War of Words

Early in our nationhood a great hole opened up and 18,000 precious lives disappeared into it. The shock lingers a century later. A further 42,000 men survived, though badly hurt, and with a 10th of the entire population involved directly in World War I its shadow touched everyone in some way – families, friends and friends of friends. More of our men were killed in World War I than in World War II and subsequent military involvements. The last 1914-1919 war veteran died in 2003. The 5 August centenary of the Great War’s declaration invites a re-examination of New Zealand’s part in it, and here are two engrossing picture books to assist the process.

The first is New Zealand and the First World War 1914-1919 by Damien Fenton (Penguin, $75) which has a colourful, quickfire approach. Good-quality illustrations are snugly interspersed with pouches and pockets containing fold-out maps, posters, booklets and other printed material. There are also postcards, tickets, chits, letters and souvenirs making up what the publishers call “a plethora of ephemera”, which is a way of playing down a smart feat of editing. It is all in step with the historical narrative and website backup.

The book has magazine-like immediacy and teems with interest – as with the sidelight about a song called Tipirere (Tipperary). It is a long way to get there, as the Maori Pioneer Battalion discovered in World War I, saying goodbye to Piketiri (Piccadilly) on the way. A full Maori translation of the words to Tipperary is given in this unusual war history, which is a cleverly conceived project from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The author is a senior historian with the ministry.

The other book, Images of War: New Zealand and the First World War in Photographs by Glyn Harper (HarperCollins, $99.99), is a 400-page whopper – a greatly enlarged version of his 2008 book of the same title, with pictures mainly from the National Army Museum at Waiouru but also from the soldiers’ own photographs taken with the newfangled pocket cameras launched by Kodak in 1916. (A public appeal drew a huge number of historic pictures out of private storage – the same tactic The Auckland Star used with equal success for its centennial issue of 1970.) The pictures in this collection are of a familiar style, limited technically and by subject matter, with soldiers standing numbly against landscapes reduced to mud and wreckage, towns and farms torn beyond recognition.

Do such scenes represent some “bleak requiem” for human hope? The author will not allow that, pointing out that a hugely powerful aggressor was defeated and New Zealand troops played a crucial role in its downfall –something we need to remember. Our fighting men were and are rated among the world’s best. In becoming so they built a new sense of self-worth and national identity. And these are “significant and positive outcomes”.

Bereaved families hardly hasten to balance factors like pride and sorrow. So how are people to cope with past losses in this centenary year? We sanctify our martyrs, craving a spiritual affinity with them. We reach for touchstones like loyalty, bravery, sacrifice. We build memorials. We anoint our fighting men, gratefully, and accept that World War I proved them to be superb soldiers. And although that was a long time ago, we still need to recognise that although we may never need to “feed the guns and beat the Huns”, we are probably not immune from entanglement in future world conflicts.

Both of the above books give disturbing glimpses of a new kind of surgery made necessary by an increase in disfiguring facial injuries, often involving extensive loss of tissue. The Boer War had presented no such challenge, but 15 percent of the World War I casualties had facial wounds caused by flak from shell bursts and high-velocity bullets, often infected from bacteria-rich farmland.

The story of how the new surgery developed is told in a remarkable book Reconstructing Faces: The Art and Wartime Surgery of Gillies, Pickerill, McIndoe and Mowlem by Murray Miekle (Otago University Press, $60). Dunedin-born Sir Harold Gillies and Henry Pickerill, who came from Britain to be the first director of the University of Otago Dental School, were operating on the Western Front in World War I. The two younger men, Gillies’ cousin Sir Archibald McIndoe of

Dunedin and Auckland-born Arthur Rainsford Mowlem, joined the work in World War II. The author, also a New Zealander, is a distinguished professor of orthodontics.

What looks like a forbidding topic produces a book that is informative and absorbing on many levels – not least in the operations, airborne and surgical, of daredevil fighter pilots who, as members of Gillies’ exclusive Guinea Pigs Club, already had injuries repaired and went back into the air for more. The book records the names of 642 club members. Some wrote memoirs of their own, and Murray reproduces some racy anecdotes. The famous Douglas Bader, who is not listed as a Guinea Pig, was not the only legless pilot. Colin Hodgkinson, who also lost his legs, was returned to service in the Fleet Air Arm.

It would be a mistake to be put off the book by the shocking and even horrifying nature of some of the photographs. The book as a whole is much too good for that – and besides, the facial surgery produces some admirable transformations.

The memoirs of Australian plastic surgeon Sir Benjamin Rank give a deserved and possibly admiring nod to Kiwi ascendancy in the specialised field of facial reconstruction: “Rainsford Mowlem was a sprightly person with a sharp, decisive mind… Like Gillies and McIndoe with whom he was so closely associated in hospital and private practice, he too was a New Zealander…”

The forces that drove Gavrilo Princip, a frail farm boy turned student, to kill the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife 100 years ago, thus precipitating World War I, are analysed in a book due out in May. It is The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher (Random House, $39.99).

Reyburn House Art Gallery

Home of the Northland Society of Arts

Open: Tues - Fri 10am - 4pm. Sat - Sun 1pm - 4pm

Closed Mondays

Historic waterfront house and quality art gallery. Reyburn House built between 1865-1875 is Whangarei’s oldest existing early settler home. All year round art exhibitions, extensive gardens, boutique gift store. WORLD CLASS ART GALLERY.

Reyburn House Lane, Town Basin, Whangarei. Ph/Fax 09 438 3074 | www.reyburnhouse.co.nz

Not yet off the press, Holding on to Home, New Zealand Objects of the First World War is written by Kate Hunter and Kirstie Ross (see Kate’s story about the social impacts of war at home on page 6). World War I seeped and stormed into every aspect of New Zealanders’ lives, from the front line to the family home. The things that survived – a crumpled theatre ticket, an engraved cigarette case, a knitting pattern, a piece of velvet embellished with sequins, a rifle – are emotional touchstones that bring this distant event back into our hands. Historians Kate and Kirstie scoured museums and archives to uncover these personal possessions and the stories they tell. All-new photographs and original research illuminate the things that were worn, lugged, kissed and held by soldiers and those at home, placing these objects at the centre of this important new social history. Holding on to Home provides a fresh perspective on World War I and gives valuable insights into the lives of New Zealanders during wartime, more than 100 years later.

Publication date: August 2014.

Giveaway

We have two copies of Holding on to Home to give away. To enter the draw, send your name, address and Holding on to Home on the back of an envelope to Book Giveaway, Heritage New Zealand, PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140 before 15 June 2014. The winners of last issue’s giveaway Book of New Zealand Words are: Alan Tunnicliffe and Denise George, both of Christchurch.