Students get a lesson on trench life
They dug a trench, ate bully beef, fought a fierce battle, and boasted about their victory afterwards.
No, they weren’t WWI diggers at Gallipoli.
But they were Northern Southland College students pretending to be WWI diggers at Gallipoli, 100 years ago.
College humanities department head SeYe Chan took his year 12 humanities students to a farm in Mossburn at the weekend to recreate a battle fought by the Southland 8th infantry against the Turks in 1915.
The students had been studying the role of New Zealand in WWI, and what better way to learn than to try and live the experience, he said.
The students marched out into the paddock at the crack of dawn on Saturday and spent until 4.30pm that day digging an ANZAC-style trench which included sand bags and an enclosed dugout for the officers. They barricaded it off at the sides so it was like a fortress, Chan said.
The students ate bully beef for lunch and horse stew for dinner, and endured horizontal rain while digging the trench, Chan said.
They built the trench because they had a battle to fight from within it - against the college’s previous year 12 history class [aka the Turks] who attacked them with thousands of water balloons that night.
The 45-minute battle, which also included parents on each side, was "absolute carnage", Chan said.
But the humanities students [Anzacs], who had thousands of water balloons of their own, emerged victorious from within their 15m trench.
"The Turks ran out of ammunition," Chan said.
At the end, both sides crowded around a fire and spoke of the battle, with many fibs told.
But Chan reminded them it was not about glorifying war, it was to give them a hands-on learning experience.
"Show them what it’s like to spend all day digging a trench because your lives depend on it".