A report in the Herald told the story of the white ensign from HMS Queen that hangs in a corner of the Christchurch Cathedral in Nelson. Continue reading

He endured the dreadful conditions to give spiritual aid to the New Zealanders.

Chaplain captain McMenamin landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 to serve at the frontline.

Later he went to the Western Front.

On July 9, 1917, after the Battle of Messines in Belgium, McMenamin was conducting a funeral service for fallen soldiers when the enemy fired a shell into the congregation.

Six soldiers were injured, and McMenamin was killed.

He was buried originally in Belgium, but was reinterred at the Nieppe Communal Cemetery in France.

His parish in Petone erected a new church dedicated to his memory in 1934.

Although this church was demolished in the 1990s because it was an earthquake risk, the original stained glass windows were retained and rededicated to his memory.

Continue reading

Now, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in proportion to the passing of the years, is celebrated the shared combat ordeal of gallant "Johnny Turk" and the Bronzed Anzac.

And why not?

The Turkish forces, well prepared behind excellent defences, used their tactics to good effect, ably led by a professional officer who was to go on to bigger things, such as the fire destruction of Smyrna - namely, Kemal Ataturk.

But, pause for one moment to consider a slightly different scenario.

Let us suspend historical reality for the purposes of this exercise.

What if, say, instead of Gallipoli, the Anzac forces were going into combat with an SS Battalion somewhere in Poland during the Second World War?

Would we then, decades later, be joining up with our comrades in battle to celebrate what both sides had gone through, our enmities forgotten?

Can one commemorate the shared experiences with enemy forces who acted as the military arm of a state carrying out a terrible genocide at the same time?

For it was the night before the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, then called Constantinople, when occurred the arrest, detention and subsequent liquidation of 625 intellectuals, priests and leading figures of the Armenian Empire.

This event is widely held to signal the onset of the first major genocide of the twentieth century, the most blood-drenched period in human history.

What followed was a mass murder of an entirely innocent group of citizens in the Ottoman Empire by means that are still horrifying to contemplate.

By the time Turkey sued for peace in 1918, up to 1.5 million Armenians had been slaughtered, decimating the population of a group of people who had lived in the Fertile Crescent since the dawn of human settlement. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: The Guardian

He tried to stop the war but in vain.

The first public speech Pope Benedict XV gave after the Conclave which elected him as Pius X's successor on 3 September, marked the start of his mission to end hostilities, convincing the great powers to resolve pending questions through dialogue and negotiation.

This was the spirit of his first four public wartime speeches.

On 8 September 1914 Benedict XV "repeated his predecessor's call to people to pray for an end to the war," urging powers to put down their weapons.

But his calls fell on deaf ears.

He made another attempt at moral persuasion on 1 November 1914 with the "Ad Beatissimi" encyclical.

In it, Benedict XV denounced the general cultural barbarisation of the time: "the lack of reciprocal love between men," material wellbeing "becoming the only aim of human action" and the nationalistic hatred which led to paroxysm.

According to the Pope this was all rooted in a culture of positivism which exalted hatred, instinct and the fight for survival.

In the face of all this it was necessary to return to the "principles of Christianity" so that the exaltation of hatred can be replaced by "fraternal love".

Hence his appeal to Catholics to take humanitarian action. Another appeal was then made to the warring sides to put an end to the violence and find "other ways to ensure violated rights were respected."

This second appeal also fell on deaf ears.

A third attempt to persuade sides to put down their weapons was made at Christmas: "Benedict XV asked for a twenty-four hour ceasefire to remember the "Prince of Peace".

But the Russians and French said no.

On 10 January 1915 Della Chiesa published his Prayer for peace but Belgian and French clergy twisted its meaning to fit their own political and patriotic interests. Continue reading

Sources

• Vatican Insider
• Image: Times of Malta

They can broadly agree on what factors were involved but ascribing relative importance to a myriad of long-term and more immediate causal factors has kept academics, veterans, and politicians writing and talking for an entire century.

Long-term causes may actually have had a stronger bearing on the systemic causes of the conflict but attention must first focus on the sequence of events that led from Sarajevo to the outbreak of continental war.

Since a coup in 1903, Serbian nationalists had been working towards the creation of a greater Serbia.

The Balkans had been embroiled in two separate wars between 1912 and 1913 and, ever since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the region had been in a near-permanent state of instability and tension.

Bosnia Herzegovina had been annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908 and Franz Ferdinand was in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 to inspect Austro-Hungarian troops in the region.

Gavrilo Princip had been part of a team of operatives plotting assassination on 28 June 1914.

Even historians still cannot agree on how the First World War began, writes Conor Mulvagh of the School of History and Archives at University College Dublin.

They can broadly agree on what factors were involved but ascribing relative importance to a myriad of long-term and more immediate causal factors has kept academics, veterans, and politicians writing and talking for an entire century.

Long-term causes may actually have had a stronger bearing on the systemic causes of the conflict but attention must first focus on the sequence of events that led from Sarajevo to the outbreak of continental war.

Since a coup in 1903, Serbian nationalists had been working towards the creation of a greater Serbia.

The Balkans had been embroiled in two separate wars between 1912 and 1913 and, ever since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the region had been in a near-permanent state of instability and tension.

Bosnia Herzegovina had been annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908 and Franz Ferdinand was in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 to inspect Austro-Hungarian troops in the region.

Gavrilo Princip had been part of a team of operatives plotting assassination on 28 June 1914. Continue reading

Sources

• RTE News
• Image: Greg Manderson
• See also: A Global Guide to the First World War, an interactive documentary from The Guardian.

On Aug. 20, 1914, with World War I less than a month old, Pope Pius X died, and on Sept. 3, 1914, Benedict was elected pope, only four months after being created a cardinal.

Crowned on Sept. 6, 1914, he possessed the diplomatic experience that the conclave had wanted.

The first four years of Benedict's seven-and-a-half-year papacy were to be consumed by his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to stop a war that he condemned as "the suicide of civilized Europe."

Born Giacomo della Chiesa in Genoa 1854, the sixth child of an ancient but poor patrician family, Benedict was ordained in 1878, spent much of his life in the Vatican's diplomatic service and became undersecretary of state in 1901.

In 1907, he became archbishop of Bologna.

As archbishop, della Chiesa spoke of the church's need for neutrality and to promote peace and ease suffering, but his role as a peacemaker and conciliator came up against several obstacles that predated the war.

The conflict ("the Roman question") between Italian state and church, which had existed since 1870, was unresolved.

Coolness between the Vatican and Russia stemmed from tensions with the Orthodox church, while the unification of Germany in 1870 had made it a dominant Protestant power in Europe, at the cost of Catholic Austria and thus lessening the Holy See's influence.

Germany's "Kulturkampf" had, among other things, banned religious orders, withdrawn state subsidies from the church, removed religious teachers from schools, imprisoned clergy, and when the training of priests reverted to the state, half of the seminaries closed.

In France, the church had forfeited property since the separation of church and state in 1905.

In November 1914, Benedict published the first of his 12 encyclicals, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum.

The greatest and wealthiest nations, he said, were "well-provided with the most awful weapons modern military science has devised, and they strive to destroy one another with refinements of horror." Continue reading

Sources

• Vassallomalta
• Image: Times of Malta.com

The crucifix belonged to Bishop Henry Cleary, the Catholic Bishop of Auckland from 1910 to 1929, who took his duties right to the frontline.

In 1916, Bishop Cleary travelled from Auckland to London to seek medical treatment, intending to resign because of poor health.

Instead, he discovered there was no Catholic chaplain with the New Zealand 2nd Brigade in France and volunteered to serve on the frontline near Fromelles.

After just a night and a day of fighting at Fromelles, 1500 British and 5533 Australian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the Germans.

The soldiers' bodies and many wounded were left on the battlefield in no man's land - unable to be recovered and buried.

Although a temporary truce had been made with the Germans to allow the wounded to be rescued it was vetoed by senior officers, and the New Zealand troops were deeply troubled by their inability to recover and bury their comrades.

Bishop Cleary and an officer crawled out and lay in the snow amid the remains of the dead. In his diaries, Bishop Cleary comments several times on the dead lying "out there" and how the Germans used to shoot burial parties.

Just 50m from the enemy line he said a "De Profundis" over the bodies - a psalm which normally forms part of the prayers for the dead recited at Catholic funerals.

However, Bishop Cleary's wooden crucifix was badly damaged while he was in the trenches so the Kiwi soldiers gathered up spent shell cases and cobbled together a new crucifix for him. Continue reading

Sources

• New Zealand Herald
• Image: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara

Anzac Day is one of those mysterious days. We know the meaning, only what is the meaning precisely? I relate more readily to certain family birthdays and to Easter; more readily to All Souls' Day with its call to remember the departed, surely one of the things that makes us more human, than to Anzac Day. The day is a memorial for the dead, especially now that none of the original men at Gallipoli are alive to tell the story, but what else is it?

My paternal grandfather, Edgar Harvey, was not only an Anzac but among those who landed nearly 100 years ago at the Turkish cove, later named Anzac, on 25 April 1915. Yet the family almost never talked about this, or subsequent events in his wartime experience. It was passed over in silence. It still is, largely.

In a country where Gallipoli is treated as a moment of great national importance, it might be expected that I would feel proud to have a grandfather who fought there and survived. While that is the case, it was never instilled in me to feel that way.

My father rarely if ever talked about his father Edgar's wartime experience. Silences in childhood may come to say that there must be secrets, or there are feelings too hard to express. Just being alive, I came to learn, is what is important, not being proud about knowing someone who was there.

One thing my father, an Anglican, did repeat while I was growing up in the 1960s was Daniel Mannix's claim that the Great War was nothing but a trade war. The vehemence with which he repeated this assertion told me it stung, he was hurt by the truth of it. Continue reading

Sources

• Philip Harvey in Eureka Street
• Image: The Guardian