The Echoes That Remain

The Echoes that Remain tells the story of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force during the Great War from 1914 to 1918, and in particular the New Zealand Engineers and the battles that they fought in from Gallipoli through to the Western Front. They were young men from a far-flung Dominion, catapulted into that European war because New Zealand was part of the British Empire. The original history of the New Zealand Engineers, published in 1927, used selected contributions from officers and men. Experiences of soldiers whom the war had claimed such as Bert Tuck and Tom Farrer were not mentioned. Others, such as Frederick Skelsey, never spoke of their horrendous war time experiences.There is an unspoken assumption that these men from the other side of the world simply arrived in France and went into the trenches of the Western Front. Nothing could be further from the truth. Training of the newly arrived New Zealand Expeditionary Force reinforcements occurred in England, and the New Zealand Engineers were trained for conditions on the Western Front in the coastal towns of Christchurch, Boscombe and Bournemouth. While training, they were integrated into the local communities. They arranged various social activities with the civilians, shared the privation of war with them, married local girls and left widows. This story is as much a history of those townspeople as it is of the soldiers.After years of research, Clement Wareham relates a fuller account of these men and the harsh conditions they endured from the Gallipoli campaign, the numerous battles they fought on the Western Front, through to the hard-fought final victory.