For King and country

If I look back at what I’ve done with my life, my conclusion is that I was floundering until about age 26. I don’t hold this up as typical of my generation, but to provide context: My dad’s dad went off to fight WWI in 1914 at the age of 24. He wilfully left tiny Collingwood to battle complete strangers to the death in impossibly far-away places, at an age when the biggest decision I had to make was whether or not to do more postgrad study.

I’d call him “Grandad”, because that’s what he was of course, but he died nine years before I was born. To me, he’s Grandad Edward, but family and mates knew him as “Buster”, an old-timey nickname which seems almost stereotypical for the grandfather you know only from uniformed WWI photos – as if he’d spent the war getting into scrapes and sticky situations with his fellow boys in uniform, “Biggles”, “Ginger” and “Algy”.

The reality was rather different. Did Buster know what he was getting himself into? From here, it’s hard to believe he wasn’t affected by the propaganda and “for King and country” sentiment sweeping New Zealand, but it’s almost equally difficult to imagine that he approached it as a grand adventure with the sort of “over by Christmas” naivety seen so often depicted in modern-day films about WWI.

Whatever his reasons for joining up, and however he anticipated it all going, it seems unlikely he could really have been prepared, with the war set to defy the entire world’s expectations of just how horrific it could get, and for how long.

Grandad Edward was in the artillery, and fought at Gallipoli before going on to Europe and the then-record-setting awfulness of Europe’s Western Front, where he won the Military Medal. The family story I’ve heard has always gone along the lines that his gun emplacement took a direct hit, killing some of its crew, and he stayed at his post, doing his duty as the shells continued to rain down around him.

“They gallantly worked all through the heavy fire, continuing the fire with the remaining gun and eventually clearing away the wreckage and the wounded from the other gun and eventually firing both guns”, the official citation has it. It’s a somewhat drier account than the oral retelling passed on to me, and missing our colourful family addendum, which goes like this: Buster was actually under consideration to receive the Victoria Cross for his bravery, but after he pinched a bottle of booze from an officer, his medal was subsequently downgraded by angry superiors.

Just how much truth there may be to this story, I’ll never know – Grandad Edward, his unidentified soldier mate who supposedly passed the story on to my dad, and increasingly my dad’s own memories are now all lost – but it strikes a chord. It’s easy to imagine that after a near-death experience in which friends were killed beside me, my own priorities would be finding the nearest bottle of booze, rather than worrying about what medal I was going to get.

Years later, when asked what he had won his medal for, Grandad Edward’s frequent reply was apparently that “it was for holding the general’s horse”. It was always the horses, he added more sombrely, that he had felt the most sorry for.

What did it feel like coming back to New Zealand after those four years and 202 days overseas? Four years of mud and dysentery and dead mates and those poor conscripted horses? Buster was disillusioned, much like they all were. Whether he was also haunted by what he had seen or done, it’s harder to tell – held rigidly to the stoic definitions of manhood of his day that cling tenaciously, even in our own John Kirwan-PSA-assisted times, the returning diggers largely kept their experience to themselves. Buster’s drinking, from all accounts, had started in earnest before the war, so the epic sessions I’m told he put in at the Returned Serviceman’s Association were doubtless driven by camaraderie. But who knows if they had a touch of coping mechanism to them as well?

What are we to make of it all from a hundred years later, at this point in history, when Franz Ferdinand is a band that has faded from the limelight and many of the people reading this article can’t reasonably be expected to have recognised the reference to Biggles I made in the second paragraph? Through what lens should I view Grandad Edward’s experiences? Pride? Gratitude?

There’s an almost rote fallback here: thank you for your service to your country, Sergeant Allan. But while I understand the sentiment and don’t begrudge it in others, I don’t know if it really sits right for me. The thing about WWI is that it was particularly stupid, pointless, and horrible, even when ranked in the generally stupid, pointless and horrible category of wars in general. There was no great evil to stop, no desperate struggle for our survival – it’s a stretch to argue it was a war that needed fighting at all, or that the men of New Zealand needed to be fighting it.

“There are times when we pause and look back and relive the past and there flashes before our vision the question of how much the world has prospered from the sacrifices and the suffering of those days. I think when that question is reviewed...the answer of course is nothing.” LISTEN to ‘Bob’ recall his experience fighting on the Western Front in 1916. 

I don’t really know what service was really rendered to New Zealand as a nation or its people by Buster and his mates – at least in any kind of ‘for the good of the country’ way. That’s not their fault, but it is how it is. WWI sucked Grandad Edward almost inexorably up, battered him around and eventually spat him out, ultimately for no good reason. He spent nearly five years of his life on a petty schoolyard squabble, writ absurdly and tragically large. What exactly was the ‘service’ performed to New Zealand by thousands of blokes murdering each other in deplorable conditions over the same bits of ground? And if there was one at all, was it worth it?

There was no great evil to stop, no desperate struggle for our survival – you have to stretch things to argue it was a war that needed fighting, or that the men of New Zealand needed to be fighting it.

Naturally, it was a different time – New Zealand still thought of itself as a part of Britain. But one rather thinks that if our parliament had done the then-unthinkable and returned a polite-but-firm verdict of “We’ll pass, thanks”, 16,697 Kiwi blokes like Grandad Edward would have lived longer than they did.

16,697: that’s a lot of potential. It’s a good bet that at least some of those blokes would have helped us to forge our own identity as a country through other, less destructive methods than a war we didn’t start. A lot of kids wouldn’t have had to grow up without dads. A lot of other guys would have gone on to have children and grandchildren – even if they were without ribbons and medals tucked away somewhere safe in a drawer.

If there’s a sense of gratitude from our generation to men that fought a war 100 years ago in a climate so culturally and politically alien to our own – and large numbers of us at Anzac Day each year suggest perhaps there is – it strikes me that the sentiment stems not from thoughts like “Thanks for that time you fought in the name of Britain’s economic and political interests” or “Thanks for doing the duty your country asked you to” or even “Thanks for being so brave when those shells were coming down all around you, Grandad”, but instead: thanks for going first. Thanks for the illustration. Thanks for paying the heavy price that was required for us to learn this lesson.

I think I’d like to say sorry instead. Sorry World War One happened, Grandad Edward. Sorry you experienced it. Sorry I never got to meet you and know you. And then my own thanks go like this: thanks for going through all of it. Thanks for your stories, your medal, and your example. I hold them all as precious because one day, when they’re old enough, I’ll pass them all on to my own kids. Then another generation of your family will know why we should never again go to war.

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Audio recorded by the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand in 1981 and provided courtesy of New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero.