History this week

Stop and Stare!

The huge room is full of conversation, rising and falling as a new excitement appears, or as we stand open-mouthed in front of a new picture.

Parts of the room are in darkness, others are flooded with light.

On the walls are photographs, displays, old postcards, maps, letters. Here and there are display cabinets with tattered uniforms and old weapons. There are several screens with photos, or databases of names to be searched.

We are at the exhibition which shows something of the connections Taranaki had with the Great War a century ago.

We have stood in the foyer of the museum for twenty minutes while a local singer entertained us with "Watchman, what of the night?" and a couple of speakers introduced the exhibition and thanked those who had contributed. Then we all sang "Hoki mai, e tama ma" (Come home, boys) and trooped down to the exhibition hall.

Two photographic displays stop us in our tracks. One is a series of big family photos in large, plain wooden frames, of four men in uniform. At first glance it looks like four copies of one photo. Then you read that it is four brothers from one family, all killed in France within a few months. One of our friends standing nearby wonders aloud: "How would you ever get over it?" Then we realise the family is distantly connected with Margaret's family, and we pause again.

On the opposite wall of the room, many metres away, is the other photo: a large reproduction of a scene from the French countryside, with a trench snaking away through the centre into the distance. Almost all the photos you see from the trenches are taken below ground level, but here the photographer has got up higher and you can see the trench in its surroundings. We stop and try to take it in.

We have been here an hour and there is lots more to see, but it is time to go home for a meal. We will certainly be back for several more looks. Margaret has found a reference on a database to a relative she cannot place, probably a great-uncle, and we already know of one of his brothers killed a few days before the armistice in 1918.

Then there is Margaret's grandfather who went to France as a farrier and came home "shell-shocked" and spent his afternoons from then on enjoying a liquid lunch until the late evening, to the near-ruin of some sections of his family, consequences which are still affecting the family to this day.

My own family had two great-uncles who served in the war, one coming home with a wooden leg, which used to fascinate us when we went for holidays to his farm. My parents had over 50 cousins between them and many of them went overseas in the Great War; one at least came home a basket case.

As a nation we are only just beginning to get our heads around the meaning of this war, and to deal with its downstream effects; in another twenty years we will have to start thinking about the Second War, a much tougher nut to crack!