NOVEMBER 5 2016 http://www.listener.co.nz 53
ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY 1/2-112327-F, EPH-D-WAR-WI-1917-02it examines the fraying extremes. As the
war ground into its third year, passing
men through its brutalising machinery
at industrial strength, support dwindled.
Communities bound by intense solidarity
began to shatter under exorbitant living
costs and demands of conscription. The
dissenters, the pacifists, the “shirkers” or
the resistance (passive or otherwise)
offered by many Maori communi-
ties who weren’t exactly swayed into
“defending” land that had previously
been theirs – these are by far the most
fraught aspects of the period.A
lthough dry in parts, the book
is not without its ironies and
amusements: Ian F Grant, dis-
cussing anti-German sentiment, notes
that “the Franz Joseph Glacier was in
danger of disappearing from maps –
for xenophobic rather than climatic
reasons”. Greg Ryan, looking at
wartime sport, notes colonial troops
had “particular prowess” throwing
grenades because it “required a skill
equivalent to overarm bowling”.
However, a minor problem should
be noted: Peter Lineham’s work on
organised religion mentions the far-
right Protestant Political Associationbarely in passing, a subject to which Brad
Patterson devotes an electrifying 17 pages.
This might be to avoid overlap, but Line-
ham seemingly ignores the PPA’s dramatic,
sectarian provocations.
Most chapters close teasingly at the
end of the war, and you feel that many
subjects are just getting under way. How
did the seeds of Anzac Day contribute to
our many national myths? And as alluded
to by Jeanine Graham, what became of
the soldiers, mangled in body and mind,
when they returned?
New Zealand Society
at War delivers
rich detail from a
previously neglected
deep seam of history. l
NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY
AT WAR 1914-1918,
edited by Steven
Loveridge (VUP, $40)German internees on Somes Island in
Wellington Harbour, in uniforms they made
themselves.