NZ’s march into the abyss
A dented helmet bears silent witness to one family’s ordeals. By Jessica Long.
Wellington-born Frederick Stuart Varnham picked up his diary in Ypres, Belgium and scribbled the date. It was the eve of October 12, 1917, and he was huddled in a bivvy as the rain poured down. Unbeknown to Varnham, 843 New Zealand men were about to die in a brutal, chaotic battle.
October 12 would become known as the nation’s darkest day.
Captain Varnham, 29, serving with the 3rd Wellington Battalion, signed off his diary entry, ‘‘Stung in the neck by a wasp’’.
It had only been eight days since he saw action in the Battle of Broodseinde, an attack costing 320 New Zealand lives.
The battalion was there to provide cover for an Australian assault on October 4 in ‘‘miserably cold’’ conditions as the Allies pushed towards Passchendaele, east of Ypres.
The assault began at 5.50am. Within half an hour his colonel, Claude Weston, had been wounded and Varnham took command of the Wellington troops.
His leadership of up to 700 men under heavy shelling and counterattacks earned him the Military Cross in a battle considered a ‘‘great victory’’.
By 5.30am on October 12, the rain had grown heavier, and there was ‘‘plenty of mud’’ as Varnham moved off with the troops in single file.
The grounds across the Belgium battlefields were soft and water-logged which caused guns to sink up to the axle and misfire, killing many of New Zealand’s own men.
Soldiers saw their friends caught on barbed wire and mown down by Germans in pillboxes. The bombardment of 4.5 million shells left deep holes which filled with a viscous muck that drowned men, mules and horses.
‘‘All about us are our own dead and dying, lying in the mud in the drizzling rain’’, wrote Private Neil ‘‘Monty’’ Ingram.
‘‘One saw sickening sights in that brief interval … I saw limbless men and dead men on all sides, and yet a feeling was not one of horror or fear, but simply that it was all so natural and ordinary in occurrence.’’
Varnham’s battalion moved forward to Spree Farm at 1pm but a few hours later the wasp’s sting in his neck had begun to swell.
He was ordered to leave the field and sent to Number 1 Field Ambulance where he remained for the rest of the day.
His daughter, Nancy Croad, often wondered if the insect saved her father’s life.
It was the second time he’d cheated death since signing up in 1914, she said.
He didn’t leave for Gallipoli until just after Chunuk Bair, a battle that resulted in the near-annihilation of the Wellington Battalion.
‘‘If he’d gone earlier with his regiment he probably wouldn’t have survived.’’
While Varnham was lucky, he didn’t get away unscathed. ‘‘He was wounded and gassed at one stage and spent quite a lot of time in England for treatment,’’ Croad said.
The fighting didn’t stop after Passchendaele, and after the swelling on Varnham’s neck went down, he continued on with his troops.
Three of Varnham’s future brothersin-law weren’t so lucky.
Croad’s mother, Dorothy, was one of 10 children but the Great War took her parents’ three eldest boys: Herbert Augustine Knight, 20, who died on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915; George Bernard Knight, 24, killed at Passchendaele in 1917; and William Douglas Knight, 26, who was killed in the last battle of the Somme in 1918.
Dorothy’s mother, Ellen Knight (nee McGlashan), felt her loss deeply, treasuring every letter they wrote from the field until she died in Whakatane, at the age of 93.
George was born in Dannevirke and grew up to be a great sportsman, and a leader who played the violin.
He was a farmhand at Ormondville and a clerk with the Loan and Mercantile Agency Company.
When World War I broke out, he signed up with his younger brother, Herbert. The pair fought together at Gallipoli, but the elder was left mourning when a ‘‘sharpshooter’’ struck Herbert through the heart.
His death left ‘‘the greatest sorrow that has ever happened in our family’’.
‘‘It was as great a shock to me as it would be to you,’’ he wrote.
‘‘He had only left the trench about 20 min on a volunteer job too. Volunteers were called to bury a mule killed near a hospital station and Herbert, altho [sic] he had done more than his share, volunteered.’’
George buried his brother beneath a ‘‘huge fig tree’’, near a shattered farmhouse.
On July 29, 1916, George was shot in the chest at Armentieres. He survived, but it took him a year to recover from the wounds.
Eventually, he was promoted to second lieutenant and posted to the Otago Regiment. They left for France on June 21, 1917.
On October 15 Varnham was told by a wounded man from George’s company that his future brother-in-law died three days before.
Varnham wrote to his fiancee’s family to break the news. ‘‘I cannot express how deeply I feel for you, feeling so bitterly the loss of such a good friend – more than that, a brother.’’
Croad said the conditions were so extreme, the only way George could communicate with his men was to stand up – ‘‘and so, of course, he became a target’’.
‘‘George was the one who was talked about the most in our house. He had a very quirky sense of humour which
comes out in his letters.’’
‘‘I would have loved to have had him as an uncle.’’
Croad remembers her father’s ‘‘very blue eyes’’ and light brown hair. ‘‘Stuart’’ was six-foot tall and would have been a handsome fellow, she said.
‘‘He was wonderful … a lot of fun to be around, he was a great tease..’’
When Croad was old enough, her father would take her to Anzac Day services in New Plymouth every year.
She’d walk beside him and listen to his eight medals ‘‘clink’’ away on his breast.
‘‘The night before we would do all these preparations of polishing buttons and boots. I always felt so proud.’’
Growing up in a house with a war veteran seemed normal.
As children, Croad and her sisters would play with the grenade that sat on the family’s mantelpiece.
‘‘Then we had his tin helmet which had a dint in it. He informed us it was from a grenade that had hit it ... that was used as a doorstop, oh that’s right, and his tin trunk which was always known as ‘the coffin’,’’ she said.
Croad still has her father’s miniature medals and sword, but a lot of Varnham’s war-time possessions are now in museums across the country.
He didn’t talk about the war much but would drop hints at its brutality at times when Croad was told ‘‘to be brave’’, or to stomach something gruesome.
‘‘I can remember as a child I used to ask, ‘How many Germans did you kill, dad?’, which is a pretty stupid thing for a child of about seven or eight to ask … he just sort of fobbed us off.’’
Varnham died of cancer in 1963 when he was 75 years old. His wife Dorothy, sister of the three Knight brothers killed in the Great War, died in 1980 at the age of 89.
Croad said it was important to tell the stories of the people who served in the war, so the nation remembered and learnt from it.
‘‘It’s part of our history.’’
The Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot Cemetery in Belgium carries the names of 1176 New Zealanders, including at least five sets of brothers.