Dugouts, old wine and camel falls
In a letter to his mother, George Parsons joked that he was so accustomed to sleeping in dugouts that if he ever made it home, he would have to dig holes outside to live in.
But like thousands of others, he didn’t know whether he would be back. Parsons served the Wellington Mounted Rifles and then the Imperial Camel Corps for almost five years throughout World War I.
And he was lucky. After the war, Parsons returned to New Zealand where he would marry,
‘‘He was one of thousands of men that went and did what they had to do. He was a very ordinary man who went off to do his bit.’’
Marilyn Young
have four children, move to a Waikato farm and live to be 100.
His granddaughter, Te Awamutu-based Marilyn Young, is piecing together his time in the war, helped by postcards sent to and from his family. To his family, Parsons – who died in 1983 – rarely mentioned the scarlet fever, bland food, dirtiness and death he became accustomed to during his five years serving in Gallipoli and Egypt.
Young simply remembers him as quiet and humble with a penchant for cooking.
‘‘He was one of thousands of men that went and did what they had to do,’’ Young said. ‘‘He was a very ordinary man who went off to do his bit.
‘‘He said he didn’t know why they were fighting over [the land], said it was ‘no blanky good’. It was only sand and rocks. [That] was his sort of attitude.’’
While his time in the Mounted Rifles is well documented throughout NZ history, there’s little written about Imperial Camel Corp, Young said.
The Corp contained a mix of British, Australian and Kiwi troops using hardy camels for transport in the inhospitable terrain of the Sinai and Palestine campaigns against the Ottoman Turks. Through Parson’s accounts, some stories of the somewhat overlooked theatre of war have survived.
‘‘I grew up knowing that his only real injury was when he fell off his camel.’’
Parsons fell riding downhill in Egypt while pulling along another camel of a dead or injured soldier.
He didn’t return to the camp and his unit went looking for him. Meanwhile, an enemy plane bombed their cookhouse.
But with everybody out looking for Parsons, no one was killed.
Recently Young’s uncle told her about some old jars full of of wine her grandfather and other soldiers had found along the Dead Sea Valley while they made the risky journey to the eastern side of Jerusalem. While some jars were broken, others were stoppered, sealed with beeswax and full of drinkable wine. The wine could have been old enough for a museum, Young said.
But Kiwi to the bone – her grandfather and the other men drank it.
Young has kept a Christmas postcard fom Parson’s mother, the faded writing crammed into the corners of the postcard.
‘‘Dear George,’’ It says. ‘‘I am sending this with your cake, I wonder if you will get it. I don’t think I will wish you a Happy Christmas as I don’t know how it can be a happy one if you are still there.
‘‘I hope the cake will be alright if you get it, but if it is someone else’s luck to get it, I hope he will enjoy it.’’
She never knew whether the letters or multitude of cakes she sent would reach him alive, Young said. For thousands, they didn’t.
‘‘Some of these postcards are quite heartbreaking when you think about it.’’