in his behalf. As the friend entered the gate of the residence where the dead woman lay, he was suddenly seized by the police, who had planned an ambush anticipating that the son would come back to take a last sad farewell of all that was Mortal of the mother who bore him.