The history of New Zealand at war is largely one of ordinary people called upon in extraordinary times - men and women who left their day jobs when their country called them. In Kiwi Battlefields, Ron Palenski tells how one such man
Dick Travis knew what he and his mates were in for. He'd been out through the night in what was known as No Man's Land, that acreage of death between the two front lines. The attack was due the next morning and Travis, king of scouts, had been out for a look around, to see what would face the New Zealanders on the morrow. Now he knew.
Habitually dressed in non-regulation balaclava with bits of twigs and grass sticking out of it and with revolvers strapped to his sides like Hollywood's version of a Wild West gunslinger, Travis had crept, crawled and capered up to the German positions in what was described in the battalion history as an exhaustive reconnaissance.
The land between the lines was, Travis reported, a mass of shell-holes three parts filled with water and scattered among them were broken wire entanglements. There were also bodies, friends and foe, the cost of a failed attack two days before. With a fine downward view of this land were German blockhouses, or pillboxes as the troops knew them because of their appearance, hemmed in by coils of barbed wire, much of it nearly three metres high and varying from six to 12 metres in depth.
The Germans were between 100 and 150 metres away, with the advantage of height. Travis had a good look at them coming and going from the blockhouses, an indication that the troops used them for sleeping before taking up frontline positions.
All of this Travis reported to his battalion, adding his opinion that heavy artillery needed to be brought to bear to ease the way for the infantry. Because it was Travis, his word was accepted without question and a request went back to brigade headquarters. When nothing happened, another request went back. The artillery eventually began its crescendo of hate and subjection but only briefly and the damage was negligible.
Travis' fears were wholly justified. This was Passchendaele. This was the battle of 12 October 1917, when more New Zealanders were killed than on any other single day in the country's military history.
For the New Zealanders, Passchendaele meant the attack on the Bellevue Spur of the gently sloping Passchendaele Ridge. A week before, it had meant the Battle of Broodseinde Ridge, another spur. That battle, though costly, was regarded as a success. Bellevue Spur was a disaster.
For other Allies, Passchendaele meant other unpronounceable names on a map covering a tiny area of Flanders in southern Belgium. For them too, it was disaster.
Passchendaele, like the Somme of the year before, came to be synonymous with the horror that was the Western Front: thousands of men going over the top (or "hopping the bags" as the New Zealanders put it) into the face of a driving hail of lead from rifles and machine-guns and the indiscriminate scything white-hot metal of shrapnel from exploding shells.
Passchendaele was the ultimate in this hell on earth. Heavy rain and then persistent drizzle reduced the land, already cleared of growth by explosions, into a sea of mud, leavened only by the shell craters which provided both the rudiments of shelter but also the potential for drowning.
The artillery, so necessary to pound the barbed wire out of the way and to reduce the effectiveness of the German defences, couldn't do its job properly. The gunners sweated and cursed because they knew the price of failure. But it was not their fault.
Some guns couldn't be brought into position because horses and mules pulling them just foundered in the mud. For those that were brought up, it was difficult to establish stable firing platforms.
The official New Zealand war correspondent, Malcolm Ross, wrote: "It seemed at the time and on the spot that the troops of all divisions were being asked to attempt the impossible, and that some of the finest units on the British front were being needlessly sacrificed."
Travis went back into No Man's Land to lay a tape line to help the leading waves of infantry keep in alignment and to keep them at a safe distance from the barrage which would come over their heads and hopefully destroy the barbed wire in front of them. Travis knew what was coming.
He knew most things. His name, one of the New Zealand padres wrote of him, was known to every man in the New Zealand Division and to many an officer and man in others. He took great risks but seemed to have a charmed life. His mere presence, the padre wrote, increased the spirits of the New Zealanders.
"He reintroduced into the drab monotony of trench warfare the old spirit of adventure," he wrote. Other soldiers took to flouting regulations and copied Travis' mode of dress - the balaclava and the revolvers, and officers would turn a blind eye.
One British officer once came across Travis and was appalled at the way he looked. He dressed him down with words and tone that could have come from Eton and told Travis to go away and dress properly and report back in five minutes. Travis sauntered off while a New Zealand officer, who overheard the tirade, took the Brit aside and explained the facts of Travis' life to him. According to one of Travis' biographers, Jim Gasson, the Brit later became a keen advocate of Travis and his methods.
Travis began life in the Bay of Plenty as Dickson Cornelius Savage, but an apparent falling out with his family led to him moving to Southland as Dick Travis. There, he enlisted in the Otago Mounted Rifles and set out on his individualistic approach to war.
He served on Gallipoli but it was on the Western Front that he made his name. "No Man's Land was his home," Ross wrote of him. He lived in it night and day. He knew every sap and shell-hole, every tree and tarn in it and about it. He knew it better than he knew his own trenches and in addition he knew the methods and habits of the German soldiers as few men knew them.
Apparently, a favourite trick of Travis' was to go out and capture a German or two when an officer wanted to know the identity of troops facing them. Sometimes he'd get his prisoners, identify them and then persuade them to do a spot of stretcher bearing or trench digging for him until they could bear or dig no longer.
He was highly decorated and capped all his medals with the Victoria Cross. He was killed 24 hours after the action that won him the VC, in 1918, 10 months after Passchendaele.
Travis had survived the battle, but the war got him in the end. Many didn't get past Passchendaele. It was the lowest point for New Zealand in the war.
Extract from Kiwi Battlefields by Ron Palenski (Hodder Moa, RRP $44.99)
