Just outside Andrew Holden\u2019s office at the Christchurch Press off Cathedral Square \u2014 and, believe me, New Zealand\u2019s prettiest city is as colonial as they come, a Potemkin town of mock-Tudor government buildings, Scottish baronial churches and wooden versions of Victorian homes \u2014 is a brightly coloured, cheerful little water-colour. Boarding a big steamship, thousands of New Zealanders in big broad-bottomed brown hats are lining the quaysides, the gangplanks and the decks.<\/p>\n
For a moment this week, I thought this might be some annual festival (perhaps involving New Zealand\u2019s 35 million boring sheep). But then Andrew spotted my interest. \u201cThey\u2019re going to Gallipoli,\u201d he said. And \u2014 fast as the lightning bolt of history \u2014 my eyes returned to the tiny figures on the deck. Off they were going, another flower of youth, to the trenches and dust and filth of my father\u2019s war.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure of this, but I think \u2014 I suspect and feel \u2014 that the Great War, the war of 1914-1918, is beginning to dominate our lives even more than the terrible and infinitely more costly conflict of 1939-1945. As the years go by, the visitors to the great cemeteries of the Somme, Passchendaele and Verdun grow greater in number. The Second World War may haunt our lives. The First World War, it seems to me, imprisons us all.<\/p>\n
The statistics still have the power to overawe us. As John Terraine calculates, by November of 1918, France had lost 1,700,000 men out of a population of 40 million, the British Empire a million \u2014 700,000 of them from the 50 million people of the British Isles. The British Army, let it be repeated, lost 20,000 killed on the first day of the Somme. I noticed that in Christchurch Cathedral, the bronze plaques to the Great War dead had been newly polished \u2014 so that they looked as they must have been seen by those who came to mourn almost a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n
Who would have believed, even half a century ago, that this year\u2019s Toronto Film Festival would open in Canada with a film called Passchendaele \u2014 perhaps the most-difficult-to-spell-movie of all time \u2014 the film poster showing just a young man standing in mud and filth and rain? Who could conceive that one of the most popular non-fiction books in recent Canadian history would be the Ottawa War Museum\u2019s Great War historian Tim Cook\u2019s At the Sharp End, the first volume of his monumental study of Canadians in the 1914-18 war?<\/p>\n
Canada had its Douglas Haig \u2014 a maniac called Sam Hughes (“Minister of Militia and Defence”) who forced his young men to use the hopeless Canadian-made Mark III Ross rifle which jammed and misfired and heaped up the corpses of Canadians who could not defend themselves with this patriotic, murderous weapon. Cook, despite his occasional tendency to clich\u00c3\u00a9 (says Fisk) is superlative.<\/p>\n
His description of desperately young Canadian men cowering in shell-holes \u2014 showered by the putrefying remains of their long-dead friends as bodies are again torn apart by shells \u2014 is devastating. So, too, are his quotations from the letters home of Canadian soldiers. \u201cI went thru all the fights the same as if I was making logs,\u201d Sergeant Frank Maheux writes home to his wife in an innocent, broken English. \u201cI bayoneted some (sic) killed lots of Huns. I was caught in one place with a chum of mine he was killed beside me when I saw he was killed I saw red … The Germans when they saw they were beaten they put up their hands but dear wife it was too late.\u201d<\/p>\n
My God, how that \u201cdear wife\u201d tells the truth about the surrendering Germans\u2019 fate. And here is Captain Joseph Chabelle of the Canadian 2nd Division\u2019s 22 Battalion: \u201cOh! The sensation of driving the blade into flesh, between the ribs, despite the opponent\u2019s grasping efforts to deflect it. You struggle savagely, panting furiously, lips contorted in a grimace, teeth gnashing, until you feel the enemy relax his grip and topple like a log. To remove the bayonet, you have to pull it out with both hands; if it is caught in the bone, you must brace your foot on the still heaving body, and tug with all your might.\u201d<\/p>\n
Private James Owen was to describe how an enraged friend was trying to bayonet another German. \u201cHe lunged at the German again and again, who each time lowered his arms and stopped the point of the bayonet with his bare hands. He was screaming for mercy. Oh God it was brutal!\u201d<\/p>\n
Haig, by the way, was initially dismissive of the Canadians. \u201cThey have been very extravagant in expending ammunition!\u201d he complained. \u201cThis points rather to nervousness and low morale.\u201d<\/p>\n
How the gorge rises at such wickedness. But it rises far more as you turn the pages of the beautifully produced, desperate collection of French soldiers\u2019 amateur paintings and sketches of the Great War \u2014 \u201cCroquis et dessins de Poilus\u201d \u2014 which, ironically, includes a set of sad portraits of the poilus\u2019 Canadian comrades. This magnificent book was produced by the French Ministry of Defence; why it could not have had a joint production with the Imperial War Museum beggars belief \u2014 does the Entente now count for nothing? For anyone who wants to understand the total failure of the human spirit which war represents \u2014 and the utter disgust which must follow the \u201carbitrament”of war (a Chamberlain word this \u2014 see his 3 September 1939, declaration of war) \u2014 must read the extract from Jean Giono\u2019s Le Grand Troupeau, which accompanies Louis Dauphin\u2019s bleak, rainswept painting, \u201cSupply Route at Peronne\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rats, with red eyes, march delicately along the trench,\u201d Giono writes of the creatures with whom he shared the war. \u201cAll life had disappeared down there except for that of the rats and the lice … The rats were coming to sniff the bodies … They chose the young men without beards on the cheeks … rolled up into a ball and began to eat the flesh between the nose and the mouth up to the edge of the lips … from time to time they would wash their whiskers to stay clean. Then the eyes, they took them out with their claws, licked the eyelids, and would then bite into the eye as if it was a small egg …\u201d<\/p>\n
My father saw these horrors on the Somme. They all did. Of course, Messrs Bush and Blair did not have to soil their thoughts with such images. Our boys shipping off to war \u2014 Mrs Thatcher happily endured the Gallipoli-like departures from Portsmouth \u2014 is enough for our leaders. But could it be, perhaps, that we \u2014 the people \u2014 know more about horror than our masters? Our history suggests this is true.<\/p>\n