Ninety two years ago today 846 New Zealanders died in our worst ever military disaster.

At 5.25am hundreds of infantrymen climbed out of their trenches and walked into a firestorm. As they struggled towards the village of Passchendaele through thigh deep mud they were cut down by machine guns, sniper fire and shelling. So much was wrong with the order to advance on the German lines that day, as historian Glyn Parker writes in his history of three major New Zealand battles of the western front Dark Journey: lack of time to prepare, exhausted troops, atrocious weather, muddy terrain, inadequate artillery, and huge areas of unbroken barbed wire defences that somehow the commanding officers hadn’t known about.

October 12 was a dark day for the New Zealanders but all the Allied forces and the Germans sustained huge casualties on the fields of Flanders.This little part of Europe in 1917 was the epicentre of the organised slaughter known as The Great War. Some half a million people died over 100 days for a territory gain of around five kilometres. Passchendaele became an international symbol for the senseless violence of war.

The Belgians have not forgotten. The mayor of Zonnebeke, the town in Flanders close to the battlefield and the massive allied military cemetery at Tyne Cot, was in Takapuna on Saturday attending a commemorative ceremony where locals lined the footpath in the rain as soldiers, RSA members and the descendants of WW1 veterans marched past the council chambers. A photographic exhibition has been touring the country and a memorial service is being held tonight at Fort Takapuna.

Glyn Harper’s book is well worth a read. He writes that even though few New Zealanders today are familiar with the details of what happened at Passchendaele, the legacy of the public’s response to the massive casualties was a deep seated hostility towards the military. He says military men were derided and despised in the years that followed and that it was not until the 1970s that the army allowed soldiers posted to Auckland and Wellington to appear in uniform in public.

Even so, the events of 1917 were repressed in the national memory:

It is a tragedy that the events of Passchendaele are largely unknown by the majority of New Zealanders. As a nation we have inherited a reluctance to explore fully our war experiences, and thus we emulate those silent soldiers of the Great War.

I wonder if it is more than just the horror that made us reluctant to confront the facts of Passchendaele. At Anzac Day commemorative ceremonies you hear plenty of speeches about courage and sacrifice, and few that refer to the sometimes senseless carnage of war. Many of the survivors interviewed in Harper’s book are in no doubt about the hell they endured. Are we worried it will disrespect the bravery of the men who fought in our name? Wouldn’t it be a better tribute to their sacrifice if we acknowledged that war is hell, and pledged to do everything possible to avert future wars?

Photo: Jacking up a field gun at Passchendaele in an attempt to move it forward. (1999-929 Kippenberger Military Archive and Research Library, Army Museum Waiouru)