A genius at war
An extraordinarily talented Kiwi ended up in the trenches of Gallipoli. His war memoir is one you have to read, writes Ewan Sargent.
There’s a moment at Gallipoli where Alexander Aitken is walking back to his bed – a coffinshaped hole in the ground. He’s carrying his violin and has just played at a mini-concert, including
The First Noel in a dugout, under Chunuk Bair.
Far to the south, Aitken can hear a ship’s gun boom as it fires at Turkish forts on the other side of the peninsula. The shells cross the night sky like the noise of a distant train.
But another much closer noise catches his ear. “I began my walk, but stopped at halfway, conscious of danger, as of a rattlesnake. A string of hisses, rapid and even as semiquavers, sounded just in front of my knee, accompanied by soft thuds somewhere to the right; machine-gun bullets at the end of a very long trajectory.”
One swing of his arm and the violin case would have been shredded.
“I stood still; the hisses ceased for a few seconds, returned, ceased, returned. I jumped high over the spot and dashed for my earth-bed, roughly grounding the violin.
“For a while I lay awake, shaken by this escape from the arrow that flieth by night and by the gossamer thinness of the partition between life and death; but I slept nonetheless soundly.”
Aitken’s words capture the sights and sounds of war so acutely and beautifully. Even musically. His war memoir Gallipoli to the Somme is regarded as the greatest book written by a New Zealander about World War I. It might be the greatest piece of non-fiction writing by a Kiwi.
But there’s a good chance you have never heard of it. Somehow this book by a Dunedin-raised academic has slipped out of sight.
Auckland University associate professor of English Alex Calder would like to change that. He’s republishing Aitken’s 1963 memoir because he believes this is a tale that needs to be recognised for its unique and powerful insight into war.
Aitken was an extraordinarily unusual man. He had a photographic memory and once famously recalled an entire platoon roll book of 56 names, numbers and next of kin, when the book had gone missing. He memorised Pi to 1000 numbers and could recall the sequence from any point, tapping out a rhythm with his fingers as he did, hinting at the strange way maths and music mingled in his mind. He could multiply nine digit numbers in his head.
Aitken topped the country in seventh form scholarship exams by a wide margin and at that age he was as good at English, French and Latin as he was in maths. He was largely a self-taught violinist. His memory and ability to recall events was so astonishing that in later years psychologists studied him.
This is the man New Zealand put in a soldier’s uniform and sent to the trenches in Gallipoli and France with the Otago Regiment.
Calder says all books about World War I are in a sense about memory, and Aitken’s book is by “someone who had one of the most amazing memories in human history”. He calls it a humble book, “cool, collected, considered and truthful”.
“There’s a kind of a very sharp visual perception he is able to get across in his writing. The book is like a series of photographs and that’s a quality of writing more than the memory.”
Aitken writes about taking a shot at a Turk in the distance, hearing the soldier next to him fire at the same time, and seeing the Turk fall. The mathematician in him tries to cope with the idea of killing.
“At night, in the dug-out after the change-over, it returned upon me. It seemed that the two shots could raise nine possibilities, in three of which at any rate I might have killed or had a part in killing a fellow human being. This, of course, was what I was there for, but it seemed no light matter and kept me awake for some time. I could come to no conclusion except that individual guilt in an act of this kind is not absolved by collective duty nor lessened when pooled in collective responsibility.”
When Aitken writes about a wholly futile and suicidal attack he is sent on during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, it’s in a sensory-filled, dream-like way.
“In an attack such as this, under deadly fire, one is as powerless as a man gripping strongly charged electrodes, powerless to do anything but go mechanically on; the final shield from death removed, the will is fixed like the last thought taken into an anaesthetic, which is the first thought taken out of it,” he writes.
He returns to the dream theme in another passage: “Now from two directions, half-right, half-left, came the hissing of many bullets, the herringbone weave of machine-gun crossfire…. Again these things are remembered as sometimes a deeply submerged dream may be recaptured in waking moments; at the time I took account of them only dimly, and certainly did not think of death for a single moment – no merit in this, we are not responsible for what we do in dream or hypnosis.”
Seconds later, Aitken is hit by bullets in his arm and foot. He survives by listening to approaching howitzer shell blasts and calculating where to crawl so as to avoid the next explosion. But his war is over.
Calder says Aitken started writing down his memories “as a letter to no-one” while recuperating as a day patient at Dunedin Hospital. He worked on it intermittently for four decades, slowly turning it into a book with chapters. In the meantime, he became a distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.
But he suffered terribly from having such a wonderful memory. It meant the war was always with him and he had regular mental breakdowns of anxiety and insomnia. During these difficult times, he worked on his war manuscript.
When it was finally published in 1963, Calder says it was immediately regarded as a war classic alongside those such as Edward Blunden’s Undertones of War.
On the basis of just one book, Aitken the mathematician was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. And yet in 2014 when Calder attended a conference about New Zealand in World War I, none of the historians and literary experts had heard of Aitken, let alone read the book.
He’s hoping that will change and new generations will discover the genius from Otago and who “wrote our greatest book about the First World War and one of our great pieces of non-fiction writing”.
“It really ought to be permanently around for generation after generation to discover.”
The violin Aitken carried with him throughout his war is on display at Otago Boys’ High School, where he was dux in 1912.
The instrument was given to him by a man who won it in a raffle on the ship taking the soldiers to war in 1915. Aitken played it for his fellow troops, who helped hide it during route marches and inspections because it was illegal. Aitken wrote the names of the battlegrounds he survived on the inside of the case.
Calder points to the violin as an answer to the question of how Aitken got on with his fellow soldiers. They looked after it and him, Calder says.
“I suspect he was deeply respected by the men around him.”