Aitken Alexander - Gallipoli to the Somme: recollections of a New Zealand infantryman

GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME

RECOLLECTIONS OF A
NEW ZEALAND INFANTRYMAN

By
Alexander Aitken
8/2524 N.Z.E.F.

Edited and Introduced By
Alex Calder

GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME

by Sir Bernard Fergusson

O N 14 JULY 1916, AT ARMENTIRES, THE 4TH COMPANY OF THE 1ST Otago Infantry Battalion made a disastrous night raid on the trenches opposite. Of the 181 men who blackened their faces and clambered over the parapet, 163 would be killed or wounded. Sergeant Alexander Aitken, of 10th Company, had been picked to lead a section of his former platoon in a supporting position on the left flank. The platoon wriggled through the wire in advance of the main assault and dug into shell holes in the middle of no-mans-land. A tremendous artillery barrage went overhead, crashing into the German trenches. Aitken checked his watch: zero hour, the raiders would be on their way. Suddenly, bright flares shot up from the enemy lines, illuminating the men of 4th Company as they fell to machine-gun fire and crumpled under shrapnel bursts. Out on the flank, the supporting party themselves came under fire. Aitken had earlier noticed that men from another section of the platoon were dug in rather too close to a row of treesa natural ranging target for German mortar crews. Few would survive the nights long bombardment. Come daylight, having helped carry in the wounded, Aitken returned exhausted to his own lines.

Those who were killed that day are buried in the Cit Bonjean military cemetery just out of town. It contains a total of 453 individual New Zealand graves, along with a Memorial to the Missing listing the names of a further 47 known to have been killed in this sector but whose bodies were never recovered. In one corner of a manicured lawn stands a monument with the inscription: THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. For a visitor like me, that cannot be true. I do not remember any of the fallen: the names are mere names, alphabetised into anonymity. A battlefield tourist following in Aitkens footsteps can drive in not much more than an hour from Armentires, where the New Zealand Division was introduced to the Western Front in May 1916, to the necropolis of the Somme, where another Memorial to the Missing at Caterpillar Valley lists the names of 1,205 New Zealanders whose remains were unidentifiable or never foundan astonishing half of those killed here in September and October 1916, yet the merest fraction of the 72,194 names inscribed on the nearby British Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. That total is so unfathomably large it seems impossible they can all be there; yet every name is present and correct and locatable by a relative making a pilgrimage.

I made my own visit to the Thiepval Memorial in September 2016, during the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Naturally, I looked first for my own name. I could see Calder after Calder in the Highland Regiments, but who was to say any of them were mine? Lacking a known personal connection, the mind struggles to take in the magnitude of this towering monument to loss. But an information panel helps the visitor size up this edifice in mathematical terms. There are 72,194 namesso many per square foot on a site of so many square feet. How did the architect fit them all in? Sir Edward Lutyens found a geometrically elegant solution: by basing his design on a stack of interlocking arches, he was able to maximise the surface available for inscription.

While I was pondering dimensions, our battlefield tour-guide had retired to change his clothes, emerging in a suit and bowler hat to MC a brief ceremony of remembrance. There was to be one of these for each of the 141 days of the Somme. Huddled family groups mounted the steps to lay a wreath. People spoke. There was a minutes silence, followed by a Last Postsomeone pressed play on a boom-boxthat was nonetheless moving in this setting. Not so the closing Exhortation:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Familiar words, yet I recoiled from them. There is a gap between names that are recorded and people who are rememberedand I felt it open like a chasm in the air between the arches of the missing at Thiepval.

Yet my encounter with these intolerably nameless namessingular, ordinaryon which our sympathies are engaged. Set against this world of particulars and singularities is everything that is too big or too much for ready comprehension. This forms the least communicable part of a soldiers experience. We see it in the way diaries written at the time so often need words for a lack of words: I cant say, you had to be there. Perhaps something similar happens when we read about war. To learn that 19,240 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Somme gives one measure of grief and suffering, yet all such numbers, to paraphrase Stalin, are merely statistics. So while friends and relatives may feel the loss of a single soldiers life as a tragedy, that focus is less available to anyone trying to explain what it was like to be a soldier in the Great War. Aitken at one point explains that grief for a school-friend would be felt later, but in the pitch of battle, his strongest impression is of casualties occurring everywhere around him. The true theme of the war memoir is not the single death, but death in numbers, death over and over, even though those numbers numb the mind.

Yet Aitkens restoration of the missing roll-book works the other way. No-one really believes the names on these war monuments live for evermore: there is no human memory that could encompass them. But, like so much else in this volume, Aitkens hypermnesic recollection of impersonal military records has a particularizing, and humanizing, force. Against the odds, fifty-six names, along with their connections, have been remembered. Rolls of the dead make the mind glaze over, but on this occasion we feel wonder. It is not surprising the episode soon grew into legend. Some soldiers said Aitken knew the numbers of their rifles too, and he was himself put out when, in the 1930s, the episode returned in an even more unlikely form: a lubberly newspaper reporter had mistaken his platoon for a battalion. Like all good stories, this one went around the world. And so, one afternoon, on his quiet walk home from the university, Professor Aitken noticed newspaper billboards with the headline, EDINBURGH WIZARD. Much to his dismay, on opening the evening paper, he discovered the wizard was himself.

The man with the enchanted memory was born in Dunedin on 1 April 1895, the eldest of the seven children of Elizabeth and William Aitken, a grocers assistant. Williams parents ran a small leasehold farm on the Otago Peninsula at Seal Point. The grandchildren were frequent visitors there, as well as to the farm of their Auntie Jeanie, on the coast north of the city at Waitati. In 1945, Aitken recalled those childhood holidays in a letter to his aunt that is interesting not only for the flavour it gives of his early years, but also for the highly imagistic quality of the recollections, and for his habit of listing one impression after another, making a slideshow out of his long, semicolon-heavy sentences. He also intertwines these vividly recollected images with a reflexive commentary on how his memory is functioning. His war experiences would be remembered in this way too.