Tales of broken spirits in wartime

One-off drama tells a different war story, writes Nick Grant.

There's a group of New Zealand war heroes whose courage and suffering hasn't traditionally been acknowledged during our annual observance of the cost of past conflicts on Anzac Day. After Field Punishment No.1 screens this week, I'm betting that oversight will be corrected.

The one-off drama tells the based-on-fact story of 14 Kiwis who, having refused on moral grounds to take up arms during World War I, were shipped off to the battlefields of Europe anyway and subjected to enormous abuse in an effort to break their spirits and make them fall into line.

It has been made by Lippy Pictures, the production company responsible for acclaimed true story tele-features Until Proven Innocent and Tangiwai. Given that track record, it should come as no surprise that writer-producers Donna Malane and Paula Boock and their team have done an impeccable job of bringing these brave conscientious objectors' tales to vivid life.

The programme begins with a group of children discovering a half-naked, unconscious, amnesic man lying in a French field in 1918. After he is taken to a hospital, the story flashes back one year earlier to the troop ship Waitemata, where we discover the man (played with great strength and dignity by Fraser Brown) is "conshie" Archibald Baxter, who would become well known as the author of the autobiography We Will Not Cease and father of one James K. Baxter.

Over the next 90 minutes, Field Punishment No.1 shuttles backwards and forwards between Archie recuperating in hospital and the events that led him there. It's an effective structure, nicely handled by editor Paul Maxwell, that creates a mystery the viewer wants to see solved - not that it remains mysterious for too long what has reduced Archie to his catatonic state.

"No doubt we're a hindrance to you, but we act out of deeply held convictions," Archie tells an officer. "We don't expect any special treatment. We just ask that you treat us as men and not as soldiers. That's all."

Of course that's all too much for the military commanders. Armies operate on unthinking obedience because if soldiers stopped and thought about war's whys and wherefores, they'd almost always refuse to fight, especially in the face of the utterly senseless slaughter of trench warfare. So Archie and his comrades are treated as less than men to provide an object lesson to the troops about the price paid for not following orders.

Their trials and tribulations - their torture, there's no other word for it - get progressively worse and include the penalty that gives the programme its name: being tied to a post in a stress position in freezing conditions all day for 28 days in a row at Mud Farm Detention Camp in France, an injustice James K. Baxter immortalised in his poem, Pig Island Letters.

At times it's hard to watch the brutality the men are subjected to but director Peter Burger and cinematographer David Paul often find a stark beauty in the subject as well. Designer Miro Harre and costume designer Kirsty Cameron create an amazingly authentic sense of period and scale, and Victoria Kelly's restrained but emotive score adds to the mounting air of horror and melancholy. The cast are uniformly excellent.

I can't command you to watch this programme but I strongly urge you to. It's your patriotic duty.

Field Punishment No.1 screens Tuesday, 8.30pm, on TV One.