A group of volunteers, including the descendants of the veterans, have spruced up their grave sites by concreting and painting them.

They also repaired the headstones, as part of the Nikao Cemetery Restoration Project.

Gloria Walker was one of 65 Australian cancer patients buried at the Nikao cemetery on the Cook Islands' largest island, Rarotonga, after seeking treatment from Milan Brych.

When her daughter Cate was in the Cook Islands tending to her mother's grave, her husband Paul Morrisey found an Anzac headstone which had washed onto the beach.

"There was so much damage in the cemetery. There were headstones down on the shoreline and it was just a terrible mess," Walker said.

"It was completely overgrown, it was just full of coconut trees, vines, I didn't even know there were graves there.

"It was a complete jungle.

"I thought 'that's it, I'm doing something about this now.'"

Walker used social media to assemble a team of volunteers to restore headstones, and concrete and paint the grave sites.

She said that, during the years of neglect, at least 10 graves had been washed away in the tourist and cancer patient area.

Some of the ANZAC graves had also disappeared, and Walker went through the archives to establish how many soldiers had been buried on the site.

More than 300 Cook Islanders served with the Maori contingent in Europe and the Mediterranean during the Great War.

It is thought that this graveyard contains the largest group of Cook Islands veterans buried anywhere in the world.

Source

• abc.net.au
• radionz.co.nz
• cookislandsnews.com
• Image: Cate Walker

Ryan Philp, Eric Asomah, Dean Brien and Pratik Seegoolan participated in the 2017 Graves Project researching the lives and service histories of veterans buried in Mount Isa. Continue reading

It is one 'petal' of a larger memorial for all those who died there - including German soldiers.

It's also a departure from the style of tributes in the 1920s to the 'glorious dead', with a century of perspective.

Passchendaele Society director Greg Hall argues those who died are no more heroes than those who survived and had to come back to pick up and carry on their lives.

"What's the difference between someone who performed bravely and came home, and the person who probably ran into a burst of German gunfire, and didn't [come home]? "

Words like 'sacrifice' and 'nationhood' also bother Hall. He argues the language of those war memorials - the "glorious dead", "honour" and "sacrifice" - is very much the language of the time.

"New Zealand sent 100,000 men away. We had 57,000 casualties, 18,000 killed.

"The population at the time was only one million. The impact was not only devastating but it also happened on the other side of the world.

"The chances of a mother visiting her son at a named grave were pretty remote."

On a single day in World War I - October 12, 1917 - 846 New Zealanders died in the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders, Belgium.

Many more died later from wounds received on the day, with the total number of wounded, dead and missing in 24 hours a staggering 2740.

On the evening of October 11, a crew of 14 paddled a waka down a canal in the Belgian city of Ieper (Ypres in French) to the Menin Gate memorial.

Te Hono ki Aotearoa (The Link to New Zealand), was made by master waka builder Hekenukumai Busby of Doubtless Bay for a museum in the Dutch city of Leiden seven years ago.

It was crewed by eight Maori and six members of the Njord Royal Student Rowing Club from Leiden.

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Newsroom
• Image: New Zealand Herald

The NZDF will take to the chalice to Belgium where it will be used in services in Nieppe and Mesen/Messines as part of the commemorations to mark the centenary of New Zealand's involvement in the Battle of Messines.

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 chalice, a gift from the Petone parish, was returned to Sacred Heart Church. The chalice has been used during services ever since.

The stained glass window positioned behind the altar, in the church was dedicated to McMenamin when it was rebuilt in the 1930s.

The NZDF will take the chalice to Belgium where it will be used in a graveside service at Nieppe Communal Cemetery on June 8, and a mass for McMenamin in St Nicholas' Church later that day.

That's a day after the National Commemorative Service at Messines Ridge British Cemetery and a Sunset Ceremony at the New Zealand Battlefield Memorial.

Source

• scoop.co.nz
• home.nzcity.co.nz
• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: img.scoop.co.nz/ nzwargraves.org.nz

It is one hundred years since the first NZ Defence Force chaplain was killed on active duty.

The service will be attended by the Governor-General, His Excellency, Lieutenant General The Right Honourable Sir Jerry Mateparae, Chief of Defence Force, Lieutenant General (LTGEN) Tim Keating, past and present NZ Defence Force chaplains, and relatives of two NZ Defence Force chaplains who died on active duty.

56 year old Chaplain-Major William Grant was killed on 28 August 1915, during a firefight.

He was killed while tending to wounds and recovering bodies of the fallen.

He is buried at Gallipoli, and left behind a widow and five children.

Grant received the 1914-15 Star and the Victory Medal for his service.

Relatives of Chaplain-Major William Grant will attend the service, together with members of his former parish in Gisborne.

Chaplain-Major Grant's great-niece will do a scripture reading during the service.

Source

• pacific.scoop.co.nz
• Image: movementonline.org.nz

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

In a statement, the bishops said the Great War's dimensions were "shocking".

The conflict from 1914 to 1918 left 16 million dead and 21 million wounded.

The centenary of the outbreak of the war was on July 28.

The German bishops said the conflict was of "previously unimaginable proportions", in which poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction were used.

It added that Europe's Christian Churches had also played their part in "war-mongering" at the outbreak of fighting.

"Although the Catholic Church had distanced itself from nineteenth-century nationalism by virtue of its universal character, many bishops, priests and faithful took the side of those welcoming the war as a chance for spiritual and moral renewal," they said.

"We know today that many people, including those high up in the Church, brought guilt upon themselves, failing in the national blindness to perceive the suffering of the war's victims, and realising too late the consequences of absolute loyalty to their respective nations."

In their statement the bishops paid tribute to Catholic priests and military chaplains who worked for peace and reconciliation, and to Pope Benedict XV, who "repeatedly urged" the warring parties to go to the negotiating table rather than take up arms.

Nationalism, if taken to extremes, still posed a threat to peace today, the German bishops stated.

"Our times demand an effective response in asserting the common interests of the human family against destructive self-interest," they said.

Pope Francis referred to World War I in his Sunday address at the Vatican on July 27, one day before the centenary.

The Pontiff begged humanity not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

He also lamented the modern conflict between Israel and Palestine and the violence in Ukraine and Iraq.

The Pope begged for the world to avoid the carnage that took place a century ago, which then-Pope Benedict XV called a "useless massacre".

"Brothers and sisters, never war, never war!" Francis pleaded.

Sources

• The Tablet
• New York Daily News
• Image: Salon.com

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

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