Jan: Blighted by the war

WILLIAM ARTHUR GARDINER

My grandfather Arthur joined the 18th Reinforcements as a volunteer in 1916 at the age of 20.

He was a skilled horseman and was in the Otago Mounted Rifles. He was in Egypt for initial training and then at Sling Camp on the Salisbury Plains in England. He saw action in France and Belgium in 1917-18, but was hospitalized at Etaples Training Camp in France suffering probably from shell shock. 

At the end of the war he was sent to Cologne to be part of the Army of Occupation in 1919. When he got home he was ill and was unable to keep food down — a result of being gassed.

Twenty-five years after the war he was diagnosed with severe depression related directly to his war experiences and triggered by the Second World War. At this time he was chairman of the local Patriotic Society and had to farewell the next generation of men, including his own sons, to fight overseas. 

He was sent to Seacliff Hospital where, like Janet Frame, he was given electro-therapy shock treatment. His health was blighted by the war, and he died at the age of sixty-eight.

Annie: The Battle of Messines — pillars of fire

My maternal great uncle Charles Joseph Ardern (1878-1920) aka Charles Harding was a Private in the 1st Battalion Auckland Infantry Regiment, Army number 15897.

He was stationed on the Western Front from 1916. His division moved to Flanders in February 1917, and he later took part in the capture of the Messines Ridge, Belgium.

The Battle of Messines was launched on 7 June 1917 with the detonation of 19 underground mines underneath the German lines.

There was stillness and silence for an hour preceding the attack …t hen the ground rocked and the air was filled with the sounds of the deafening explosion — the loudest man-made explosion to that point, as the sky lit up with towering pillars of fire.

The village of Messines was captured successfully by the New Zealanders, but they later suffered heavily from German bombardment, with more than 700 killed.

During the operation, Charles was in the frontline and was struck by a German 77mm field gun known as a whizz bang. He would have heard the terrifying whizz noise of a travelling shell before the bang of the gun itself, and had virtually no warning as the shell fired travelled faster than the speed of sound. He suffered serious wounds in several places.

With his shrapnel-shattered arm and leg, he was stretchered to the field hospital, and transferred eventually to General Hospital, Walton on Thames. He was discharged as no longer fit for war service due to wounds received in action, and returned to New Zealand on the H.S. Marama in August 1917.

Back in New Zealand, he struggled to adjust, and took some time to rehabilitate. On March 3 1920, while working at a Public Works camp near Paeroa, Charles drowned in the Waihou River. Although the inquest found no evidence to show how he got into the water, it was thought that his war wounds may have contributed to his death.

~ Annie Christie

Photo: Advanced dressing station in German Second Lines during the Battle of Messines, Belgium, by Henry Armytage Sanders 

www.natlib.govt.nz/records/22324292

reference 1/2 - 012773-G, Royal NZ RSA official negs WW1