It is the morning of October 12 in New Zealand.  Dawn has passed and is moving toward Europe, where on this day ninety years ago at Passchendaele, Belgium, New Zealand suffered the greatest losses in its history. 

        After an inadequate artillery bombardment that failed to cut the barbed wire or reduce the German machine gun emplacements, New Zealand and Australian soldiers climbed out of their trenches and were slaughtered.  While I was aware of the casualties New Zealand and Australia sustained in both World Wars, I was not aware of New Zealand’s losses on this particular day until a recent supplement in the NEW ZEALAND HERALD that was as fine a piece of journalism as I can recall.

        Within two hours almost a thousand New Zealand soldiers were dead.  The population of the country then was about one million, so this was one-thousandth of the total population.  It is unthinkable; it is unimaginable.  The equivalent in present day American would  be 300,000 dead men.   

        The war was already in its fourth year, but the British General Haig who ordered the attack had not learned.  From my reading of history, I long ago realized that a military ‘genius’ is a man of average intelligence whose opponent is retarded.

        The HERALD ran many photographs.  Among those most startling are three ariel views of Passchendaele taken taken in just over four months in 1917.

            June 15:  a country road leads from the foreground to the                    

            back bisecting a pretty village; one large building, probably   

            a church; many smaller ones; rows of trees boarding a     

            patchwork of neatly laid out planted fields.

            October 10.  Two days before the attack.  Bleak            

            landscape pockmarked by shell craters.  The only        

            indication of the former road is two lines of rubble from the

            buildings that once stood beside it.  Arches can still be seen

            in the sides of what was the large building.

            October 30.  Everything except for a small pile of rubble at

            the site of the large building has been obliterated. 

            Everything living thing:  every tree, every blade of grass has

            vanished.  What is left is a desolate sea of mud.

         I have often been struck by the monuments found in the South Pacific to the dead of what was once known simply as THE GREAT WAR. 

        In 1976 I wrote this about the one in Papeete, Tahiti.  It can also be found on the poetry page of the main site.

                                        Tahitian War Dead

                                on the Avenue Bruat

                                overhung by trees

                                a stone monument

                                to the Tahitians who died

                                in what we once called

                                The Great War

                                what, I thought, could possibly have made

                                you go so far to die

                                how odd

                                how truly foreign

                                it all must have seemed

                                after this

                                Flanders’ fields

                                and mud

                                and death

                                three weeks later

                                I write these words alone at sea

                                their names

                                so carefully enscribed

                                already forgotten

                                how odd I ever asked

                                I, too, a glory seeker