It has been published for the first time on Newsroom.

On returning from his visit, Ireland tried to write but he was too close to the experience.

With prompting from Passchendaele Society members Greg Hall and Dermot Ross, he got around to looking at his notes and finishing his work in time for centenary commemorations.

"I'm very pleased with it. I hope it puts down something of a New Zealander's feeling, reflecting the devastation of looking at the battlefield."

Ireland says it's only recently we've been able as a nation to talk about it - something we feel should never have happened.

"When I was a boy (Ireland is in his 80s) we used to beat the drums and wave the flags but it was something that was separate from us; there was no understanding.

"You can't get a sense of pride out of being told to feel proud. You get pride from the side issues - human endurance, fortitude, improvisation and mate-ship.

"All those sorts of things happen in war. Now those stories are being told in a different way, new generations have a different understanding of what went on."

Ireland was born is 1933 and grew up in Auckland. He is a poet, fiction writer and librettist.

He lived in England for 25 years, though he has consistently identified himself as a New Zealand poet.

He was awarded an OBE for services to literature and received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2004.

Read the poem on Newsroom

Source

• Newsroom
• New Zealand Book Council
• Image: The Sun

Turkey has reacted with anger to the comment made by the Pope at a service in the Armenian Catholic Rite in Rome on Sunday.

Pope Francis said that humanity had lived through "three massive and unprecedented tragedies" in the last century.

"The first, which is widely considered 'the first genocide of the 20th Century', struck your own Armenian people," he said, in a form of words used by a declaration by St John Paul II in 2001.

Armenia and many historians say up to 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman forces in 1915.

But Turkey has always disputed that figure and said the deaths were part of a civil conflict triggered by the First World War.

Continue reading

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.