Son recalls dad’s haunting WWI tale
The son of a New Zealand soldier who helped liberate Le Quesnoy has told Marty Sharpe about his dad’s war memories.
Not many people can say their dad fought on the Western Front. Fewer still can say he took part in the liberation of the French village of Le Quesnoy – a distinctly Kiwi engagement holding a prominent position in the nation’s war lexicon.
But Clive McCall can. The 81-year-old son of John Joseph McCall said his father didn’t talk much about his war experience before dying at the age of 70 in 1961. He can only recall him talking about the war on two or three occasions.
However, one story was seared into the young McCall’s mind and is as clear today as when his dad told it half a century ago.
‘‘He’d had a few beers and had let his guard down a bit. He told me about a gravely injured German he came across on the Western Front. The German pointed to dad’s revolver then pointed to his head. He wanted dad to shoot him. They had a moment or two there before my father shot him.
‘‘He was quite affected by that, partly because he had looked in the fella’s eyes, so to speak, and appreciated his bravery. There was no way the German was going to live, but it troubled him. It underlined the lack of value for life, notwithstanding all the other things he was involved with,’’ McCall says.
His father, who served for three years and three months in World War I, also served as a trainer of soldiers in WWII. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for capturing two machine-guns and killing their crews in late 1917. After a short hospital break in England in late 1918, he returned to the fighting to take part in the liberation of Le Quesnoy on November 4.
The fortified village had been in German hands since 1914, until the Kiwis crossed its medieval ramparts, in single file, on a rickety ladder. The battle saw 142 New Zealanders killed.
The locals have never forgotten and every year since 1923 they have marked Anzac Day. Since 2014 they have held dawn services at the graves of soldiers killed on that day.
McCall visited the village and surrounding battlefields in 2012. It was, naturally, a very moving experience and he would have dearly loved to return this week to mark the battle’s centenary. But a few health issues over the past year put an end to plans to be there.
As coincidence would have it, though, another son of a Le Quesnoy veteran lives just a few blocks from McCall’s Christchurch home. Colin Averill is the son of Leslie Averill, who was the first to cross Le Quesnoy’s ramparts, using a 30-foot ladder.
About 90 members of the Averill family are marking the centenary in Le Quesnoy this week. They will be among those at the unveiling of a New Zealand museum for the war dead in Europe, an event McCall would very much like to have attended.
‘‘I’m very supportive of the proposed museum. Our experience in the European wars is an essential part of our history and I think for us to develop a small piece of New Zealand there would be wonderful.
‘‘It’s money well spent, I’d say, and when you look at what other nations like Australia have done in the way of creating memorials over there, it pales in comparison,’’ he says.
New Zealand has no museum on the Western Front to put its participation in context. Descendants of those killed can visit a headstone, or a name on a wall. South Africa has had a museum at Delville Wood, on the Somme, since the mid-1980s. Australia has had a museum at Villers-Bretonneux since 1975 and Canada has had an interpretive centre (now an education centre) at Vimy Ridge
since 1997. Now, after more than 15 years and four iterations of a plan, it’s starting to look like a New Zealand museum may soon become a reality.
Late last year, after four years of negotiations with the French Government, the New Zealand Memorial Museum Trust purchased Le Quesnoy’s former Gendarmerie (police station) and nine accompanying officers’ houses.
The trust aims to establish a memorial museum for the more than 85,000 New Zealanders who fought in Europe in both world wars and to provide an accommodation option for Kiwis visiting the battlefields and the gravesites of their forebears. It is looking to raise $15 million to refurbish the buildings.
Trust patron Helen Clark expects Le Quesnoy and the museum to become a destination for young New Zealanders travelling to Europe.
‘‘We want to make sure those stories of young New Zealanders who travelled to the other side of the world a century ago are passed on to future generations.’’