Anzac Reflections – Counting Casualties

Images: Canva

 

 

The Aegean Sea from Anzac Cove at sunset Image: Lainey Myers-Davies

April 25th is known as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand. The day commemorates citizens of the two countries who were killed in war and honours returned and serving servicemen and women. It was on this day in 1915 when Australian and New Zealand troops, or Anzacs as they came to be known, had their first major military action of the First World War. That action was the landing at ANZAC Cove on the Dardanelle Peninsula in Turkey at the start of the Gallipoli campaign.

 

New Zealand and Australian soldiers landing at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, Turkey.

Credit: New Zealand Free Lance: Photographic prints and negatives. Ref: PAColl-5936-18. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22768446

Counting Casualties

Battlefield statisticians were good

at counting Gallipoli's casualties – 

 

2, 779 died

4, 852 wounded

67 % missing 

 

Categories

for how our soldiers expired

were compiled – 

 

died of wounds

died of sickness

died of other causes

just plain killed. 

 

After, when the stench

from the trenches resiled

and the rats and the flies

ran out of flesh to defile

artefacts for the dead

were erected on the Peninsula – 

 

Headstones

Cemeteries

Memorials to the Missing 

 

With no bodies for burial

home soil saw proliferation of – 

 

War Memorials

Rolls of Honour

Gardens of Remembrance 

 

Other consequences

attributable to the Expedition

went uncounted – 

 

holes in the fabric of families

women unwed for the lack of men

bedrooms preserved in memory of sons

suicide of boys-school headmasters

(they’d blown the recruiter’s bugle)

premature ends of those at home

(and those who made it back) – 

 

died of despair

died of brokenness

died of sick in the head

Keith Westwater

I wrote this poem after hearing an anecdote about a headmaster at a large school for boys who, in response to all the jingoism at the start of the First World War, actively encouraged school-leavers to enlist in the NZ Army. As lists of 'Old Boy' casualties - particularly of those who had been killed - grew, the head became increasingly depressed and died in circumstances that suggested suicide. He was probably not the only headmaster to do so. From my experience in serving in the military, I was already aware of the way the casualties of war are counted and classified. I was taken with the notion that we don't put the same effort into counting and categorising those 'back home' who also become casualties of war.

 

New book coming up

Home Base

If you have been visiting this now revamped site in the hope of a new post, then you have struck it lucky. For the last two years or more I have been putting together a new book - Home Base. It is a memoir of the three years I spent as a New Zealand Army Regular Force Cadet, living  in barracks at Waiōuru military camp. The work is a sequel to the highly rated No One Home (Mākaro Press, 2018), which records my early and somewhat chaotic boyhood, and ends at the point I board the Auckland to Wellington overnight express in early January 1964 on the way to my boy-soldier life. I was 15, which at the time, was the youngest age one could join the Army. 140 other recruits of a similar age entered camp at the same time.

The work provides a personal snap-shot of the years 1964 - 1966 and distils the essence of what life was generally like for each annual intake of teenage boys who flowed through the Regular Force Cadet School from 1948 - 1991. Like No One Home, Home Base uses more than text to portray memories of time, people and place. Employing a bricolage approach, the work tells its story through short prose, poems, photos, sketches, maps, diary excerpts, and images of contemporary artefacts, memorabilia, and documents.

Home Base chronologically unfolds my Cadet years, but is more thematically structured than No One Home. Themes include arrival, learning the ropes, kit and caboodle, daily routine, marching and parading, minders and carers, leave and time-out, and aspects of barrack life. Vivid and sometimes humorous vignettes are used to gradually lay bare my army home and its harsh physical and social environment. Ever present are the volcanoes that form Waiōuru’s backyard, with Ruapehu in particular writ large in the lives of the cadets. Also woven through the memoir’s narrative is the story of how my individual post-cadet future came to be shaped and secured through the interest and actions of an Army benefactor.

Home Base will appeal to those who read life-stories to learn about and be reminded of times before and to an audience who enjoys reading about the New Zealand Army's past. It will also interest those who have served (or who are still serving) in the military in some capacity. Rather than being solely an account of one person’s memories of a particular life-period, Home Base will pique the reader’s curiosity and attention through the variety of literary and graphic forms that it employs and by revealing the uniqueness of a place in New Zealand most people only experience while passing through it. 

The book is due for publication by The Cuba Press (Mary McCallum) in October 2021. Before then, I'll advise when and where book launches will be and post some more extracts.

 

Here is a taster from Home Base:

 

Parade states

 

We were marched on and marched off

We were marched in and marched out

We were dressed up and dressed down

We picked up our dressing and lost it again

We marched paces forward or paces back

We stood at ease and stood easy 

We stood to attention and stood around

We braced ourselves and paced ourselves

We numbered from the right but not the left

We were wheeled in and wheeled around

We marched in quick-time

We marched in slow-time

We double-marched

We halted

We formed up in columns of three

We moved to the right or left in threes

We got on parade and got off it

We changed step and marked time

We fell out and fell in

We gave eyes right and eyes left

We advanced in review order

We presented arms

We hurried up and waited

Photo: Aerial view overlooking Waiouru Military Camp and Mount Ruapehu. Burt, Gordon Onslow Hilbury, 1893-1968 : F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Tuesday Poem: The ghost of Abbassia

Why so pale, young soldier-lad
what gloominess is this?
The days are breathing summer’s heat
what can there be amiss?

The boy he gazed into his beer
then looked around real slow
before he told to me this tale
in voice that trembled low:

I was on a signals course
we was testing radio.
We drove out to Abbassia
six months or so ago.

The night was bollocks freezing
there was ice on top of snow
the mountain she was steaming
the moon with blood did glow.

We set up camp and had a feed
but not a drop of booze.
I went outside to take a leak
and saw a bloody ghoul.

His face was black, his lips was burnt
cordite stained his hands.
His battle dress was ripped to shreds
He wore a gunner’s badge.

He said to me his gun had breached
a live one up the spout.
The crew was dead and dying –
go rouse the medics out.

I looked at him and knew he was
not human any more.
The gun it did explode alright
but thirty years before.

I told the ghost to bugger off –
his crew was feeding worms.
The gunner ghoul he swore real foul
then on me laid a curse.

He told me not to venture near
the swamp at Ngamatea
‘specially in the summer
for I would disappear.

He said the swamp would swallow me
like all them sheeps ‘n cattle
my bony bits would marry theirs
and never even rattle.

I laughed away that ghostie’s curse
when we was back in base
until today when Sarge he said
with malice on his face

‘You lot is slack and need a run
stay off the smokes ‘n beer
tomorrow sharp at sparrow’s fart
we head for Ngamatea.’

I wish I’d never seen nor dissed
the ghost of Abbassia –
tomorrow I’ll be drowning in
that swamp at Ngamatea.



I wrote this ballad several years ago (apologies to Keats for the first two lines). It is based on  a couple of incidents I experienced when I was a boy soldier in the 1960s. The ghost observation was reported by several of my colleagues during training when they were based at an NZ Army satellite camp (Abbassia, near Waiouru). Research later revealed that a gunner had been killed there 30 years previously when a shell exploded in a gun barrel during live-firing practice. We were also spun many stories about the Ngamatea (Nah-ma-tee-ah) swamp and how we would one day have to run through it during our physical training. These combined in my over-active but slow imagination 45 years later to spark this poem.

Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems and where this week's post is 'News from the Island' by Tracey Sullivan.