I hoped to run this post for ANZAC Day last week, but couldn’t quite finish the book and muster the required posting energy in time — a shocking confession, I know! I mean, where is the commitment?!

Such appalling authorial revelations aside, I have mustered the energy and resolve to produce the post for this week, so without further ado, let me speak to you, gentle readers, of ANZAC Diary, subtitled A Nonentity in Khaki, which came highly recommended by the same friend that loaned me a reading copy.

The original edition

Introduction:

ANZAC Diary is the account of an enlisted NZ soldier’s war experience,from 1917 through 1918 and the end of the war (11 November, 1918.) The material is derived from his diary and extracts from letters home. The publisher’s note, which prefaces the volume, states the following:

“…We cannot see nay detail he has written that should be left out. No word has been altered, not only because this document is something in the nature of a historical work but because he has written it so well. He is, at present, little known to us except as No. 42110. Before he died, the old soldier passed his diary on to a military chaplain…”

The upshot was that the Returned Services Association (RSA) asked Treharne Publishers and Distributors to publish the work, which they did in 1987, almost seventy years after WW1 ended. My friend’s edition does not provide an author’s name, beyond the cryptic “A Nonentity in Khaki”, but the publisher attributes the diary to an N.M. Ingram, aka No. 42110.

The Passchendaele Society provides a little more information, i.e. that he was known as Monty Ingram and served for two years and eight three days, surviving the war, but little of substance beyond that. The Anzac Diary itself, therefore, stands as his chief testament — and what a testament it is.

Private NM Ingram, from the Passchendaele Society archive.

Reading ANZAC Diary:

Initially, I was not deeply engaged by the material, which covered his enlistment and early training, then the subsequent voyage from NZ to the UK. I began to be engaged during this latter section, not because any events of note happened, but because I realised the diarist was both a keen observer and one possessed of considerable wry humour. Once he reaches the UK, and subsequently the trenches, the well written, first hand account of a “rank and file” soldier, soon becomes absorbing.

Although I am interested in such accounts under most circumstances, I suspect most readers will find the ANZAC Diary interesting because the writing style is accessible, in addition to being well constructed and written.

One of the unifying themes among those whose relatives served in WW1, such as both my grandfathers, was that they never talked about it afterward. The fact Private Ingram’s diary did not resurface until shortly before his death in 1976, aligns with that trend. Reading a firsthand account that was composed as events happen, is doubly interesting for that reason.

Although the work is well-written, it’s also very understated. This, I believe, is what makes it memorable, through the juxtaposition of events, from the banal to the horrific and overwhelming, with the matter-of-fact prose style.

Private Ingram’s first major engagement was at the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as the Battle of Passchendaele), which was fought from 31 July to 10 November 1917. The detailed account covers twenty pages (until Ingram is invalided back to the UK for a combination of being wounded and myalgia [trench fever]), but the following quotes stuck with me:

“It was a wet bleak morning and a cold wind was blowing from across No-man’s-land, bringing with it the stench of the dead … A cataract of steel flows roaring, at tremendous pace, over our heads. Machine-gun bullets make a strange whistling sound as they pass overhead on their lethal mission … {The enemy] machine guns rattle out their message of death and their whole available artillery vomits forth … hate as it lays down the counter-barrage — a curtain of flame, mutilation and death, lashing the earth with its fury, through which we must pass before we can come to grips with the Hun.”

“…a tally is made of our company and we muster 30 men all told. All that is left of 120…”

A later account, once Ingram recovers and returns to the fighting, relates the particular consequences of such barrages:

“…I witnessed a couple of holocausts during the day. The first was a party of Jerry prisoners, who had been put to carrying out our wounded. Almost a dozen of them were struggling back carrying one of our wounded on a groundsheet. Suddenly there was a deafening roar, a cloud of smoke — exit the whole party. On approaching the scene, pieces of the trunks and limbs of the unfortunate party could be seen scattered everywhere. One chap’s head had been cut off clean, as though with a guillotene, and was lying apart with no corresponding body visible. The scene of the explosion was like a butcher’s shop with joints of red meat scattered about all over the floor.”

It’s graphic and brutal, and in general, Private Ingram describes in this way, rather than interpreting and commenting. On the few occasions he does so, the words command attention:

“There are times when one’s mind is filled with nothing but the awful waste and desolation that is the essence of War. Waste of everything — waste of lives, of money, of property, and of time. The progress of the world is at a standstill, whilst half the nations are using their brainpower, manpower, and moneypower to exterminate the other half. The World’s gone mad! Surely this fair earth was not created by the Almighty to be torn, shattered, and churned to mud and slime by Hell blasting cannon, and fouled by the rotting bodies of men killed in their prime. Surely we humans were not brought into the world to be disembowelled, torn, shattered, blinded, or maimed for life by these man-made engines of destruction. … It is impossible to describe the awful desolation, waste, and sacrifice of life…”

ANZAC Diary is not all brutality, horror, and death. The period when Ingram is recuperating in the UK reads like any young man’s record of meeting people and social engagements when in a new, and well-disposed, country. He comes across as a friendly and pleasant young man, which further underlines his own summation of the brutality and futility to which hundreds of thousands of similar young men were also being exposed. The noncombatant intervals, both in the UK and behind the front lines, not only balance and frame the combat episodes, but also provide respite for the reader, making the book more readable.

The subsequent, hard copy publication.

Conclusion:

In summary, I agree with my friend’s view that ANZAC Diary is an exceptional book and thoroughly recommend it to my fellow readers, particularly those interested in works such as Maquis by George Millar, The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, or The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw. If you’ve liked books such as Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, Tu by Patricia Grace, or All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, you will probably enjoy Anzac Diary as well.

Although I believe there is a reprinted hard cover edition, I read the original paperback, 156 pages.