Prime Minister William Massey addresses soldiers of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company near Arras, France, on 2 July 1918

A few years ago I was passing through a small village in northern France. Inside the municipal buildings two impeccably dressed ladies, (I remember one was wearing a glittering peacock broach), manned a small information centre and gift shop. I wandered around the cavernous interior and noticed a long corridor displaying photographs from the First World War. Sepia toned young men with muddy boots and big smiles, standing outside of trenches and tunnels stared back at me. On handwritten notes beside the photographs, I saw the words ‘New Plymouth’ and ‘Christchurch’ and bizarrely ‘Bluff’. After a sceptical eyebrow raise at my attempt to ask for more information, Peacock Lady gave me a transcript in English.

I was in Arras, perhaps best known for the Battle of Arras. The photos were of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company: 400 kiwi’s, many of them West Coast miners helped create a vast network of military tunnels under the village. They burrowed under no-man’s land to blow up and destroy the German trenches above. They had named each of the tunnels after a New Zealand town. According to the Defence Force website: ‘Through the winter of 1916 as the town of Arras above was destroyed by German artillery the underground city grew large enough to accommodate 20,000 men. There was running water, electric lighting, kitchens, latrines, a light rail system and a medical centre with a fully equipped operating theatre’.

From a population of just over a million people, 103,000 New Zealand troops and nurses served overseas in 1914-1918. Of these 16,697 New Zealanders were killed and 41,317 were wounded during the war – a 58 percent casualty rate – one of the highest per capita of any country involved in the war.

The passing of Harry Patch earlier this year means there will be no veterans at today’s Armistice ceremonies. That generation has finally passed. And so it is up to us now, to remember them.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts a peace, under an English heaven.

~ Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

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