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WW1 memoir an eloquent protest

30/10/2018

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Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman
by Alexander Aitken
 
Not unnaturally, the centenary of World War 1 has been marked by a plethora of war memoirs, campaign histories, battle analyses and overall surveys. This work stands head and shoulders above most of them, precisely because it contains no overtly blazing message, whether condemnation of the ritualised insanity of war or of the self-evident truth that war is hell.
    This is not a record of ‘one man’s war’; the persona of the author is missing from most of it because Alexander Aitken chronicles his memories in a way that allows his readers to draw the self-evident truths for themselves. Totally disinterested in being ‘the voice of a generation’, his memoir is silent on such typical starting-points as his motives for enlisting, his initial impressions of the military life and his basic training, and bypasses these to emerge as the most eloquent, take-it-or-leave-it protest possible against what this educated, sensitive, Christian and thoroughly decent man was obliged to do and to endure in doing his duty, as he saw it, to the defence of civilisation.
     Only a man of Aitken’s intellectual gifts could have written this book in this way and with this effect, and if one is to understand the book fully, one must first understand the author. He was a strikingly intelligent man who was clearly the product of an education much above the average even allowing for the light-years’ difference between what was considered essential for an early 20th century education and that of the 21st. It is pertinent to note that Aitken’s brilliant academic career would have been stillborn in his family’s need for his labour but for a scholarship to Otago Boys’ High School, from which he emerged with a first place in the National University Scholarship Examination in Latin, third place in English and French but, more importantly for a future that would see him Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University, the realisation that numbers and the patterns into which they may be organised could be used to train the memory into feats ever more prodigal. These are recounted throughout the book and read like a chapter of Ripley’s ‘Believe it or Not’, but the excellence of Aitken’s memory is self-evident and the quality of his analysis superb.
     His bona fides as an intelligent analyst and observer established, then, we may turn to his commentaries on the War in France with the recollection that they are the product of a first-class intellect and no small gifts of expression, and look at some of them in summary: 
    On War: “Since modern war consists so largely in the grossest deceptions ensuring the foulest opportunities.”; “And so let (modern war) be stripped of glamour and seen for what it is.”
    On Truth: “Naturally there could be no mention of such a set-back in our own communiqués, aiming as they did not at truth but at gloss.”
    On Normality: “This area was out of the intenser zone of shell-fire, though 
occasional long-range high-explosive, gas- and tear-shells fell about at random.”;   “I shook off our conditioned callousness, shook off the feeling, now taking root, that this world of arbitrary violence and random death was the real world, and that justice, mercy, peace and love were phantasms that had never been.”
    On Euphemism: “It was about this time that the word ‘attrition’ acquired a vogue, 
though only in 1917 did it have a general use and an accompanying theory. There can be little doubt that both the word and the theory were the by-product, the cover, and an attempt towards the palliation of the enormous losses sustained in these great ‘pushes’ which for the gain of ten miles of advance might mean the loss of 200,000 men.”    
      And perhaps the most searing of all, On Behaviour:  “To describe (bayonet drill) accurately is to indict civilisation.”
     Aitken’s memoir of Gallipoli is that of a scholarly man steeped in the classics 
and therefore revelling in the discovery of places about which he had only read; gradually we see his pleasure in the classical ambience eroded under the corrosive effect of war as in the fact that the surviving veterans of the Main Body and Gallipoli landings chose, in rest on Lemnos, to remain in their tents “suffering, one might say, from an induced agoraphobia” because they had been conditioned by their Gallipoli experiences into the conviction that being outdoors was likely to become a fatal experience. 
     Disillusionment is also seen in Aitken’s view of poetry-as-propaganda when he contrasts the sentiment of ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ with the reality that the dead of Gallipoli were swiftly stripped of their boots by Turks even less well-equipped than the ANZACs, and when he writes “Active service permanently removes any taste for the conventional poetry of war (to become) merely a cause of wonder that a grown man could write it.”
     Here, then, is the clinical eye of the classicist and the mathematician doing what he must because of what he believes to be his duty to the milieu that produced him. It remains to be considered what that milieu may have thought of him.
     Aitken was obviously precocious. Nicknamed ‘Swotty’ from his earliest days at Otago Boys’, as a private he boned up on the features of the Gallipoli landscape before he got there. As an NCO he memorised the platoon muster-book’s record of names, numbers, next-of-kin and their addresses. As an officer he conducted lessons in celestial navigation for his soldiery. The boy who claimed to have “worked much less” than any of his contemporaries at Otago Boys’ grew into a soldier who wrote things down, committed things to memory, and studied maps, plans and orders to a degree of perfection of which only he was capable, because he would not be caught unprepared while in charge of others.  
    This is the answer to his editor’s question of “ . . . how someone so intellectually gifted could spend so much of his war, not as an officer . . . but as a regular NCO, rubbing along with the labourers and farm workers and tradesmen of the Regiment.”  In a word, they trusted him and that trust was evinced in the way his men colluded in Aitken’s possession and maintenance of the cherished violin that accompanied him on so much of his travels and travails.
     Aitken’s story is greatly assisted by editor Professor Alex Calder of the University of Auckland who has added to Aitken’s outstanding and precise prose a timeline, a valuable notes section, a bibliography and a commemorative index of names.

Review by MJ Burr
Title: Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman
Author: Alexander Aitken; with introduction & editing by Alex Calder 
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408817
RRP: $39.99
Available: bookshops

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A real boys’ book

24/10/2018

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My Old Man He Played Rugby
by Peter Millett
Illustrations by Jenny Cooper; sung by Jay Laga’aia
(and that is a huge bonus!)

     It’s just what I have been waiting for: a real boys’ book!
     I can just imagine a dad and his son/sons crowding him out on the sofa or veranda step as they read, listen and sing along to this book together.
     It’s the first audio book combo I have experienced, and if others are like this it certainly won’t be the last!
     The rhythm is catchy, the pictures inviting and gripping, the words conjuring up days in the dust and hot sun, the mud and miserable rain, on a typical Saturday.
     Happy spectator participation, and even though there are the inevitable highs and lows there is no sign of aggression or fist-waving. The two teams play, the yellows and the blacks, as we always hope they will, in the spirit of the game. And their expressions are delightful!
     Just page after page turning of thundering great fun.
     I can hear the roars and grunts, and even the smells, and it makes me laugh out loud with each page turned.
     This is not a book where the artwork has been skimped on. No, the art work is of the highest standard and in keeping with the story.
     It doesn’t matter what place a kid’s dad plays in this story, or on what side, or for what country, his dad is the hero.
     A fantastic read from start to finish.
     Thoroughly enjoyable.

Review by Susan Tarr
Title: My Old Man He Played Rugby
Author: Peter Millett. Illustrator: Jenny Cooper; Vocalist: Jay Laga’aia
Publisher: Scholastic NZ
ISBN: 9781775435280
RRP: $19.99 paperback and CD
Available: bookshops

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Sad story worth reading

18/10/2018

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​Odyssey of the Unknown ANZAC 
by David Hastings


Thanks to the centenary of Gallipoli not so long ago and the approaching 100th anniversary of the end of World War 1 there have been a plethora of books published about it, but this one is different. It is the type of book that makes history come alive. 
    Many of us know of families affected by the war service of a loved one, the nightmares, low times, depression, war neurosis, hysteria, amnesia, alcoholism and inability to love and cope with life after the horrors they have seen. During World War 1 it was called shell-shock. These days we know it as PTSD but whatever it is called it causes as much, if not more, illness, unhappiness and death as physical injuries.
    The blurb describes author David Hastings’ remarkable job as “tenacity in researching” and indeed it is, considering he was dealing with records a century old. 
    He follows the story of a young man, George McQuay, from enlistment in 1915 first to Gallipoli then the western front where he saw horrors most of us can barely imagine.  
    Next, George was found wandering in civilian clothes but wearing an Australian soldier’s hat. After the war he was repatriated to Australia and admitted to Callan Park Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney where he was known as the unknown patient as there was some doubt whether he had even been a soldier. 
    In 1928 the Returned Sailors & Soldier’s Imperial League of Australia distributed a flyer with a photograph of George throughout Australia and New Zealand asking for help identifying him, which led to him being recognised and returned to Stratford and his family.
    It is not a story of heroics and great deeds but, rather, one of an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The story is told with empathy and whilst it doesn’t really end happily it does afford closure and serves to remind us all that war is never the answer.
    Congratulations to David Hastings for a sad story well told and worth reading. 

Review by Rewa Vivienne
Title: Odyssey of the Unknown ANZAC
Author: David Hastings
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408824
RRP: $34.99
Available: bookshops

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First-hand knowledge of past times

13/10/2018

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​Two Slices of Bread – A Memoir
by Ingrid Coles


This book is titled perfectly. The author has picked out a moment in memories of her life that must surely affect any reader. 
    Even if we haven’t ourselves experienced long periods of hunger, reading of the amazement of a little girl at being allowed two pieces of bread, after so long being lucky to get one, is very moving.
    Ingrid Coles’ memoir first covers her early years in Indonesia where she was born, particularly the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java where her mother and siblings were interned – years that were to have ongoing effects throughout their lives. They were the lucky ones in that her father and a brother didn’t make it, but both physical and mental legacies of those times took their toll on survivors.
    Further chapters tell of life in Holland after repatriation, where problems still beset the struggling family, then Ingrid’s emigration to New Zealand, at the age of sixteen. 
    Along the way there is lots of information of life in the war (WW2) and post-war years in Indonesia, Netherlands, and then New Zealand – well organized into appropriate chapters. The editing is good, and it is easily read throughout.
    Overall, the production is attractive – photos, sketches and maps are provided to elaborate and enhance the story. Text print is clear, though the lack of mirror-margins makes left-hand pages difficult to read due to narrow gutters.
    In this time when such stories are being revived, this memoir adds further first-hand knowledge of past times, lest we forget.

Review by J.M.
Title: Two Slices of Bread
Author: Ingrid Coles
Publisher: Wild Side Publishing
ISBN: 978-0473428907
RRP: $39.99
Available: bookshops

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Companion books by mother and daughter

10/10/2018

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Review deleted
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Utopian appeal in YA book

4/10/2018

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​Child Power
by Raewyn Dawson


There is a certain utopian appeal to a community that lives by a code called the Peace Way.
    Despite my cynicism about the possibility of a world (especially now) living according to such a code I admired the author’s optimism and the way her characters espoused their belief in living according to the Peace Way. 
    However, it is clear that maintaining the Peace Way comes at a cost and that is to use ‘outstanding fighting skills'.
    This is a Young Adult novel and the story line engaged me from the start. The baddies got what they had coming to them and the protagonist, with her band of dedicated followers, showed that good can win over evil. 
    There is a certain irony that within a few pages of starting this book I encountered a graphic battle between the followers of the Peace Way and some bandits. As the novel unfolds it becomes abundantly clear that this Amazon tribe of young women are skilled and ferocious fighters. The Peace Way has to be mercilessly fought for.
    But then they take up good causes and find ingenious ways to solve problems. It would be a spoiler to give too much away about some of the challenges they encountered and resolved. 
    The story moves along at a great pace in a world run by young people. I thoroughly enjoyed its energy and its optimism. 
    And I don’t know how anyone could write about a utopian world without it being set against dystopia as a backdrop. Otherwise how do we know good without being able to compare it to evil? Two characters in particular epitomise this juxtaposition – the evil doers Mithrida and Nigel. Although banished to an island they still cast a menacing shadow over the people of the Plains.
    Good versus evil is the underlying theme of ‘Child Power’ and Raewyn Dawson takes the reader on a journey in a world that is cast from the imagination with reference to some Greek History which makes the Amazon story authentic. 
    In the shadowy world of evil the characters are hazy and ghostlike. In the world of good, characters are sharply cast and we warm to them. The victims of evil also suffer and the young people whose mission is to save the hapless victims find an ingenious way to carry out their mission. 
    Quite how a writer would deal with a community living the Peace Way without them having to overcome evil with violence I don’t know. I wonder if that dilemma ever troubled the author. It would seem not, because I feel sure that the next book in the Amazon series will also have the heroines conquering anti-heroes.
    It is a super book and I can imagine a young reader, especially a young girl, devouring every word.

Review by Suraya Dewing
CEO, Stylefit (formerly The Story Mint) http://www.thestorymint.com
Title: Child Power
Author: Raewyn Dawson
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473435271
RRP: $20
Available: bookshops

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