Editorial: Le Quesnoy is getting a fine NZ war memorial

New Zealand soldiers scaled Le Quesnoy's medieval stone walls on November 4, 1918. 120 New Zealand riflemen were killed, just a week before the war ended on November 11. Photo / Malcolm Sines

Editorial

EDITORIAL

The long, four-year centenary of the Great War ends next Sunday, Armistice Day, but tomorrow New Zealand marks its own last battle on the Western Front and does so in a way which will leave a lasting attraction for New Zealanders visiting Europe.

Tomorrow is the centenary of the New Zealand Division's liberation of the small French town of Le Quesnoy which has never forgotten the soldiers of a small far-away country probably barely known to most of the townfolk.

Today Le Quesnoy has a street named Avenue des Neo-Zealanais and a school and another road named after the first soldier to breach the walls of the 17th-century fortress around the town. As too few New Zealanders know, to visit Le Quesnoy today is to be greeted with gratitude still for driving out the German occupying force a century ago.

It is a pity that the town has remembered New Zealand much better than New Zealand has remembered its victory at Le Quesnoy. It is also a pity that New Zealand, unlike Canada, the USA and Australia, has had no museum in Northern France or Belgium dedicated to the memory of its soldiers' efforts in two World Wars.

That need should be well met by a gracious building, the home of the town's mayor a century ago, which will tomorrow become the New Zealand War Memorial Museum in Le Quesnoy. Jude Dobson, who has been previewing the occasion for the Herald this week, reported the museum site also contains a few small self-catering buildings from its days as a gendarmerie which will be renovated to provide accommodation.

As she wrote, "You can imagine school groups staying, throwing a rugby ball around on the ample lawn, and using this as base from which to visit all the major memorials." Indeed you can. None of the WW1 battlefields are very far away. The Great War of attrition was fought for tragically small gains between the trench lines.

Today the fields are farms again, the "ridges" and other landforms that loom so large in accounts of the battles, are barely discernible. The most visible features left by the war are the cemeteries splendidly maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

New Zealand has also erected battle monuments to its soldiers at the Somme, Messines and Passchendaele but, according to Greg Moyle of the Le Quesnoy NZ Memorial Museum Trust, these are, "off the beaten track, difficult to find and seldom visited".

A living museum in a lovely old walled French town will be well visited. New Zealanders young and old who have been visiting Gallipoli, Ypres and the cemeteries in every greater numbers in recent times, will be certain to add Le Quesnoy to their itinerary. We all might soon be pronouncing it "Le-ken-wā".

It will make a change to be remembering an unalloyed victory. The German army was in retreat but would not give up the fortified town without a fight. New Zealand's 3rd Infantry Brigade, tasked with taking it, found their way blocked by walls and a heavily defended gate. The ensuing battle cost 118 Kiwi lives and another 24 died later of injuries. The artillery had not bombarded inside the inner walls to spare the town and no civilian lives were lost.

Thanks to those New Zealanders we are all greeted warmly in Le Quesnoy today. We should make this museum worthy of our welcome there.