Glyn Harper has created a composite NZ soldier from the conflict, called Johnny Enzed, and used the device to explore soldiers' lives as they served King and country. Illustration / Rod Emmerson
Military historian Glyn Harper has recreated the life of an Anzac soldier. He talks to Andrew Stone about life at the front, and back home.
They had bad teeth, enjoyed a drink or three and were as horny as hell.
Beyond their human frailties though, the New Zealand men who enlisted in the thousands for World War I and sailed to an uncertain fate confronted their task with courage and resolve.
"I think what they did fighting in this war, sticking it out till the end, is a considerable achievement," says military historian Glyn Harper. "We need to acknowledge that."
They faced the war, the influenza pandemic, then they came home to a country sick of the war.
"The country just wanted to get back to normality, to put the war behind them. The men who came home were basically told, 'You've done your bit, just get on with it'."
Faced with indifference, and an expectation that they would simply pick up the lives they had left behind, it was no surprise, says Professor Harper, that some soldiers stumbled and fell.
As William McKeon, a young Wellington draughtsman put it, the men came home, "some of us broken but all forged into something tougher by contact with the fiery furnaces of war".
For his new war study, author Harper has created a composite New Zealand soldier from the conflict, called him Johnny Enzed, and used the device to explore soldiers' lives as they served King and country. His approach draws together military and social history to give readers a sense of war not so much from the horizon of the military command, but from New Zealand soldiers in their trenches and tents, on the training ground and even with the tarts they chased in Cairo, Paris and Piccadilly.
Which brings us to the rotten teeth, the boozing and the sex.
Volunteers had to pass medical and dental examinations before they pulled on a uniform. In 1914, New Zealand men's teeth were "more or less deplorable", despaired military dentist Captain Robert Elliott. In the month it took Elliott to sail on the Maunganui to Suez in January 1916 with the 9th Reinforcements, he and a technician pulled out 255 teeth, filled 103 more, made 22 dentures, repaired 28 sets and undertook 83 other forms of treatment.
Such was the state of their choppers, Elliott wrote, "many of the men should never have been allowed to embark".
Through the war, Johnny Enzed had his moments with drink. At camp, before they embarked, alcohol lay behind cases of ill-discipline.
McKeon described a comatose soldier returned to quarters, "filthy and smelling to high heaven of stale liquor and something almost animal".
The New Zealand Tunnellers Company, a unit of older men drawn from mining communities, had their share of hard drinkers. The tunnellers, who waged war underground in often perilous conditions, ended the conflict with more than their share of convictions for breaches of military codes.
Of the 296 cases of Field Punishment No 1 meted out to New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) members, one researcher mentioned by Harper estimated that the tunnellers copped about 80. Remarks Harper: "For a unit that was less than 1 per cent of the total NZEF, to be awarded more than 25 per cent of one of the most severe forms of military discipline seems extraordinary."
The tunnellers laboured long, and drank with gusto, which Harper says "was to be expected when hard men are needed for hard tasks." The "hard men" paid a heavy price. From just over 1,200 tunnellers who served, 51 were killed in action or died of wounds.
In the trenches, where the New Zealanders fought for three grim years, the daily "rum ration" was one cheerful moment in the bleak business of survival. Distributed in big brown earthenware jars - stamped SRD or "special rations department" but known by the men as "seldom reaches destination" - the rum was a precious fluid. Trooper James Nimmo wrote the morning tot "could just about save a bloke's life often when he is wet and cold".
If Johnny Enzed fought hard and drank hard, he also played hard.
Writes Harper: "From the moment the NZEF was created, the soldiers' preoccupation with women and sex led to problems. This should have come as no surprise."
Hundreds of recruits were diagnosed with venereal disease, especially in the biggest camps, Trentham and Featherston. Volunteers or conscripts with VD were not allowed to enlist until cleared of infection.
At home, the rate of VD peaked at 34 per 1000 men in 1917. Abroad it was a different story. In Egypt, where the NZEF trained hard in preparation for Gallipoli, rates soared as the young soldiers encountered prostitution on a vast scale in Cairo.
The city's red-light district, the Wazza, teemed with women on the game. Ormond Burton, a stretcher bearer who wrote The Silent Division, a classic account of the war, felt the Wazza "staggered the imagination of the average New Zealander".
Burton remarked that "if truth be the first casualty of war, chastity is probably the second".
(The Wazza was a casualty of a riot involving New Zealand and Australian soldiers. About 2500 Anzacs ran amok in April 1915, wrecking brothels and smashing property. Each blamed the other. Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone, who died at Chunuk Bair, lamented: "If they had burnt the quarter down it would have been a good thing.")
Harper recounts the candid exploits of King's College old boy Trevor Holmden, a lawyer who left the Auckland Battalion for a commission in the British army.
After Gallipoli, Holmden played hard in Cairo. His diary recorded how he and three friends downed three bottles of Bollinger before being "rather pestered by painted tarts". The night wears on. "1am finds me grinding an Abassinian [sic] ... we leave at 5.30." It was, Holmden wrote, "really a unique evening".
Johnny Enzed had many more "unique evenings" throughout the war, on leave in Paris and London.
Harper says wartime Prime Minister William Massey "was right when he said that you can't put young men in uniform and send them away on a big OE and expect them to behave like saints. They weren't. They got into trouble. The rates of venereal disease were high but not the highest among the forces.
"But the real test of discipline was in the front line. That's where you could not fault the New Zealand Division's performance, and no one did."
Harper notes the late British military historian John Keegan - who also wrote about conflict from the soldiers' perspective - considered that during World War I, the New Zealand soldiers earned the reputation "as the best soldiers in the world during the 20th century".
Concurs Harper: "We took a conglomeration of people with mixed military experience - some had been in rifle associations or had time in cadets - but who were not trained soldiers, and prepared them for war. There was an awful lot of training when they had to learn very quickly.
"When it came to the crunch they performed remarkably well. Every account I've read or could find has indicated they rated very highly."
Much of the raw material for Johnny Enzed was drawn from soldiers' diaries, letters home, and unpublished material which families of servicemen sent to Harper when they learned of project, one of studies in the World War I Centenary History series. He pored over hundreds of documents, many written in the spidery, copperplate style of the time. When words or phrases were hard to decipher he enlarged them on a computer screen.
The choice of "Johnny Enzed" as his nickname for the 100,000 men of the NZEF was inspired by Richard Holmes' landmark study Tommy, an account of the British soldier on the Western Front. "I was inspired by Tommy," says Harper, "and I want to tell the story of our soldiers. And I wanted to use their words."
Much to Harper's surprise, one of the words the New Zealanders didn't use when referring to themselves was "Kiwi". Terms they used included "Anzac", "Digger", "Maorilander", "Moalander", even "Pig Islander". Harper liked "Enzed", a term that could apply only to the New Zealand soldier, and he couldn't go past "Johnny", which was current in World War I.
Before he put on a uniform, Johnny Enzed was a farmer, a labourer, a carpenter, cobbler or clerk. Harper even found four professional golfers and a couple of acrobats: "They came from all walks of life."
Harper is something of an Anzac rather than a Johnny Enzed. The Christchurch-born historian has an Australian mother. After crossing the Tasman for a teaching job, Harper enlisted in the Australian Army. Nine years later he transferred to the New Zealand Defence Force, and completed two tours of duty in East Timor. He ended his army service ended as a lieutenant-colonel.
Besides his historical studies, Harper has written nine children's books, an enjoyable diversion which he says allows him to take his imagination beyond the battlefield.
The war studies professor at Massey University in Palmerston North says his ambition with his new military study was to add to the legacy of works in the World War I centennial series.
He wanted to convey what ordinary men had to confront - the rats, body lice, the numbing shock of a companion blown to bits alongside you - and salute the courage and endurance of the Johnny Enzeds in rebuilding their lives at the end of it all.
"When you consider what these men went through, then if they are not our greatest generation, they are certainly our most resilient."
Johnny Enzed, The New Zealand soldier in the First World War 1914-1918, by Glyn Harper (Exisle RRP$55), is out now.
In all the theatres of World War I, the conflict on the Western Front took the greatest number of NZ lives. Of NZ's casualties in 1914-18, the trenches of Flanders and France claimed 84 per cent.
The images from that terrible engagement are some of the most poignant from the war: haunted faces, wan grey skies, everywhere mud.
Glyn Harper recounts an attack during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 - "the most destructive, lethal storm it [the NZ Division] faced on the Western Front - to show how war "consumes men".
Writes Harper: "One member of the team digging the communication trench received a direct hit from a German shell. Only the man's legs remained from the knee down. His brother, who had been digging beside him, remained unscathed.
"He gathered his brother's remains and buried them, carefully marking the spot. The surviving brother then resumed his digging task."
George Souter, of the Otago Mounted Rifles/Pioneer Battalion wrote in his diary: "WHAT SHEER GUTS."
Donovan Duff was already serving a life sentence. He was handed another one today.