Yes, we must not forget but we must learn too

Last Sunday marked the end of five years of New Zealanders commemorating the centenary of World War I. Thinking back to the events in 2014, which seems like ages ago, I can only imagine the enormity of the original conflict for those here in New Zealand. What relief and exhaustion the survivors must have felt when the Armistice was signed.

Commemorating the war has been a highly rewarding journey for me. It started more than a decade ago when my mother drew my attention to some anonymous handwritten poems she had found after my grandfather died. Bert was a WWI veteran and we assumed he didn’t write poetry. Even stranger, though Grandpa was a great supporter of the British Empire – how he must be turning in his grave at his grandson’s republican ravings – the poems complained about the rigid class system where officers got the best food and the troops suffered.

Further investigation by my cousin Paul Turner revealed that other members of his regiment also had these poems. Paul suspects the poems were a group effort, written anonymously in case they were found.

My grandfather’s poems led me to create a play about World War I – King and Country .It was respectful to those who served and also examined the role Ma¯ ori played in the war – at that time a neglected part of our history. The play ended with the actors dropping their characters and stating their personal connection to World War I.

Initially the actors all assured me they had no links. ‘‘Go ask your grandparents,’’ I barked. Sure enough, every one of them had links to the war. One Wellington relative was wrongly stated as dead before the grieving family found out days later that he was still alive.

When commemorations began in 2014, I found myself employed on a variety of war-related tasks. One minute I was writing short biographies of soldiers and nurses; the next I found myself on a steam train with actors playing characters on their way to Passchendaele.

I was impressed by the dedication of New Zealanders at home and overseas, but I also had a nagging doubt that I might not be getting the full story. What about the dissenters and conchies?

Meanwhile, New Zealanders couldn’t get enough of the commemorations. They were downloading apps, attending WW100 events, and visiting Te Papa’s Gallipoli exhibition in their thousands.

I loved seeing New Zealanders engage with their own history. But I also wondered if our commemorations were leading us to overhype our contribution and buy into some convenient national myths. As my mother recently said, ‘‘when I was a child, I believed that Dad and Uncle Bill won the war, with a little bit of help from a few others’’.

Yet Chris Finlayson, the visionary minister for arts, culture and heritage who laid the foundations for many of the events, and backed it up with generous funding, frequently pointed out that we were not celebrating but commemorating the war.

In 2015 I found myself in Paris as part of a New Zealand delegation writing a conceptual brief for the French contribution to Pukeahu. Here I learned that, for the French, the war was one that killed civilians as well as soldiers, and ruined whole towns and cities – not the New Zealand experience. Yet there were numerous shared experiences that linked our countries. To visit the Western Front, especially the Somme and Verdun, where I stood in a mausoleum built over the bodies of 30,000 men, was unforgettable.

On my return, I was asked to write another play about World War I. I had been so immersed in the conflict that ‘‘No thanks – been there; done that’’ was my initial response. Surely there are enough plays where a young man in 1915 says, ‘‘Pater, Mater won’t let me go to war’’. Then I had the idea of writing about young New Zealanders and Australians in the present visiting Gallipoli for a boozy commemoration. One of the characters dared to say much of what I was thinking – that we often blindly commemorate the past and don’t learn from our mistakes.

I couldn’t help but see the parallels between Gallipoli and our recent efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought I would be crucified for even expressing such an opinion but, by 2017, audiences – possibly suffering commemoration overload – were happy to consider the issue, even if they didn’t always agree.

Now that the commemorations are over, I hope New Zealanders take more time to study their past. Those calling for more emphasis on the New Zealand Wars are visionaries, not radicals. Let’s hope that the war commemorations will influence our politicians before they again blindly recommit New Zealand to more futile engagements in those ‘‘Johnny Turk’’ lands of Afghanistan and Iraq, and peace will reign.

As the old song goes, ‘‘When the flowers bloom in no man’s land, bringing a message of peace and love. And the cannons’ roar is heard no more. What a blessing from above.’’

Let’s hope the war commemorations will influence our politicians before they again blindly recommit New Zealand to more futile engagements in those ‘Johnny Turk’ lands.