Tales of those who survived

I remember when Bright Williams died in 2003. He lived a few doors down from my mother on Busby Hill and he was 105. He was also New Zealand's last living World War I soldier.

With his passing, the cataclysm that was that war also changed from a living event, albeit a tenuous one, to something totally of the past.

Jane Tolerton's An Awfully Big Adventure - New Zealand World War One Veterans Tell Their Stories allows us to see the reality of the war - across the years; across the theatres our troops were engaged in - Gallipoli, Palestine, France and Flanders; at the war's ongoing effects. The book is a wonderful work. It begins with the recording of the oral narratives of about 80 veterans back in the 1980s.

It is a rebooted version of In the Shadow of War, published in 1990 and co-authored with Nicholas Boyack.

This book broke new ground in its use of voices separate from the more "official" histories. The light hand of the interviewer(s), in juggling potentially confused memories and the spontaneity of unrehearsed recollections of men, mostly in their 90s, means both these books are a delight for anyone with half an ear for history in extremis, as lived by the ordinary bloke - the private or the second lieutenant.

That we should need to know where we have come from and what it is that makes us what we are today as a nation, is, for me, a self-evident one: Axiomatic. Gallipoli, after all, is one of our foundational stories and history's wounds can cut deep: For instance, Hawke's Bay, as the Wellington's leading attack company, was savagely mauled on Chunuk Bair.

Tolerton has presented (re-presented perhaps) her soldiers' recollections chronologically from 1914 to after the war. She has expanded on the number of veterans telling their tale in this new volume; 80 as compared with only 11 in the original book. We can see individuals popping up in different situations and battles spread over the four years of conflict.

Her questioning of old diggers - some recounting their experiences publicly for the first time - is deft, sympathetic and unobtrusive. Through selecting "the best stories", crisp editing and thoughtful and informed chapter prefacing, Tolerton allows these men to live and breathe. My God, what they went through.

As Anzac Day crowds swell to ever-greater numbers with each passing year, especially with the centenary next year of the outbreak of the war, this book supplies an unrivalled commentary on what it was like to have been there.

Each year on April 25 we celebrate and commemorate the deaths of all New Zealanders who have died in war but this cultural bastion began on a pebbly Aegean beach 98 years ago when the cream of New Zealand's manhood confronted the truly sharp end of their "awfully big adventure".

This book helps keep alive our honouring of sacrifice and hardship through the lives of those who survived to tell their tale.

An Awfully Big Adventure - New Zealand World War One Veterans Tell Their Stories

By Jane Tolerton

Penguin Books