Few unscathed by war’s horrors
The Great War 1914-1918 was supposed to be the war to end all wars. As it turned out it wasn’t, but for the scale of sheer carnage and savagery it must surely rank up there as one of the most defining events of modern human history.
There were many dark events in the history of World War I, but surely one of the blackest days was at the battle for Passchendaele, in Flanders, Belgium.
According to NZHistory online ‘‘in terms of lives lost in a single day, the failed attack on Bellevue Spur on 12th October was probably the greatest disaster in New Zealand’s history’’.
Local historians Peter Millward, Karen Stade and members of the Nelson Historical Society have done a stellar job of unearthing theinvolvement of local Nelson Provincial families.
A wall at Nelson’s Founders Park currently lists the names of 3000 men and women from theprovince who served in WWI, with more being discovered each passing year.
Around the country, thousands of families must have been involved in the war effort, and the wider Mirfin family was no different.
Apparently, according to my father Stuart, I had 11 direct ancestors who served in WWI, who hailed from Otago, Westland, Nelson, and beyond.
Most made it back alive, although one was so shell-shocked and mentally damaged by war that he never recovered and later tragically took his own life.
Perhaps the saddest story was my great, great uncle D’Arce Basil Alborough of Nelson who enlisted at 17 years old old and died a few months into his 18th year at Rhododendron Spur, Chunuk Bair on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Whether he died with his face to the Turk enemy or was killed by ‘‘friendly’’ artillery shelling and bombardment is known only unto God. My great-grandmother Freda never forgot the heartbreak of losing her brother and told me often about him.’
A recent Nelson Mail article by Stade and Millward really bought the horrible reality of war into human perspective with the hearttouching story of Golden Bay’s Mary Newlove who sent four sons off to war with only one returning alive, and two of her sons killed at Passchendaele on the same day.
By contrast, the Mirfin family was lucky, blessed, or just plain dodged the bullets, mud, barbed wire, heavy shelling, U-boat torpedoes, or mustard gas. Four West Coast Mirfin brothers, Melville, Stanley, George, and my grandfather, Ashton all went to war, and all four returned home to the family farm of Oulton, near Ikamatua, in the Grey Valley.
Melville Mirfin was even honoured by NZ Post in 2014 when he was selected as the face of a special WWI postage stamp commemoration edition for his military service for the full length of the war 1914 -1918.
With this history in mind, my father Stuart has always told brother Scott and I regularly of trench warfare stories passed down to him by his father Ash.
In fact Stuart and Sherry had just returned home from the battlefields and cemeteries of Europe when the three of us attended the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele together at Nelson’s ANZAC Park on the 12th October 2017. returning home to farming, marriage, fatherhood, and much later grand-parenting.
Ash Mirfin (1894 – 1978) was a West Coast farm boy who also saw great technological changes in his lifetime, going from travelling in horse-drawn stagecoach as an infant, to watching a man walk on the moon on TV.
On the front in 1917, aged 23 years old, Rifleman Ashton Mirfin, No 55074 of the NZ Rifle Brigade faced many challenges and deprivations.
Ash often told Stuart such stories."We weren’t cowards’’ Ash would say. ‘‘But we weren’t fools either’’. Fortunately Ash left our family a lasting legacy in the form of his wartime diary, with meticulous entries and intelligent insights into life in the trenches.
Some parts are alas missing, thought by Stuart to have been ripped out by overzealous military censors of the time.
One entry of 21/08/1918 at Pusieux, France talks about leaving the trenches: ‘‘Hopped the bags at 4.55am. Had very successful attack – few casualties, large number of prisoners and guns. Captain Seddon (son of NZ Premier Sir Richard Seddon – ZM) killed at 5.30am’’.
In September 2017, Stuart and Sherry, with the expert assistance of Peter Jones, who as a WWI history expert also speaks fluent French, were able visit many of the cemeteries containing the bodies of men Ash fought alongside.
In Hebuterne Military Cemetary they found the grave of Captain Seddon.
It was at a grave such as this that they found an inscription with notification that the New Zealand occupant had been selected and repatriated to New Zealand to be therefore known as the ‘‘Unknown Warrior’’.
Ash might have been
It was a beautiful commemorative service and afterwards we all enjoyed chatting to the participants, RSA members, and dignitaries involved including Mayor Rachel Reese and a female Representative from the Belgian town of Zonnebeke nearby Passchendaele.
Ash Mirfin escaped the horrors of Passchendaele itself, but spent much of his war fighting within the constantly shifting Allied defence lines that were known as THE SALIENT, but nearby and adjacent to Passchendaele.
Ash was part of the Third Ypres battle, but the three Ypres battles, which included Passchendaele, left both sides exhausted and more than a million lives were lost in an area not much bigger than from Takaka to Nelson City.
After Armistice was reached, Ash spent the rest of his overseas service in the Army of Occupation in Cologne, Germany before competent, even lucky, on the battlefield, but he very nearly never made it that far.
In training camp Ash and his brother George fortunately avoided harm when a hand grenade blew up in their barrack room.
Bored soldiers were playing ‘catch’ with the grenade when someone duffed their catch and the grenade dropped into an opentopped potbelly wood stove. Everyone dived for cover as the grenade exploded sending shrapnel in all directions.
But Ash’s good fortune went back further than that to when he first arrived in Britain.
Two troopships of the NZ Expeditionary force, the Ulimaroa and the Norman arrived at Plymouth Sound from Wellington, with the men en route to Sling Camp on the Salisbury Plain.
The men travelled aboard a train when fate intervened at the village of Bere Ferrers, in the English county of Devon.
The New Zealand troops were hungry, not having eaten for more than 10 hours.
Two men from each carriage, one of which was Ash, had been pre-selected to exit the train at the first stop to obtain food for all soldiers. The train stopped, and the men hopped out. .
Travelling at 40 miles per hour on tight narrow gauge train tracks, the London Waterloo to Plymouth Express Train gave a blast on the whistle but was unable to see the soldiers on the track ahead until it was too late.
There was just nowhere to go and Ash always described it as the most horrific scene of his war.
Nine men killed instantly, another died of wounds the next day.
A small man, Ash squashed himself flat against the stationary train as the oncoming colossus ripped the buttons from his uniform tunic.
These New Zealand men have always been celebrated and remembered by the villagers of Bere Ferrers with plaques at the train station and at the local church. Local people organised a commemorative event to remember the sacrifice of the New Zealand soldiers and Stuart and Sherry were fortunate to attend the ceremony, to the minute, to the hour, to the day, to the month, exactly 100 years on.
It was an emotional ceremony attended by New Zealand dignitaries including the NZ High Commissioner and Head of the NZ Defence Force.
Rifleman Ashton Mirfin No 55074 was a survivor, but just an ordinary man who experienced extraordinary luck.
At Labour Weekend, sitting on the banks of the Waimea River, I thought carefully about the awful dice of chance in life.
It did occur to me that if Ash had been hit by a train or a German bullet a century ago, I wouldn’t have been there...