* Horror of the Western Front line recalled
Christchurch man Paul Grainger recalls the time his uncle opened up about his traumatic World War I experience.
Time and again I hear relatives of World War I veterans saying that the men would never talk about it. My uncle, Tom Grainger, was one such veteran. He had over three years on the Western Front as a machine gunner.
Because he volunteered very early in the war, his army number had a ‘‘bar’’ in it. This is relative, see below. My brother and I would often ask him about his experiences and he would change the subject, but then one night he let us have it. I can still remember it vividly, even after 50-plus years.
‘‘So you think war is glamorous, do you boy?’’
He then went on to explain that in the Battle of Verdun there were over one million casualties. ‘‘Imagine one million men walking past you, three abreast. Do you know how long it would take to pass you?’’
Tom was at Passchendaele, the Somme and many other battles. As a machine-gunner he would have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of German boys. Towards the end of his life I am sure he was seeing the ghosts of those boys. He was certainly very, very bitter about it all.
He described mowing down the German attackers with deadly crossfire and the Germans crawling over their own dead.
He talked about how, after a few years of mass murder, all countries were running out of men and in the last year or so of the war, younger and younger boys being in the army and crying for their mothers when under fire.
When the Germans broke through in 1918, the NZ Division was sent to plug the line and he said they had to point their guns at some of the British Army soldiers who were retreating.
I cannot confirm this but this is what he said.
And then the killer blow. ‘‘Well boy, after you have been killing hundreds of men, what difference does the colour of their uniforms make? Lots of officers were shot in the back as they went over the top.’’
If men were on a charge for some offence, or they thought the officers were being too hard on them for minor infringements, they could end up being shot by their own men.
When I told the boys at school this I was ridiculed.
Three years ago I attended a talk by New Zealand military historian Brian Lockstone, and I asked him if this was true. He confirmed it, and that it was always hushed up.
Lockstone said it was not so common in our division because the New Zealand division commanding officer had a policy of promoting officers from the ranks and they understood the hardships that the men had to endure.
It was much more common in the British divisions, where the gulf between officers and men was often huge.
In the summer of 1918, Tom was wounded and the last thing he remembers before going under the anaesthetic was the surgeon saying, after looking at his number, ‘‘Jesus, a bar man, not many of them left.’’
Thankfully the war ended just as Tom was to return to his unit. Before he went overseas Tom had thick auburn hair and in 1919 when he stepped onto the Dunedin railway station platform to be met by his mother, the first thing she said to him was, ‘‘Tom, what have they done to your hair?’’
It was snow white.
He returned to his job as apprentice joiner for Fletchers and that is another story of bitterness.
In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the few men at Hillside Workshops allowed to work on the railway carriage that would carry the royal family around New Zealand during their visits.
He married but had no children. Perhaps this was a blessing.
He was a fierce man and my father said he, as a teenager, was scared of him when he returned from the war. I have to say I was too.
He was a man not to be crossed and I am sure a psychologist would have had an interesting case. The experiences these men had were horrific and one can understand why they did not want to revisit them and hence few talked about them.
That and the fact that their real horror stories would not have been believed anyway.