Remembrance

Five years ago I had the pleasure of walking the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand’s Great Walks and arguably one of the world’s. Our first night was spent at Routeburn Falls Hut where the peace of the rain forest had competition from a group of fifteen or so exuberant, high spirited and talkative teenage girls from Otago Girls High School on an outward bound course.

Watching their antics by the waterfall and listening to the gossip on the veranda I remember feeling slightly envious of their youth, energy and sheer joy of life. They were young, innocent and carefree. Worries about bills and decisions about careers were far into the future. They had their whole lives ahead of them to enjoy and be whatever they wanted. And they also just happened to live in one of the most beautiful and unspoiled places on the planet.

Four years later I stood looking out over farmland on the Messines ridge in Belgium on a soft warm summers day. The only sound was the rustling of leaves as a breeze blew gently through the ash trees lining the British Cemetery. New Zealand soldiers were instrumental during the WWI Battle of Messines, which took place in the first two weeks of June 1917. The Germans held the high ground and the New Zealander’s were first out of the trenches during the main attack.

In total, there were 4,978 New Zealand casualties killed or injured during the Battle of Messines. The New Zealand Memorial is situated within the British Cemetery and commemorates eight hundred and twenty eight Kiwi men whose bodies have never been found. 

Standing at the memorial, my eye was drawn to the names of men from the Otago Regiment etched into the stone and I was instantly taken back to that pleasant evening in the rain forest and the infectious joy and laughing of those teenage Otago girls.

These men would not have been much older than those girls were. And yet they volunteered (only a third were conscripted) to travel far away from their beautiful country with its snow capped mountains, vast rain forests and crystal clear rivers to fight and die in a bloody war that was not really their own battle. And here they remain in the farmers fields of Flanders, their bodies either disintegrated by shellfire or swallowed up by the glutinous mud.

I sat for a long time at that memorial thinking about that lost generation of young men and that new generation of young women from a small province, in a small country at the bottom of the world. And I prayed that those Otago girls and the rest of us would never have to live through the industrial scale slaughter of WWI and WWII ever again. And that somehow, even in the violent and uncertain times we are living through at the moment the leaders of the world would realise that searching for peace has surely got to be better than looking for war.

Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.