The Great War’s impact on N.Z. life

Press, 18 November 1989, Page 27

The Great War’s impact on N.Z. life

Behind the Lines. By Nicholas Boyack. Allen and Unwin/Port Nicholson Preen, 1989. 239 pp. Illustrations. $29.95. (Reviewed by Oliver Riddell) This could have been the best book so far about New Zealand’s involvement in the Great War of 19141918. It focuses on interesting as well as important events, and is impeccably researched. It fails because the author cannot restrain himself from making moral judgments about the events and attitudes of which he writes. He imposes his own late-twentieth century morality on the earlytwentieth century people and facts he is describing. When their morality differs from his own, he criticises them. . ,

It is remarkable that Boyack should choose to spend so much time in painstaking research about people with whom he has so little empathy. His research is admirable; well over 200 individual accounts in letters and diaries have been cited. Yet much of the time it is not

history he is writing but a sermon. He distracts the reader from the validity or otherwise of his general argument. Boyack’s thesis is that because New Zealanders have traditionally regarded their country’s involvement in the First World War as THE watershed • event in its history, this ought to be tested. He uses first-hand accounts of what it was like, how attitudes changed during the war, and what consequences flowed. Before 1914 we were a colonial outpost; after 1918 we were a nation. It was not as sharp and sudden as that, of course, but as a generalisation it has stood the test of time. It has been so universally accepted that it has come to be even more true subsequently than was perceived at the time.

The experiences of those who went to war changed the way they saw the world. It was not just the fear and discomfort in the trenches, or the ghastly deaths constantly occurring all round them, but the way they viewed authority, mateship, women, “inferior races,” and New Zealand’s own

qualities of beauty, cleanliness and isolation, that have helped shape the national character. All this Boyack traverses. The experiences of the soldiers affected both themselves and all with whom they came into contact for the rest of their lives. But Boyack cannot leave it at that. He writes with white-hot anger, about the five New Zealand soldiers executed for breaches of military discipline, and dedicates the book to them. The publishers are at fault in not insisting that Boyack edit out his more extravagent personal opinions. < It is such a pity, because there is so much in this book to inform and entertain. In his many quotations he has allowed the soldiers to have their say. But he has not understood the

age-old privilege of the soldier to “grouse.” Too much of what he has allowed them to say seems to be because they justify his own low opinion of their officers (ignoring that some became officers as the war went on) and “the system.”