Book Review: The Great Wrong War

The Great Wrong War, New Zealand Society in WW1, by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, Random House NZ, published 2010, ISBN 978 1 86979 263 3.

In this book you will not find accounts of the great battles of World War 1. Rather it focuses on the scene back in New Zealand. “World War One was wholly avoidable for New Zealand, wholly unnecessary- and almost wholly disastrous”.

The author, a well known New Zealand historian, starts the book before the declaration of war. He examines the pre-war compulsory military training scheme and the attitudes of the men, and families, to this. He simply explains how NZ got tied up into the pre-war politics and subsequent declaration of war. He then progresses through the war, documenting the changes to attitude, etc, caused by the huge loss of life and serious wounds to the enlisted men and the economical constraints caused by the cost of fighting the war.

Eldred-Grigg bases the book around a few basic questions: How did we get involved, what was the attitude of the citizenry of NZ to the war and its progress, what were the consequences to NZ economics and social history.

Every family in NZ had a relative or friend involved in the war. Every family suffered the loss of or serious wounds, physical or mental, to a family member or relative. The families were serious affected by the war which changed, forever, the family dynamics, beliefs and expectations as the returned soldiers tried to settle back into family life.

Most genealogists tend to get the personnel records of their soldiers and follow their “career” in the war. Very few consider the massive upheavals that occurred to the families back home. In my family, I have a mother who married her son off to a girl half his age and forced him to work in a dairy factory to avoid being called up. She had already lost one son and another survived the war but was mentally damaged. Another of her sons produced a family very quickly so that he became a reserve. I have another family in which the fiancé of a casualty married his brother which produced a marriage that was more a marriage of convenience than a loving one. This family has a history of vigorous arguments between family members as a consequence.

This book is a ‘must read’ for those genealogists seriously considering writing their history because it gives the other side of the picture to the ‘glorious deeds of battle’. It may explain some of the little ‘quirks’ in your family tradition and why the returned soldiers and their families did the things they did after the war.