A Grim Template.

Witnesses To A Massacre? The New Zealand Mounted Field Ambulance served in Sinai and Palestine in the latter years of the First World War. What connection, if any, did it have to the bloody events at Surafend? Major Alexander M. Trotter (the author’s grandfather) is seated on the right in the second row.

I DON’T BELIEVE my grandfather participated in the Surafend Massacre, but it’s possible he treated some of the wounded. He was definitely “in theatre” at the time. That is to say he was in Palestine. Riding with the New Zealand Mounted Field Ambulance and the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade alongside the Australian Light Horse. The latter two entities were up to their bloody armpits in the Surafend Massacre, but for the most part the attack was led by ordinary rank-and-file troopers – not their officers. Which is not to say that their officers didn’t look the other way when their men descended upon the little Palestinian village to avenge their mate, Trooper Lesley Lowry, tragically murdered by a Palestinian thief on 9 December 1918 – just 28 days after the war officially came to an end.

Certainly New Zealand and Australian officers remained steadfastly tight-lipped in the faces of the investigation team sent by a furious General Edmund Allenby. The British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force demanded the identities of the troopers involved in the killing of 30 Palestinian civilians. Denied even a single name, Allenby vented his spleen on the New Zealand and Australian perpetrators. He did not mince his words:

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

Allenby’s words came close to provoking a mutiny among the Australian and New Zealand troops, and he was soon forced to retract them.

The Jewish settlers of Rishon LeZion, a Zionist settlement not far from Surafend could not understand what all the fuss was about. Even in 1918 (some might say especially in 1918, barely a year since the Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a homeland in Palestine) there was no love lost between Jew and Arab.

The inhabitants of Rishon LeZion had, however, erected a memorial to the New Zealanders who had fallen twelve months earlier in the Battle of Ayun Kara. The shrewd Zionists of Rishon LeZion understood both the vital importance of freeing Palestine from Ottoman Control and how critical it was that the British Empire become the Holy Land’s new overlord. And they never forgot the New Zealanders. For many years after the First World War, the leaders of Rishon LeZion would send a Christmas message to New Zealand newspapers:

[T]he memory of the New Zealand and Australian troops, Anzac, remains carved in our hearts. You won the highest praise for your splendid valour right throughout the campaign and no less than your valour in battle was your chivalry to the people of the country.

Not a sentiment the villagers of Surafend were likely to endorse, but the Zionists of Rishon LeZion understood that the State of Israel they were so determined to build would always be in need of friends.

How disturbing it would be to discover that the destruction of Surafend by the New Zealanders and Australians in 1918 served as a grim template for what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” – those terrible days in 1948 and 1949 when Jewish militias fell upon the towns and villages of Palestinian Arabs and drove more than half-a-million of their inhabitants into exile. Without these mass expulsions – this ethnic cleansing – the State of Israel could not have been securely established.

Terror has its uses. In spite of his fury at the Surafend Massacre, General Allenby soon found it expedient to employ the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse in quelling the anti-imperialist uprisings that erupted across British-occupied Egypt in March-April of 1919. The mere prospect of receiving a visit from the General’s Surafend “murderers” was usually sufficient to quieten-down any ungrateful and unruly wards of the King-Emperor.

Did my grandfather, a country doctor for 40 years in Herbert, North Otago, listening to news bulletins on the radio receiver he’d built himself, ever recall those long ago events? He must have known about Surafend – especially after Allenby’s outburst. His copy of Lieutenant-Colonel C. Guy Powles The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine is sitting on my desk as I write these words. The “disturbance” at Surafend is described. When he heard about the bitter events of May 1948, did he recall their deadly precursor of December 1918?

What were his feelings when he read those Christmas messages from Rishon LeZion in the Otago Daily Times?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 12 May 2023.

The Grim Tutorial Of The 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic.

Forgotten Precedent: If you look hard, it is possible to locate memorials to the victims of the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic. For the most part, however, the horrors of those dreadful months were simply rolled-up with all the other bloody horrors of the war. In popular memory, these two, equally traumatic, global experiences merged into a single tragic narrative which was now – praise be to God! – over. Best not to dwell. Best not to ask too many questions. Best not to learn too many lessons.

WHY WERE SO FEW lessons learned from the deadly Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19? The current best estimate of the death toll from “Spanish Flu” (which actually originated in the United States) is 50-60 million – many times the number of people killed in the First World War. With the global population estimated at 1.8 billion in 1918, the Spanish Flu killed 3.0 percent of all the human-beings on earth. In the face of such stunning mortality, national governments might have been expected to pledge themselves to doing all within their power to prevent a recurrence. Why is it that in every city, town and village of New Zealand memorials abound to the 18,000 men who fell during the four years of the First World War, while only a handful recall the 9,000 victims who perished in just six terrifying weeks at the peak of the 1918-19 pandemic?

The answer lies in the extraordinary degree of censorship imposed upon their citizens by all the governments engaged in the First World War. In order to “maintain morale” on “the home front” it was considered vital to shield the families and friends of the men in the trenches from the realities of industrialised warfare. Great Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, famously told a journalist friend: “If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

That they were required to post casualty lists numbering in the tens-of-thousands was bad enough. Belligerent governments (including our own) were absolutely determined to keep the soldiers’ loved ones in blissful ignorance of the way their sons, brothers and husbands had died – and of how little was gained by their sacrifice.

As the death-toll mounted and the horrors of the war multiplied, political and military leaders found themselves holding a tiger by the tail. They had kept so much hidden, from so many, for so few tangible gains, that they had no option but to keep hiding the truth from their respective peoples. To make their job easier they cultivated an atmosphere of extreme intolerance for any behaviour or expression capable of being construed as dissent or disloyalty. Those found guilty of opposing the war (future New Zealand prime ministers among them) were imprisoned. Kiwi conscientious objectors – most famously Archibald Baxter – suffered the infamous tortures of “Field Punishment No. 1”.

It was into this fraught environment that an avian variety of influenza crossed the species barrier into pigs, and then into humans, on a Kansas farm early in 1918. “Patient Zero” was an infected farm boy who carried the virus with him to military training camp, from whence it travelled with infected troops to the battlefields of France and Belgium. In a terrifyingly short period of time it had been carried back into the home countries of the infected soldiers. The death toll rose relentlessly and exponentially: the virus killed hundreds, then thousands, then millions.

And the authorities deliberately muted their official response. In Britain and its empire especially, which was staring down the barrel of a German victory in the early months of 1918, the political and military leaders were desperate to keep any suggestion that, back home, their loved ones were falling like ninepins from their fighting men. With revolution raging in Russia, Allied politicians were in no mood to allow the Bolshevik “virus” to spread.

In frightening anticipation of the policy of the current British government, the pandemic was simply allowed to “let rip” among Britain’s helpless and unprotected population. Perhaps the most tragic moment came on Armistice Day, the 11 November 1918, when hundreds of thousands of citizens were permitted to gather in the streets, hugging and kissing, to celebrate the war’s end. It is difficult to imagine a more effective way of hastening the virus’s spread!

Obviously, local measures were taken to keep people safe, but with censorship still in place, the pandemic had burned itself out before its worldwide impact was generally comprehended. Everyone the virus could get had been gotten, there was no one left to infect.

Tragically, the appalling decisions of New Zealand politicians and military administrators, both at home and in our newly acquired colony of “German Samoa”, allowed the virus to come ashore and do its deadly work. The ship returning William Massey, New Zealand’s prime minister, from Europe had reported the infection on board but was, astonishingly, allowed to dock. No one, seemingly, had the courage to order the PM placed under quarantine. The New Zealand military officer “in charge” of Samoa, was similarly informed that there was sickness aboard an arriving vessel. He, too, permitted its passengers to disembark. The virus swept across western Samoa, killing upwards of a quarter of the territory’s native population.

If you look hard, it is possible to locate the burial sites of the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic’s victims. Row upon row of tiny gravestones, or, verdant swards of cemetery lawn marking mass graves. Very occasionally, there is a larger memorial. The reality, however, is that the horrors of the pandemic were simply rolled-up with all the other bloody horrors of the war. People were encouraged to merge these two, equally dreadful, global experiences into a single tragic narrative which was now – praise be to God! – over. Best not to dwell. Best not to ask too many questions. Best not to learn too many lessons.

And yet, some lessons were learned. In 1920 the Health Organisation of the League of Nations was formed, building upon the rather haphazard pre-war efforts to co-ordinate the international fight against deadly diseases. In 1948, following a second, even more appalling global conflict, the now defunct League’s Health Organisation morphed into the World Health Organisation (WHO) of the newly former United Nations. It is no accident that one of the core principles of the WHO is the early, accurate and comprehensive communication of “outbreak” data across the planet.

Political and military reluctance to rapidly and truthfully acknowledge, and then take steps to combat, outbreaks of highly infectious and deadly disease, as happened at the end of the First World War, is every bit as dangerous to public health as the deadliest virus. Such is the grim tutorial from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19. It is to be hoped that the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States – and New Zealand – are paying close attention.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 March 2020.

A Diet Of Lies.

Imperial Beast: Very few New Zealanders ever grasped what the rest of the world saw when it looked upon the British Empire: a huge blood-smeared lion whose sharp teeth and vicious claws struck terror into the hearts of all those too weak to resist them.

WE HAVE JUST CONCLUDED four years of commemorating the First World War. What amazed me about all that official amplification of 100 year-old echoes is how little new information it contained. As is the case with Sir Peter Jackson’s stunning colourisation and all-round technical enhancement of First World War film footage, we have learned nothing that we did not know before. Our troops wore khaki uniforms. Their buttons were made of brass. They sang as they marched. In a strange way, by being stripped of their black-and-white historical dignity, they have been rendered ordinary: indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the here-and-now. They look and sound like extras in one of Sir Peter’s movies.

Perhaps it was always so with official attempts to appropriate the past? To dress contemporary problems in antique costumes and pack the past’s dialogue with all the lies our masters would like us to mistake for history.

It is a task which, tragically, is becoming easier with every passing decade. Reading some of the comments to Mike Treen’s latest post, I was astounded by the number of readers who had no idea of what was happening in 1918. They were clearly astonished by Mike’s snapshot of the dramatic events which drove the Allied and Central Powers to sign the Armistice of 11/11. But, then, why shouldn’t they be astonished? The “official” commemorative programme did not appear to regard the revolutionary wave washing across Europe in 1917-18 as in any way relevant to the War’s end.

Those same officials were even more determined to keep from New Zealanders living at 100 years remove from the First World War just how authoritarian the government of their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ was. Far better to simply go on insisting that the young men fighting and dying in far-off Gallipoli, Flanders and Palestine were engaged in advancing the cause of freedom, justice and democracy. Informing young Kiwis that their forebears were actually fighting to secure for Great Britain the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East might cause them to ask – given the number of wars (some quite recent) that have been fought for the same prize – whether it was worth the sacrifice of 18,000 young New Zealanders.

The historians’ problem is that they assume that everyone knows the story when, as Mike’s post makes clear, hardly anybody understands what actually happened 100 years ago. How the fighting ships of Great Britain, the world’s greatest naval power, had made the transition from coal (of which the British had plenty) to oil (of which the British had none). How the Brits key oil supplier, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, had suddenly become vulnerable to the intertwined military and economic ambitions of the German and Ottoman Empires. How the rapidly expanding German High Seas Fleet and the proposed Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway convinced the Foreign and Colonial Office that the Germans had to be stopped. How the British Government could have prevented the outbreak of war in 1914 – but chose not to. How the big losers of the First World War were, you guessed it, Germany and the Ottomans. How Great Britain’s new best friends in the Middle East all just happened to live on top of a sea of oil.

And it’s still going on. New Zealand, whose Governor-General, Lord Liverpool, declared war on Germany in 1914 without bothering to consult the NZ House of Representatives, remains a loyal member of the Anglo-Saxon “Club”. (John Key’s term for the “Five Eyes” security pact linking  Britain’s ‘white empire’: The UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; with that other great Anglo-Saxon power, the United States of America.)

The great disadvantage of being a member of the Anglo-Saxon Club is that it makes it practically impossible for most New Zealanders to see their country and its allies for what they are – imperialist bullies.

The present Coalition Government has made much of the “danger” China poses to the micro-states of the South Pacific. So much so that our Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, has declared the need for a “Pacific Re-set”. Exactly why the presence of China should pose a danger to the peoples of the South Pacific, while the ongoing presence of its former imperial and colonial powers does not, is never explained. It is simply assumed that “we” are the good-guys and the Chinese are the bad guys.

No one asks the question: Is it appropriate that Australia is essentially re-colonising Papua-New Guinea? Or wonders why the Australians have turned the tiny tropical state of Nauru into a sweltering island prison for Middle Eastern refugees, utterly destroying its democratic institutions in the process.

Most New Zealanders remain blissfully unaware that 100 years ago the New Zealand military occupation force of what had been German Samoa allowed a ship carrying the deadly influenza virus to dock in Apia. Or that, over the course of the next few weeks, that criminally negligent decision led to the death of fully one quarter of the inhabitants of the western half of Samoa. Or that, a few years later, New Zealand soldiers shot down unarmed Samoans demanding their country’s independence from New Zealand colonial rule.

We forget that both the British and the Americans, the good guys, held the Pacific peoples in such high regard that they turned their home islands into test sites for their atomic and hydrogen bombs. The radioactive fallout from these atmospheric tests poisoned the Pacific environment – along with the peoples who lived off its fruit, root vegetables and fish.

Such is the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the South Pacific. And yet “we” are not perceived to be a “danger” to its peoples. Rather it is the Chinese: a nation which has seized no colonies; created no pandemics; and exploded no nuclear devices in this part of the world who are considered “dangerous”. The country that kept New Zealand prosperous through the Global Financial Crisis is slowly but surely being transformed into our enemy, while the country that has imposed tariffs on our steel and which demands that we endanger our own health by dismantling Pharmac, is hailed as our “very, very, very good friend”.

One hundred years ago, New Zealand was a small but vigorous limb of the great heraldic beast known as the British Empire. Being so, we were able to see only the great heraldic beasts identified as our enemies: the German and Austrian eagles; the Ottoman’s crescent moon and star. Having laid them low, we hailed our victory as a good thing. Very few New Zealanders ever grasped what the rest of the world saw when it looked upon the British Empire: a huge blood-smeared lion whose sharp teeth and vicious claws struck terror into the hearts of all those too weak to resist them.

Perhaps it is time for New Zealanders to give up their diet of imperial lies and learn, at last, how to digest the truth?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 November 2018.

What We “Don’t Know And Can’t Know” – The Truth About World War I.

World War I: The Glorious Version: The Battle of Le Quesnoy was New Zealand's last engagement of World War I. The battle's most famous image, depicting Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill stepping out on to the ramparts, revolver in hand, perpetuates the notion that war is a noble and manly enterprise. The censors were happy to let the image pass. What the New Zealand public were not permitted to see, however, were images of the utter slaughter that was the Western Front.

ON THE ELEVENTH HOUR, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, 2018 – this Sunday – we will celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. It is Armistice with a capital “A” because this was the historic ceasefire, negotiated by representatives of both the Allied and the Central Powers, which caused the guns to fall silent. With the coming into effect of the Armistice at 11:00 hours, 11 November 1918, the world-shattering conflict that would come to be known as World War I finally ground to its end.

The past fortnight has been notable for the amount of media attention devoted to a relatively insignificant incident which took place during the final phase of the decisive allied offensive that knocked Germany out of the war.

The taking of Le Quesnoy, by elements of the New Zealand Division, on 4 November 1918, was unquestionably a moment of great gallantry and humanity. By scaling the fortified town’s massive walls, the New Zealanders obviated the need for the artillery bombardment by which the capture of so many other German-occupied towns and villages had been effected. Small wonder that the citizens of Le Quesnoy still fete the rescuers of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Small wonder that the Germans laid down their arms and surrendered to them. When, just a week later, the war ended, thousands of human-beings were still breathing who, in the normal course of that terrible conflict, would have been dead. It is a wonderful story and well worth remembering.

But what happened at Le Quesnoy is about as far from typical of the fighting in World War I as it is possible to get. For a start, the New Zealand Division was advancing: moving forward through the French countryside in a fashion which had become tactically impossible just a few weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. For most of the war a vast defensive line, stretching all the way from the English Channel to the Swiss border, had been transformed into an obscene meat-grinder into which the flower of European manhood had been fed by commanders who had no idea how to wage industrialised warfare without shedding veritable lakes of human blood.

The most famous image of the Battle of Le Quesnoy: that of Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill stepping out on to the ramparts, revolver in hand, perpetuates the notion that war is a noble and manly enterprise. The censors were happy to let the image pass. What the New Zealand public were not permitted to see, however, were images of the utter slaughter that was Passchendaele. The bodies ripped to pieces by shrapnel; the grey-green corpses barely visible in the all-conquering mud. These obscenities, grimly typical of the rapacious imperialist conflict, are still considered unfit for general consumption.

World War I: The Reality 

In 1917, Britain’s wartime leader, David Lloyd George, told the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P Scott: “If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

The tragedy of the past four years is that, for the most part, the politicians and propagandists of 2014-2018 appear to share Lloyd George’s breath-taking cynicism. Whether it be Sir Peter Jackson’s larger than life heroes; or the fusillade of revisionist war histories unleashed by military writers determined to gun down the comic accuracy of the final Blackadder series; allowing the people to know the truth about World War I seems to be as impossible as ever.

Instead, New Zealanders are treated to the wicked conflation of the humanity and valour of the men who took Le Quesnoy with the purposes of the war itself. The conflict in which so many young New Zealanders perished was not conducted in the name of humanity, but in the name of the King-Emperor – whose representative, Lord Liverpool, announced this country’s participation from the steps of the General Assembly Library, without the slightest reference to the wishes of the people’s parliamentary representatives.

Moreover, as the butcher’s bill grew the supply of volunteers dried up and the gaping holes in New Zealand’s lines after Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele were filled with conscripts. What could New Zealand have become if those 18,000 young men who died – had lived?

That is the truly obscene cost of World War I: its opportunity cost. The future that might have been.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 November 2018.

The Kiwi Connection In Palestine.

New Zealand's Collective Punishers: “I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.” - Major-General Sir Edmund Allenby addressing New Zealand and Australian troops after the Surafend Massacre, December 1918.

I DON’T KNOW which is more embarrassing: to have a lawyer called Trotter defending a woman who prostituted her own daughter; or a PhD history candidate called Trotter “Exploring the Kiwi connection as Israel turns70”.

On balance, I’d have to say that the PhD history candidate is the more embarrassing of the two. That our justice system goes out of its way to ensure that every accused person is provided with effective legal representation is something of which we should all be proud. So, I doff my hat to Karl Trotter for his defence of the indefensible. To Sheree Trotter, however, I have only questions to offer – not the least of which is: How could a PhD history candidate’s description of Israel’s “Kiwi connection” not include the moving ceremony at Rishon LeZion and the brutal massacre at Surafend?

Rishon LeZion (The First of Zion) was one of those settlements involved in what was, rather quaintly, referred to as, “the upbuilding of Palestine”. On 4 November 1917, New Zealand troops had participated in the Battle of Ayun Kara, located very close to Rishon LeZion. Twelve months later, the leader of the Zionist settlement invited the New Zealanders (who were still encamped close by) to a commemorative ceremony.

The small Jewish community had erected an obelisk in memory of the New Zealanders who fell at Ayun Kara, and its Mayor had prepared a speech:

“These dead have not only fought for their country, they have planted the flag of justice and lit the torch of liberty. Its light will never be extinguished. You have placed marking stones along the route to the future. These markers, formed by your tombs, will cause those who come after to meditate: ‘It is just about a thousand years’ they will say, ‘since, on this very soil, Western lords came with the sacred flame of religion and in the name of the Cross to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. And now, after long delay, these same children of the West have come again in their thousands, glowing with ardour, animated by the thirst for liberty, justice, and fraternity, to liberate the same country from the yoke it has borne for nearly five centuries.”

Stirring words – and they clearly left a deep impression on the Kiwis. Because, just over a month after the ceremony at Rishon LeZion, on 10 December 1918, animated no doubt by their thirst for “liberty, justice and fraternity” troopers of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, backed by their comrades in the Australian Light Horse, inflicted a gruesome collective punishment upon the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Surafend.

The night before, in the course of a botched robbery, a Palestinian Arab had shot and killed a New Zealand soldier, Trooper Leslie Lowry. The offender had been tracked back to Surafend and the Kiwis ordered the villagers to hand him over for punishment. When the villagers refused, the Kiwis and their Aussie mates, some 200 men altogether, marched the women and children out of the village and then proceeded to attack the men and boys who remained.

Their weapons of choice were pick-axe handles and the heavy, canvass-sheathed chains used to haul supply wagons and field guns. They swung these with deadly effect against the Arab defenders. By the time the Kiwi and Aussie troopers marched out of Surafend, by now a smoking ruin, more than 40 Palestinian Arabs had been killed or wounded.

The massacre had taken place in defiance of the Brigade’s commanders and with the connivance of more than a few junior officers. The Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force – the occupier of Palestine following the cessation of hostilities – Major-General Edmund Allenby, was furious. Forming the ANZAC’s into a hollow square he unleashed a tongue-lashing the like of which no British or Empire troops had heard for many, many years:

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

This outburst aroused such mutinous resentment among the New Zealand and Australian troops that Allenby was soon forced to retract his words. In the weeks ahead, as the British tightened their grip on the former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, they would have need of that ANZAC muscle. When the New Zealand and Australian troopers were ordered into action against protesting Arab nationalists, the dreadful reputation they had fashioned for themselves at Surafend rode ahead of them.

Thus, was the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, given effect. Such, was the Kiwi connection with one of the earliest Zionist communities in Palestine. That sorrow-filled stretch of earth which would, forty years later, become the State of Israel.

The lesson imparted by those murderous Kiwi and Australian soldiers on the night of 10 December 1918 – that Palestinian Arabs could be collectively punished with impunity – was one the Zionists never forgot.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 24 April 2018.

New Zealand’s First “Revenge Raid” – Surafend, Palestine, 1918.

Troopers of the NZ Machine Gun Squadron, NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade, Palestine, 1918.

 

The shocking events described by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson in Hit and Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the Meaning of Honour are not without precedent in the history of New Zealand’s military engagements overseas. In the tiny Palestinian village of Surafend, in the final days of 1918, New Zealand troops participated in what was indisputably a serious war crime. The parallels with the SAS “Revenge Raid” of August 2010 are striking. The Surafend Massacre was also sparked by the killing of a New Zealand soldier. It, too, was a  murderous “fiasco”, the details of which were kept from the New Zealand public for many years. This, as best as I can determine, is what happened.

 

 

THE WAR WAS OVER. At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month 1918, the fighting ceased. For the men of the New Zealand Machine Gun Squadron, and all the other troopers of the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade encamped among the barren sandhills of central Palestine, that single fact was all that mattered.

 

But, as the weeks passed, the war’s end, while obviously a source of immense relief, had also become the cause of intense frustration. Now that their job was done; now that the killing had stopped; now that they had survived; all these men wanted to do was go home.

 

 

WHEN Trooper Leslie Lowry pulled his kit-bag under his head on the night of 9 December 1918 it was to home that his thoughts inevitably wandered. Wrapped in his blanket to ward off the late autumn chill, he lay motionless beneath the low canvass ceiling of his tent thinking of New Zealand until, lulled by the companionable snorting of the tethered horses, he drifted off to sleep.

 

An hour later he awoke with a start to feel his kit-bag/pillow being unceremoniously yanked from under his head. He scrambled out of the tent, stumbling in the sand as he pulled on his trousers, and shouting at the top of his voice to the men on sentry duty:

 

“Stop him! Stop that little bastard – he’s stolen my kit-bag!”

 

The thief was clearly visible in the moonlight, weaving in and out of the thorn bushes that dotted the sandhills.

 

Trooper Lowry had always been a good runner and he proved it now by sprinting after his quarry like a huntaway. Within seconds he’d caught up with the man who’d stolen his property.

 

“You give that back – you thieving little swine!”

 

For a moment the New Zealander and the Palestinian faced each other, breathing heavily. In the distance both of them could hear the shouts of the alerted sentries and the alarmed whinnying of the horses.

 

“Come on mate,” said Lowry, speaking in what he hoped was a more reasonable tone, “you’re not going anywhere. Hand it over.”

 

The Palestinian said nothing. Instead, he reached into the folds of his caftan and pulled out a heavy Webly revolver, retrieved six months earlier from the corpse of a British officer. Pointing it at the New Zealander’s chest – he fired.

 

Lowry sank slowly to his knees, hands fluttering uselessly as blood spouted from the neat little hole in his chest, pouring out through his fingers and down over his bare stomach. Without a word he toppled over onto his side, an awkward, quivering bundle in the cold sand.

 

The Palestinian turned and ran off into the darkness.

 

 

THE news of trooper Lowry’s death spread rapidly – and its effect was devastating. For a man to have come through everything the NZ Mounted Rifles had endured, only to be murdered by an Arab thief just weeks before sailing for home, was almost too much for his comrades to bear.

 

“He was unarmed for Christ’s sake! The thief must have seen that. What kind of man calmly shoots an unarmed man, at point-blank range, for the sake of a bloody kit-bag?”

 

“We’re not going to take this lying down – I don’t care what the Heads say. This is too bloody much. Come on you blokes, it should be easy enough to track the bastard through all this sand. Look! – there are his footprints!

 

“You three, go back and round up the rest of the Squadron – and see if you can get some of the Aussies from the Light Horse to join us. We’re going to track this murdering bastard back to the hole he came from and cork it up tight. Make sure he’s still there in the morning when the Red-Caps arrive.”

 

The thief’s footprints led the New Zealanders and their Australian allies across the sand to the nearby Palestinian village of Surafend. Within the hour they had set up a tight military cordon around the cluster of stone houses: no one was permitted to enter or leave.

 

 

THE morning light came slanting down into the village of Surafend and illuminated the faces of the New Zealand and Australian troopers encircling it. But the rising sun brought no Military Police. Indeed, having being informed of the murder of Trooper Lowry and the situation at Surafend by the Australian and New Zealand Divisional Commander, Major-General Edward Chaytor, General Headquarters had peremptorily ordered the cordon lifted. There would be no official investigation, no Red Caps, no arrests. By the afternoon of 10 December all the troopers who had surrounded Surafend were back behind their tent-lines, allowing a steady stream of Palestinian men to make their way out of the village without hindrance.

 

Trooper Lowry’s comrades were furious.

 

“I don’t believe this – I simply don’t believe this! How can the bloody British just sit there, knowing that a soldier of the Empire has been murdered, and do nothing about it?”

 

“You know the Heads. There’ll be some behind-the-scenes skulduggery between the British and that Arab king Lawrence has been squiring around. The last thing they want is any ‘unpleasantness’ – nothing to upset the ‘delicate diplomacy’ between His Majesty’s Government and the leaders of the Arab tribes. What’s one Kiwi digger’s life compared to ‘the future of the Middle East?’”

 

“It’s just like that bloody fiasco at Ain Es Sir – remember? When our lot were sent back to help the Circassians and the ungrateful little bastards ambushed us. Nobody did anything about the men they killed there either.”

 

“Well that’s not going to happen this time. I’ve been talking to the men. They’re ready to do something on their own. And there’s a swag of blokes in the Light Horse who’ll join us. The Aussies are as sick of this turning a blind eye to theft and murder as we are. I hear there’s even a few Brits willing to do their bit.”

 

“Do what?”

 

“We’re going to pay the village of Surafend a little visit. And if they refuse to hand over the bastard who shot Les, we’ll administer some justice of our own – ANZAC-style.”

 

 

THERE was fear in the eyes of the women, children and old men of Surafend as they were assembled in front of the village well. These strange men from distant lands said little, but their gestures were clear enough. Holding the pick-axe handles they were carrying with both hands, they pushed and prodded the little huddle in the direction they wanted them to travel – out of the village and up into the sandhills. One of the old men pleaded with his grim shepherds.

 

“We are friends,” he cried in heavily accented English, “friends of the British.”

 

“You may be friends of the British,” hissed one of the troopers, pushing the old man back into the huddle, “but you’re no friends of ours.”

 

“Keep them well back!” Someone shouted. “Well back.”

 

From the crest of the big sandhill overlooking Surafend, the little huddle watched as around 200 troopers closed in on their homes. In addition to pick-axe handles, the New Zealanders and Australians were armed with the heavy, canvass-sheathed chains used to haul supply wagons and field guns. They were eerily silent, and the expressions their faces wore were hard – very hard.

 

“We want the man who shot Trooper Leslie Lowry.” The leader of the troopers was speaking slowly and very clearly to the village headman. “We tracked him to this village. If he’s not here, we want to know where we can find him. Lead us to him, now, and nothing will happen to you and your people. Refuse, and ….” The trooper cast a meaningful glance at the mute formation drawn up behind him.”

 

The Palestinian looked into the eyes of the New Zealander standing before him. Neither man moved a muscle. Then, drawing himself up to his full height, the headman leaned forward to within a few inches of the New Zealander’s face, and speaking in a clear voice so all the men of his village could hear, he said:

 

“Get your infidel dogs out of my village!”

 

And spat in the trooper’s face.

 

A roar, deep and guttural, leapt from the throats of all the men present, and both sides lunged towards the other. The troopers swung their pick-axe handles high and brought them down with deadly force. The heavy chains hissed and whistled. The air was filled with the sickening sound of wood and metal connecting with human bone and tissue. Men screamed, fell, and lay still, but still the Palestinians continued to hurl themselves upon the troopers.

 

“Allahu Akbar! They cried. “God is Great!”

 

“Get them! Get the bastards!” Shouted the troopers.

 

From a distance it was all-too-clear how the fight would end. The villagers were outnumbered and the troopers superior training and discipline easily overcame their furious resistance. Slowly, methodically, the New Zealanders and the Australians beat and beat and beat. The pick-axe handles rising and falling like some vast threshing machine.

 

Soon the village was ablaze. The contents of the stone-walled houses burned fiercely, bathing the whole scene in a lurid glow. As their men fell, the women up on the sandhill began a high keening. The children, seeing the fathers and brothers being beaten to death, sobbed uncontrollably.

 

By the time the troopers tired of their grim sport, thirty Palestinian men lay dead or wounded on the bloody sand. As the rising wind swirled the smoke and cinders into the night sky, the New Zealanders and Australians formed up in ranks and, without a backward glance, marched out into the darkness of the sandhills.

 

The village of Surafend had ceased to exist.

 

 

NO New Zealand or Australian soldier was ever charged as a result of the Surafend Massacre. The British High Command was furious at what could only be considered a diplomatic disaster in terms of the British Empire’s relations with the Arab peoples.

 

The borders of the Middle East were in the process of being redrawn, and the gentlemen at the Foreign and Colonial Office in London were determined that this process should not rebound to the Empire’s disadvantage.

 

There can be little doubt that the military authorities would very much have liked to punish the ringleaders, but the troopers and the junior officers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse closed ranks against all investigation.

 

In the end it was left to the British Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Edmund Allenby, to state the views of His Majesty’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Forming the ANZAC’s into a hollow square he unleashed a tongue-lashing the like of which no British or Empire troops had heard for many, many years:

 

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

 

This outburst aroused such mutinous resentment among the New Zealand and Australian troops that Allenby was soon forced to retract his words.

 

It was a necessary concession because with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the US President, Woodrow Wilson’s, promise of “self-determination” for the world’s subject peoples, the British soon had their hands full keeping the Arab population of the region from breaking out into full scale rebellion. In this task the brutal reputation of the Australian and New Zealand troopers rode before them, striking fear into the hearts of the Arab population wherever they appeared.

 

 

UNFORTUNATELY, there was no Nicky Hager, no Jon Stephenson, to write an exhaustive account of the Surafend tragedy for the New Zealand public of 1918. Bill Massey’s deeply authoritarian government, having expended the blood of thousands of young New Zealanders in the cause of Britain’s empire, was not about to sanction a full and independent investigation into a war crime perpetrated by his own troops. As far as Massey’s stridently imperialistic government was concerned, the “boys” of the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade were heroes – blameless heroes.

 

The closest “official” New Zealand ever came to acknowledging the Surafend Massacre was in the bare summary of the event written by, Lieutenant-Colonel C. Guy Powles, author of The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine, the third volume of the Official History of New Zealand’s Effort in the Great War, published by the New Zealand Government in 1922.

 

Of the bloody evening of 10 December 1918, Powles writes:

 

“While the brigade was camped in the vicinity of Richon le Zion a disturbance occurred in the divisional area following the murder of a New Zealander, during which a village and an Arab camp were burned and some 30 Arabs killed and injured ….. It appears that the murdered man’s comrades, feeling aggrieved that the murderer was not immediately brought to book, went to the village and demanded his surrender. They were met by an insolent answer from the head man of the village so they determined to find him and the searching of the houses led to a collision with the natives which resulted in a riot.”

 

Powles also notes, drily: “[A]t the [subsequent] inquiry it was found impossible to get any evidence as to who took part in the disturbance.”

 

Then, as now, the New Zealand military authorities preferred to bury their mistakes beneath a crushing mountain of official silence.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 22 March 2017.

“Better Now Than Later!” – Nato Deploys 4,000 Additional Troops To Eastern Europe.

A Demonstration Of Strength? Is Nato's decision to deploy an additional four battalions (approximately 4,000 troops) to Poland and the Baltic States a demonstration of strength: a firm “don’t mess with even the smallest of our member states”, directed at the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin; or yet further evidence of the West’s rising levels of anti-Russian paranoia?

 

THE MOMENTS OF MAXIMUM PERIL, diplomatically-speaking, are seldom the consequence of excessive strength. Strong states have little reason to fear their neighbours. It is, rather, perceptions of national decline and diminishing military strength that spur national elites towards diplomatic recklessness – and war.

 

How, then, should we interpret the news that in May 2017 the Nato alliance will be deploying an additional four battalions (approximately 4,000 troops) to Poland and the Baltic States? Is it a demonstration of strength: a firm “don’t mess with even the smallest of our member states”, directed at the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin; or yet further evidence of the West’s rising levels of anti-Russian paranoia?

 

On the face of it, Nato remains a very strong alliance – especially in relation to the military capability of the Russian Federation. According to an article authored by Ian Shields of Anglia Ruskin University and published in The Independent of 28 May 2016: “NATO is significantly larger than Russia in simple numbers: NATO has a total of 3.6m personnel in uniform, Russia 800,000; NATO 7,500 tanks, Russia 2,750; NATO 5,900 combat aircraft, Russia 1,571.”

 

But numbers aren’t everything, it’s what you do with them that counts. At the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, the French Emperor’s, Napoleon Bonaparte’s, Grande Armée of 67,000 men outmanoeuvred and decisively defeated a combined Austrian and Russian force of 85,000. Imagination, daring and superior strategic thinking continue to play a vital role in diplomatic and military encounters.

 

In this respect the Russian leader has proved himself more than match for his European rivals. His willingness to use military force, both to advance and defend his country’s strategic interests, has reduced Nato to playing repeated games of catch-up and bluster. For the West’s political leadership Putin’s successes have been galling enough. For Nato’s generals, however, Russia’s strategic application of force has been a personal and professional humiliation. They are hungry for revenge.

 

The decision to deploy an additional 4,000 troops to Russia’s western borders has been undertaken in an attempt to both intimidate and deter Putin from contemplating a lightning-fast repossession of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Nato knows that Russia’s massive army could roll over the Baltic states in a matter of hours. Its purpose in stationing troops there is not to halt any Russian advance, but to require Russia’s soldiers to engage American, British and Canadian troops on their way to the Baltic shore.

 

Applying the same process of cold deliberation that he used in relation to Georgia, the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Putin must decide whether this “Cross the Latvian border and start World War III” threat is real, or just another example of Nato bluster. The generals may be willing to incinerate the world for Latvian independence, but what about the peoples of Western Europe? And, how willing would a President Trump, or Clinton, be to invite their own people’s annihilation by authorising a nuclear strike against Russia?

 

In Trump’s case, Putin is reasonably confident that the nuclear codes will not be activated for the Baltic States. He cannot be so sure about the hawkish Hillary Clinton. That being the case, it is not difficult to understand why Putin is deploying his cyber warriors against the Democratic Party’s candidate. It is just one more demonstration of Putin’s strategic daring – and yet another example of the West’s inability to come up with an effective response.

 

It is often argued (by the winners of World War I) that Germany was only willing to risk war with Russia in 1914 because its generals knew that given a few more years, and a few more French loans, the Russian “steamroller” would be utterly unstoppable. “If war is going to come in any case”, they are said to have reasoned, “better now than later.”

 

There are alarming echoes of these grim calculations in Nato’s most recent deployment. Faced with economic stagnation, diminishing military budgets, and increasingly restive populations, have the generals of Europe – and Britain in particular – come to the same doom-laden conclusion as the German General Staff of 1914.

 

“If we wait, then in a few years Nato will be both militarily and politically incapable of stopping Putin and the Russians from reconstituting their lost empire. Better now than later!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 21 September 2016.

Only Anger: Thoughts On Anzac Day 2016.

The First World War: A crime so colossal that it simply overpowered the imaginations of those who lived through it and after it.

 

IF YOU WERE ASKED”: What emotion is appropriate for Anzac Day? How would you answer?  Pride? Respect? Gratitude? My answer has always been, and continues to be, Anger. Bitter, searing, righteous anger at the waste of so many young lives, and at the lies told to justify a crime so colossal that it simply overpowered the imaginations of those who lived through it and after it.

 

For more than a hundred years those lies have transformed the terrible losses of the First World War into a perverse source of pride, respect and gratitude. Not only have they kept the truth about the war’s origins and objectives hidden, but they have also made it practically impossible to challenge the official version of events. This is no small achievement when the consequences of those events are still shaping our lives.

 

At the heart of the darkness that sent millions of young men to their deaths was Great Britain’s determination to destroy the thriving German economy and seize the strategic resources of the decrepit Ottoman Empire.

 

Unchecked, the German economy would have dominated the whole of Europe by the second or third decade of the twentieth century (much as it dominates Europe today). Even more worryingly, the German Empire’s increasingly close economic, diplomatic and military relationship with the Ottoman Empire would have ensured its privileged access to the strategic super-fuel of the twentieth century – oil. From the early years of the century, therefore, the reduction of Germany became the idée fixe of British foreign-policy.

 

Great Britain’s natural ally in this policy was France. Decisively defeated by the Germans in 1871, France was acutely aware that its influence in Europe was steadily being eroded by Germany’s dramatic economic growth. It’s only hope of remaining a major player in world affairs was, therefore, to strike its neighbour a crushing blow.

 

France’s key strategic problem, however, was that it could not deliver such a blow on its own – it needed allies. The first of these, the Russian Empire, was made available by the German Emperor, Wilhelm II’s, failure to renew his country’s crucial Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. The French were only too happy to fill the diplomatic vacuum created by the German Emperor’s strategic blunder.

 

This new Franco-Russian “understanding” suited British interests extremely well. Not only was Germany now faced with a war on two fronts, but, by drawing the Russians towards Europe, the French were relieving Russian pressure on the borders of the “jewel” in Britain’s imperial crown – India.

 

All that Britain required to unleash a devastating conflict upon its most dangerous economic rival was a plausible pretext. This it acquired by allowing the French and the Russians a free hand in the Balkans.

 

Europe’s flashpoint, the Balkans were the point of intersection of multiple imperial interests: Austro-Hungarian; Russian; Ottoman; and Serbian. Any move by the Austro-Hungarian Empire against its ultra-nationalist neighbour, Serbia, was bound to draw in the latter’s Russian protectors. A Russian thrust against Germany’s ally, Austria-Hungary, would, likewise, draw Germany into the conflict. German involvement would activate the Franco-Russian alliance – immediately plunging Germany into a strategically perilous two-front war.

 

Britain knew that if Germany was to avoid being caught between the French hammer and the Russian anvil, it would have to deliver a knockout blow to the French before the full weight of Russia’s vast army could be brought to bear on its eastern front. The only effective means of delivering such a blow was to direct Germany’s army through neutral Belgium and come at Paris from the north-west.

 

In other words, to enter the war with “clean hands”, Britain had only to give France its head in the Balkans. It was pretty sure that the French, with Russian connivance, would find a way to set Austria-Hungary at Serbia’s throat – thereby initiating a general European war. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in the little Bosnian town of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Serbian terrorists proved to be an admirably serviceable trigger.

 

Once the Germans detected the preparations for a Russian mobilisation against not only their Austro-Hungarian ally, but also themselves, the die was cast. Germany mobilised pre-emptively, her armies smashed their way through neutral Belgium, and Britain was supplied with the morally unassailable excuse for doing what she had been planning to do for the best part of a decade – unleashing war on Germany.

 

It was in pursuit of these blunt imperial objectives that more than 12,000 young New Zealanders were sent to their deaths. Not for democracy: our allies, the Russians, were governed by an absolute monarch; and our enemies, the Germans, boasted a more inclusive franchise that Britain’s. And certainly not for freedom: imperialism and liberty do not mix. As for the “values” New Zealanders were supposedly defending on the slopes of Gallipoli. I’d like to think that these: extreme racism, unthinking obedience to those in authority; and the extension of British power across the globe; would be rejected out-of-hand by the vast majority of modern New Zealanders.

 

As I note in, No Left Turn:

 

A patriotic painting from the depths of the war says it all. Entitled “The Casualty List”, it depicts a grief-stricken mother, her head bowed before the framed photograph of her soldier son on the mantelpiece, a copy of The New Zealand Herald dangling limply from her hand. In the top left-hand corner of the painting we see the moment of his death – the young hero’s body reeling backwards as his comrades press on towards the foe. It is a sombre work, and skilfully rendered, but it does not tell the truth about the war. Captured instead is the sense of loss; the awful ache that clawed at the hearts of practically every New Zealand family in the aftermath of the carnage. That much – but no more – was all the nation was permitted to feel. Questions about what it had all been for were met with the palliative care of capitalised nouns: Justice, Honour, Liberty, Country, Democracy. The unbearable reality – that they had died to preserve the prosperity of those who stayed behind – had to be, and was, suppressed.

 

It is still being suppressed. And if none of the arguments advanced above are sufficient to rouse your indignation, then the ongoing and deliberate suppression of the truth about the origins and objectives of the First World War should make you very angry indeed.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 25 April 2016.

Memory and Forgetting: Why Knowing Labour’s History Is So Important.

The Spirit Of Progressivism: The Czech-born writer, Milan Kundera, wrote that: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. In a curious way, the Labour Party was founded to keep the memory of the Liberal Party’s achievements, and of its vision of an economically just and socially progressive New Zealand, alive.

 

IT WAS 99 YEARS AGO, this week, that the principal elements of the New Zealand Left began arriving in Wellington. At a time of extraordinary social stress, they were gathering in search of unity and a clear way forward. Yes, the trade unions were well represented, but they were by no means the only progressive voices present. The New Zealand Labour Party, which was born 99 years ago, in July 1916, saw itself, rather, as a vehicle for the “democratic public” – that fraction of New Zealand society for whom political participation has always meant more than simply endorsing the decisions of the powerful.

 

The trade unionists and journalists, clergymen and temperance campaigners who came together that July were both alarmed and appalled at the imminent introduction of military conscription. They saw it as evidence of just how completely the war was swallowing New Zealanders’ civil liberty. The ruthless brutality of Bill Massey’s government; it’s willingness to deploy deadly force against its opponents; was raising doubts about the true purposes of the war.

 

What, exactly, were so many young men dying to defend? What had become of progressive New Zealand? Of “God’s Own Country”? The relentless din of wartime propaganda made it difficult to remember the 20-year-long Liberal Era of John Ballance and Richard Seddon. Censorship and sedition trials made it difficult – even dangerous – to object to what had taken its place. War mania had rendered rational argument impossible. The “democratic public” of New Zealand felt themselves to be (and, almost certainly, were) a beleaguered minority.

 

Over the course of the next twelve months much will be written and spoken about the formation of the New Zealand Labour Party. The celebration of the party’s centenary will be used, as all such occasions are, to bolster the authority of those currently in command of both the party and the wider labour movement. Every effort will be made to convince the Labour Party members and trade unionists of today that their present leaders are worthy successors to the men and women of 1916.

 

That is why it is so important that New Zealand’s left-wing historians spend the next twelve months acquainting today’s progressives with the facts of Labour’s history. They must loudly give the lie to those who attempt to deny the radicalism of Labour’s past; and who argue that moderation and compromise have always been the party’s watchwords. The blatantly political purpose of such historical revisionism is to promote the idea that the extreme timidity and ideological conservatism of today’s Labour Party is nothing out of the ordinary; that Labour has always been timid and conservative.

 

Nothing is more likely to ensure Labour’s demise than the triumph of this right-wing revisionist account of its history. Labour’s future depends upon how truthfully her struggle on behalf of the “democratic public” is retold. The progressives of today deserve to know how a beleaguered minority, in spite of vicious government persecution and constant media vilification, eventually transformed itself into a radical majority, and how that radical majority changed this country forever – and for the better.

 

The Czech-born writer, Milan Kundera, wrote that: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. In a curious way, the Labour Party was founded to keep the memory of the Liberal Party’s achievements, and of its vision of an economically just and socially progressive New Zealand, alive. Over the course of the next year the struggle to prevent Labour’s huge contribution to the history of New Zealand from being forgotten, or, worse still, misrepresented, must be waged unceasingly.

 

If the “democratic public” is ever again to become a radical majority, then the memory of how it fought – and won – the battles of the past needs to be kept alive in the hearts and minds of every progressive New Zealander.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 10 July 2015.

Before ANZAC Day: How It Really Was.

The Good Old Flag: Strike-breakers pose proudly under the Union Jack, Waihi, 1912. In the two years immediately preceding World War I, the “good old flag” had become an emblem of bitter class warfare. Undaunted, it was the Union Jack that 2,779 "sons of the empire" ended up dying for at Gallipoli in 1915.

TELLING PEOPLE “how it really was” is the historian’s first and, some would say, only duty. On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the Gallipoli landings it’s a duty that weighs very heavily. So much has been spoken and written about the events of 25 April 1915, and what they mean to New Zealand, that anyone attempting to tell people truthfully “how it really was” risks extinguishing the roseate glow of our national mythology in the cold white light of the historian’s flash-bulb.

 

Let’s begin with “the good old flag” under which so many volunteers marched off to war in 1914. Not their own New Zealand Ensign, but the Mother Country’s Union Jack.

 

In the two years immediately preceding 1914, that “good old flag” had become an emblem of bitter class warfare. Nowhere was this more vividly displayed than in the mining town of Waihi.

 

Only rarely can the Union Jack have been borne aloft by a more disreputable bunch of flag-wavers. Answering to such outlandish names as the “Snake Charmer” and “Harvey the Pug”, the strike-breakers brought to Waihi by the owners of the Waihi Gold Mine advertised their officially sanctioned status by rolling into town on a horse-brake draped with “the good old flag”.

Strike-breakers arrive in Waihi, 1912: The "Snake Charmer" is second from left in the bowler hat. "Harvey the Pug" stands in the middle wearing a white scarf.

 

The message could not have been clearer: the red flag of the “Red” Federation of Labour (to which the striking Waihi miners proudly belonged) had met its match.
 

Pretty soon the residents of Waihi were encountering crudely scrawled representations of the Union Jack on the walls of their houses and public buildings – usually accompanied by the words “God Save the King!”
 

Emboldened by the presence of the Police Commissioner, John Cullen, Harvey the Pug and his mates paraded brazenly up Waihi’s main street bellowing out their own, revised, version of “The Red Flag”:
 

We’ll work the mines and never fear,
We’ll drive the Red Flag out from here.
The Socialists we cannot stand,
We’ll drive them out from Maoriland.
 

Snake Charmer, Harvey the Pug, and the other strike-breakers (backed up by Commissioner Cullen’s 80 Police Constables) were as good as their word. On 12 November 1912, “Black Tuesday”, Waihi was “politically cleansed” of “Red Fed” miners and their families. They boarded the trains and ferries to Auckland in fear of their lives. The strike-breakers had besieged the Miners Union Hall, and one of the socialists they could not stand, Fred Evans, who’d tried to stop them, was beaten to death.
 

Exactly one year later, in the midst of what came to be known as “The Great Strike of 1913”, thousands of Auckland unionists marched in memory of Fred Evans. His former comrades carried a banner declaring: “If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, Good God we have bought it fair.” There were no Union Jacks.

 

"If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, Good God we have bought it fair": "Red Fed" supporters commemorate the anniversary of Fred Evans' murder. Auckland, 12 November 1913.

 

A mile across town, hundreds of “Special Constables” and their horses, known forever after as “Massey’s Cossacks” (after the then Prime Minister, William F. Massey) were encamped on the Auckland Domain. They had come from Northland and the Waikato to break the waterside workers’ picket-lines and open the Auckland wharves. In Wellington, identical contingents of “Specials”, this time from the Wairarapa, had arrived to battle the capital’s striking wharfies.

 

Massey's Cossacks: Mounted Specials arrive in Wellington, 1913.

 

The formation of these special police units had been recommended by Colonel Edward Heard, acting commandant of New Zealand’s military forces. Rather than have his soldiers take over the role of the Police on the streets of the major cities, as Prime Minister Massey, his Attorney-General, Alexander Herdman, and Commissioner Cullen were urging, Colonel Heard, in the strictest secrecy, undertook to instruct his senior officers to raise a force of special constables to break the Red-Feds” rapidly escalating strike.
 

One year later, in November 1914, many of these same special constables were on their way to a very different kind of war. From “Massey’s Cossacks” they had graduated to the Auckland and Wellington Mounted Rifles, now combined, with troopers from Canterbury, into the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade.

 

From Mounted Specials To Mounted Rifles: The NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade, Cairo 1914.

 

They were young and brave and bigoted patriots, ready to smite the King-Emperor’s enemies anytime, anywhere – including outside the gates of the Auckland and Wellington wharves. They fought like demons for Chunuk Bair and we must honour their courage. Even if “the good old flag” they fought for was not their own.
 

That’s how it really was.
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 April 2015.