Their Name Liveth For

Evermore
The Great War - 100 Years Ago

Growing up in the South Island of New Zealand and later to make Victoria, Australia home
one thing has always been a constant - and that is the reminder of the cataclysm that
shattered these two young nations in 1914 - the outbreak of the First world War.
Every municipal borough and small country town featured a memorial to the fallen of the
Great War. The old men of my childhood had stories that were never told - the uncles of my
parens; Uncle Cliff hobbled with sticks because of his wounds in the Great War; quiet and
gentle Uncle Percy who lived to support his many missionary friends marched on ANZAC
Day with his Military Medal won as a stretcher bearer at Gallipoli; Uncle Dave it was said
would lie awake at night and make the whistling noise of incoming artillery. There were other
great uncles, I know, who never became old men.

At High School remembrance and respect for former pupils who gave their lives in two world
wars was part of school life. Woe betide any student who entered school grounds via the Arch

or Remembrance and did not take off his cap in respect. Te assembly hall was adorned on
both sides with the names of the fallen etched in brass - thousands of them - and every
Monday morning names were reverentially read from a new page in The Book which sat
always open at that weeks page, under glass, at the back of the assembly hall.
And our English classes, in which I was my years leading student, was not complete without
studying the tragic majesty of the poets of the Great War - Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon,
Rupert Brook, Robert Graves and others - which left an indelible impression.
This lifelong interest was in later years working for a French company, able to provide the
opportunity for three separate leisurely visits to the former battlefields of northern France, in
particular to retrace the steps of the Australian forces as well as the appalling suffering and
loss of life relating to the two Somme offensives.

It was here as I wandered the meticulously maintained graveyards that cannot be experienced
without such a heaviness of spirit, that I would see many times the words of another Great
War poet, Rudyard Kipling, whose words Their name liveth for evermore is etched on the
altar of remembrance at every allied cemetery and which is made all the more poignant when
learning he penned those words after the death of his own 18 year old son on the battlefields
of Northern France.
And it was here, while tracing the first day of the 1916 Somme offensive at Beaumont-Hamel
where 50% of the Newfoundland Regiment was to be killed on that first day that I found in a

freshly turned furrow of earth, what is one of my most precious possessions, and a reminder
to me both of the reality of that astonishing time and the forebears who went through it in
person; but also of the importance of the vow made once and related many times while
wandering the simple white gravestones: Never Forget.