The General and the Nightingale: Dan Davin’s War Stories

By Dan Davin

Dan Davin was the author of the only substantial body of war fiction written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century in which the nation was engaged. The General and the Nightingale brings together Davin's 20 war stories, some drawn from his war diaries and loosely based on his experiences as 'a wartime scholar-soldier' and those of his fellow soldiers in the British and New Zealand armies. They yield an unparalleled insight into the Kiwi or Anzac soldier at war during the Mediterranean and African desert campaigns of World War II. Editor Janet Wilson notes they can be read as 'fictionalised accounts rather than imaginative fictions'. Born and raised in a working-class Catholic family in Southland, Davin was a Rhodes Scholar and had recently completed a degree at Oxford when he enlisted in the British Army in 1939. After receiving a commission in 1940 he successfully applied to be transferred to the New Zealand forces. He saw active service in Greece and North Africa, was wounded in Crete, and rose to become General Freyberg's intelligence officer in the Italian campaign. The General and the Nightingale updates an earlier collection of Davin's war stories published in 1986 as The Salamander in the Fire and long out of print. This new publication features comprehensive notes, a glossary, a chronology, a map of story locations, a bibliography and an extensive introduction by Janet Wilson. It is a companion volume to The Gorse Blooms Pale: Dan Davin's Southland short stories (OUP, 2007), which is also being reissued.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988592336

Book preview

Introduction: Dan Davin’s War Stories

DAN DAVIN’S STORIES about World War Two were first published in a single collection in 1986 under the title The Salamander and the Fire, although most had appeared in earlier collections or anthologies published between 1947 and 1981.¹ The Salamander and the Fire is the only volume of stories to be written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century the nation was engaged in – including both world wars and the Korean and Vietnam wars – and they yield an unparalleled insight into the Kiwi or Anzac soldier at war during the Mediterranean and African desert campaigns. Often drawn from the diaries that Davin kept for the duration of World War Two, they cover his entire period of active engagement, from the Greek campaign in 1941 to just after the end of the Cassino campaign in mid-1944. The incidents and dramas he writes about follow the Allies’ uneven progress and intermittent successes during those years.

Davin’s 20 war stories are loosely based on his experiences as ‘a wartime scholar-soldier’² and those of his fellow soldiers with whom he served in the British and New Zealand armies. They can be read as fictionalised accounts rather than imaginative fictions. Many are developed from anecdotes and gossip that circulated among the New Zealand military division, and are traceable to entries in his war diaries to which he would turn for an idea, record or inspiration.³ As Davin notes in his introduction to The Salamander and the Fire, the stories were never invented but were triggered by recognition of a particular episode or incident; he claimed that even a turn of phrase found in a book or diary might set off a train of thought to become ‘the germ of one’s own sort of story’.⁴ This engagement with real-life happenings underpins his view of literature as a reshaping of events in a meaningful way: ‘a piece of fiction must combine a passion for the exact, the authentic detail; some intellectual power which can organise the form and weight of a central though not reasonably explicit thought; and a power of feeling, a spirit, which means that the story, while avoiding a moral is fundamentally moral’.⁵ The transcripts of Davin’s unpublished war diaries which record incidents, impressions and conversations have been indispensable for reading the stories, and a crucial source in the preparation of this edition. As accounts of his war experiences that record his changing attitudes, reflections and trains of thought, often in the very language of the event or episode that is being recreated, they illuminate his processes of composition. Taken together, the diaries as a personal record of this momentous era and the stories as fictional counterpart provide a unique view of the New Zealand soldier’s experience of war.

Read in its entirety The Salamander and the Fire might be viewed as Davin’s literary tribute to the New Zealand Division or the ‘Div.’, the fighting arm of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (the 2NZEF) – that is, the entire New Zealand military organisation in the Middle East, which Davin claimed was ‘one of the very best fighting formations in the whole Mediterranean theatre’.⁶ This perception of the Div.’s strength and durability emerges most intensely in the engagements at Sangro and Cassino in the Italian campaign of 1943–44, although it also appears in embryonic form in stories such as ‘Finders and Losers’ about the battles at El Alamein. The Div.’s powerful collective presence in the stories is shaped by the charismatic personality of its commander-in-chief, General Bernard Freyberg, for whom Davin worked as Chief Intelligence Officer from 1943 to 1944; of officers such as Freyberg’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Ray Queree (aka ‘Sabretooth’), to whom Davin was also accountable; as well as of subordinates, including batmen, orderlies and junior officers. What the Div. came to mean for Davin and his generation, its growing impact as an ‘imaginary homeland’⁷ while fighting overseas, can best be discerned in the impressions and comments of his narrators and characters when the stories are read sequentially – that is, in the order in which they are presented in The Salamander and the Fire. The 1986 collection follows the chronology of Davin’s war experiences and the Div.’s progress over five years from 1940 to 1945, rather than the order in which they were written.

This present edition reproduces the stories in the same order, with one exception: ‘The Persian’s Grave’ has been moved from its place after ‘Danger’s Flower’ in the original to become the second story in the collection, following ‘Under the Heavens’. Set in Greece at the end of the Olympus campaign, it logically precedes ‘Danger’s Flower’ and ‘Under the Bridge’, which are both about the Crete campaign.⁸ The widening arc of the Second World War for the Allies and the Div. can be traced from the opening story, ‘Below the Heavens’, set in the ill-fated Greek campaign of 1941 – a scuffle that is premonitory of the gruelling, now legendary battles at Crete, El Alamein, Miteiriya Ridge, Ruweisat Ridge and Cassino – to the closing story, ‘Not Substantial Things’, about the triumphant ‘liberation’ of small Italian towns just after the fall of Rome in June 1944.

At the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, the 26-year-old Davin had just completed his degree in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, having left New Zealand on a Rhodes scholarship in 1936. He had graduated with a First in Greats (the undergraduate degree in classics, consisting of Latin and Greek literature, philosophy and history) and was on his honeymoon in Paris with his wife Winifred (née Gonley, from Ōtautau in Southland), uncertain of the direction of his life other than the wish to be a writer. On his return to Oxford he volunteered to join the Royal Warwickshire Regiment of the British Army with the Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU), but after being commissioned in May 1940 he requested permission to be transferred to the New Zealand army.

This decision to join an Expeditionary Force that consisted of his compatriots, four years after he had left New Zealand for Oxford, had momentous consequences, for it reinforced for Davin that he was a New Zealander. This affected his entire war experience and influenced the tone, mood and orientation of the stories. As Second Lieutenant in 23 Battalion (Canterbury–Otago),⁹ and commanding 13 Platoon, C Company, he encountered a microcosm of provincial Southland and Otago, where he had come from, as he noted in his diary: ‘this battalion is a travelling Invercargill, a peregrinating small town’.¹⁰ The Div. brought him back among his fellow countrymen, whose company he had eschewed by leaving New Zealand, and in the words of his biographer, Keith Ovenden, it ‘bridged his worlds, linking his New Zealand past to the rest of his life’.¹¹

The manner of his recruitment, in first volunteering to one army and then asking to be signed up to another, is not just a consequence of Davin’s being in Europe at the outbreak of war. It suggests a paradoxical ambivalence about his layered cultural identity, as Davin saw himself through the eyes of his friend, Irish poet Louis MacNeice, as ‘an antipodean, a topsy-turvy man; an Irishman who was not of Ireland’.¹² Working for Allied Command at different stages during the war, where New Zealanders were interchangeable with the British, was just one more evolution of the ongoing transnationalism of Davin’s life as a son of Irish Catholic immigrants who had settled in the South Island’s southernmost city of Invercargill.

That Davin worked at different times for the British Army and the 2NZEF suggests that men had some flexibility of movement, and the Allied Command, in turn, had fluidity in the way it seconded men between units as circumstance and need dictated. There are similarities to the way New Zealand’s military command changed men’s places and roles in the Division, especially as the war wore on, when senior officers suffered casualties or were relegated to ‘duties in the rear’ and younger men were brought in.¹³ Such pragmatic shifts of personnel and expertise can be interpreted as a seamless continuation of the British colonial power structure that informed the war effort and the composition of the Eighth Army. Expatriate soldiers like Davin, especially when he began to work in Intelligence for GHQ and the Div., would have identified as part of a complex interlocking, multinational military system overseen by the British Army, as much as a part of the New Zealand forces to which they ‘belonged’ by nationality.

Davin’s decision to join the NZ Div., which was in effect like returning to a transported homeland, had polarising effects. On the one hand, belonging to a battalion drawn from Southland and Otago reminded him of the shortcomings of the society he had escaped from and reinforced his sense of separation: at the beginning of the war he wrote, ‘I do not think I can ever live again in such a country. This battalion brings back too vividly its snobbery, its provincialism, complacency, stupidity, prejudice, partiality, ignorant positivism, and its utilitarian materialism of the crassest, most ingenuous, brazen kind.’¹⁴ On the other hand, rejoining the battalion catapulted him into a rehabilitation of this world from outside and from within the travelling battalion; for the 20 stories show his increasing admiration for and identification with the soldiers, and his passion for trying to understand, by detailing its strengths, the ‘New Zealand condition’ at war (under-represented then in the work of other writers) – experiences that few could put into words. As he came to respect the soldiers’ courage and fearlessness, Davin identified with the Div. as a unit; and as his narrator says in ‘Finders and Losers’, ‘The Div. […] owned us. Or we owned one another, perhaps that was it.’ Almost four decades later, when he came to write up and publish many of the stories, he acknowledged these antimonies in a more measured way, and could see his stories in terms of their value to the nation. Writing, for him, is associated with having ‘a toehold’ in his own country again,¹⁵ for it fosters a sense of repayment. In 1981 he wrote that his stories were ‘a reminder to my country that to leave it physically does not necessarily imply desertion or estrangement’.¹⁶ This engagement at a distance shaped his stories as acts of retrospective reflection, according to his description: ‘each is basically an objet trouvé, eroded and worn by the tides of experience smoothed by long pondering and the affections of memory’.¹⁷

In early 1941, when his responses to being among men from 23 Battalion were untested by the trials of war, he was writing mainly about his Southland childhood. He composed his story ‘The Milk Round’ as he travelled with members of 23 Battalion and others to Egypt and Greece on a series of dirty, leaking boats, while learning modern Greek from a grammar he had purchased.¹⁸ The war stories came later, after his first engagement on the Olympus Pass in Greece; but stories about his childhood in Invercargill and his war experiences mingled during the early years of the war, a productive period in terms of his writing. He was writing poetry as well throughout this time, and his poems, interspersed throughout his diaries,¹⁹ were, like the stories, written and revised at different periods of the war when he had recreational time: July to September 1940 (between volunteering and being assigned a regiment); in Cairo working for GHQ in 1941–42; at Staff Training College in Palestine and on leave in England in 1943; and in London in August 1944, on secondment to British Intelligence. Writing about the war became almost an obsession in later life; as he says in his Introduction to The Salamander and the Fire, for more than forty years he had ‘been intermittently impelled to write the stories of the war that this volume contains’.²⁰

Being surrounded by his fellow countrymen encouraged Davin to draw on a stock of memories, to hone his skills of reflection, and to bring to life New Zealand voices, personalities and incidents. His characters compare their South Island landscapes favourably with their present conditions: in ‘Under the Heavens’, for example, the soldiers in the soggy, saturated Olympus Pass in Greece reminisce about West Coast rain and pubs and long for a rum and raspberry. Davin heard the sounds of the Kiwi demotic vernacular – the rhythm and accent of humour – more vividly than at home, and he used it as raw material for the voices of his working-class narrators and characters. Stories written in the 1970s and 80s, especially those about Cassino when he was Intelligence Officer to General Freyberg, show his mastery of the military slang that by then had infiltrated the Kiwi soldier’s everyday speech and hint at his relish in using terms such as bloody red-arse, base wallower, purple death, spine-drill, brace of shakes and cocky’s joy. Ever inventive and addicted to punning and wordplay, Davin ‘the old phrase maker’ puts his own stamp on images, idioms and coinages:²¹ a lumbering tortoise is a ‘bloody old I-tank’; ‘chaffcutter’ – a machine for chopping up hay – his nickname for a gentle, if clumsy, hospital orderly; ‘bourbons’ describes a group of conservative British officers; the broken wall of the bombed monastery at Cassino is ‘like a great giant’s yellow molar’; the neologism ‘plasmatic sanction’ puns on ‘pragmatic sanction’. The glossary to this edition reveals Davin the classics scholar as a linguistic magpie who captures soldiers’ colloquial jargon to add an idiomatic, sometimes scatalogical flavour to his anecdotal style: soldiers roll racehorses, take their snakes for a walk, get shickered, are slammed into the glasshouse, and suffer from Farouk’s revenge. Every conceivable term for Germans from Heinie to Teds appears alongside Arabic words such as shufti, mafish or wadi, while fragments of Italian and German spoken by the casualties of war, German prisoners, Italian children, or women pregnant to Germans, contribute to a polyglot prose that is both colourful and accurate to its time and milieu.

Davin’s embrace of Kiwi slang in his war writing was the literary, linguistic side of his attraction to the casual colonial style of the Div. Geoffrey Cox, a friend from Otago University and Oxford and, like Davin, a Rhodes scholar, who shared a flat with him in Cairo and also became a Chief Intelligence Officer of the Div., later recalled Davin leading 13 Platoon C Company of Battalion 23 in the summer of 1940:

Dan came past, marching at the head of his platoon. Under the high peaked caps which we still wore at that stage of the war, before they were abandoned for forage caps and berets, Dan’s face was dour and set. The faces of the men behind him, mostly West Coast miners, farm workers and road makers from Southland, were typical of those early 2NZEF [...] volunteers, alert, hard-bitten, sardonic, the faces of men hardened and shaped by the rigours of the Great Slump of the 30s.²²

Cox’s impression of the Div.’s air of formidable resilience and stubborn resistance is echoed in Davin’s diary comment at the time of the evacuation of Cairo and before the fighting at Alamein in June 1942: ‘I just could not believe the Germans would get past our line at Alamein, past Paddy [Costello], past Freyberg, and those high New Zealand voices, full of confidence and courage, that I had heard passing through the Cairo night.’²³ Recognising the larger unit with its indomitable esprit de corps, as Angus Ross writes of 23 Battalion, is a defining trope, equivalent to a turning point, in a story like ‘Coming and Going’ about betrayal, or one like ‘Cassino Casualty’ about battle fatigue.²⁴ Such perceptions contribute to the psychological dimension of the stories, balanced as they are between the stress and pressures of war on the individual and the larger units – the battalion and the Div. – which command soldiers’ loyalty. In each story, the narrator as fictional witness, commentator or participant links events to the episodes on which the narrative is based, according to Davin, to establish their place in a ‘genuine historical framework’ that is ‘compatible with what did happen’; usually the first point of reference is the Div. and its trajectory through the war.²⁵

Yet Davin, having studied English, Greek and Latin and specialised in classics, was often restless in the company of the Div.’s soldiers. He was more bookish and literary than the utilitarian culture of war allowed for with its military instructions, reconnaissance maps and training manuals. His diaries as well as the stories show that his prodigious reading, especially in classical and European languages and literatures, continued throughout the war, usually undertaken during periods of inactivity.²⁶ The war diaries frequently mention the authors he was engrossed in, for example, William Blake, Shelley, Bertrand Russell, Tacitus, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and the Aeneid, which he read in the original during the battle of El Alamein.²⁷ His knowledgeable narrators, such as Con Ganley of ‘North of the Sangro’, betray a passion for literature. His extensive scholarly and literate interests, therefore, meant that despite the return to his Southland roots, Davin maintained a broad church intellectually as well as socially, and kept company – as he did throughout his life – with a wide range of acquaintances from New Zealand, Oxford, London and beyond.

Davin was from an outgoing family and always enjoyed company. As a student of Balliol College he developed friendships with an international circle of Rhodes scholars such as the Canadian Hart Massey and the Americans Gordon Craig, Joel Carmichael, Walt Rostow and Guy Nunn, as well as Oxford students and scholars such as Arthur Pyper, Thomas Hodgkin, Bill Sitwell, Richard Cobb (later a distinguished historian) and Father Gervase Mathew, a Dominican at Blackfriars; and he became reacquainted with New Zealand contemporaries such as Michael Joseph and Geoffrey Cox.²⁸ During the war, when people were thrown together, friendships happened almost accidentally: on the Athlone Castle to Egypt in early 1941, he again met up with the New Zealand Catholic cleric Father Edward (Ted) Forsman, likely a model for the padre in the story ‘Mortal’, and befriended an officer in the Maori Battalion, Lieutenant W.H. (Wattie) McKay, who in civilian life had been a journalist.²⁹

His most enduring wartime friendship was with Paddy Costello, the brilliant Auckland linguist who served in the 21st Battalion as a lance corporal in a signals unit. He is fictionalised in two stories. They met in 1941 when Davin was moving with an international set from Cairo to Alexandria: Bill Williams,³⁰ then a history don from Merton and Chief of Intelligence to General Montgomery in 1944; John Willett, an Oxford graduate, fluent in German and French who, like Davin, was on GHQ Intelligence staff; journalists Alan Moorehead and Richard Hughes; Reggie Smith, who worked for the British Council and was married to the novelist Olivia Manning; the novelist Freya Stark; Nancy and Lawrence Durrell; the poet Terence Tiller; and Walter Smart, Oriental Secretary at the British Embassy, and his wife Amy. Through the Smarts he met Elisabeth Berndt, their child’s nanny, a German–Danish expatriate with whom he had a love affair, and later a daughter, Patty.³¹ Cairo was then a melting pot of nationalities, ‘a vast variety of unusual, eccentric, well-read and cultivated people from all over Europe: White Russians, Armenians, Copts, French, educated Egyptians of cosmopolitan bent, German refugees, Italians and Greeks’;³² it was ‘the cosmopolitan capital of the old world, everything that Berlin and Paris had been between the wars’.³³ As the social and administrative nerve centre of the New Zealand Div. for most of the war, Cairo was a mecca for Davin in the years 1941–42; and the city, with its manifold attractions, made its way into his stories. ‘Coming and Going’, set in the Div.’s base camp at Maadi, tells of how soldiers found company when off duty in the New Zealand Club or at Shafto’s picture house; and other stories mention famous meeting places and hotels such as Shepheard’s or the Continental, all within easy reach of Div. HQ. Cairo with its brothels is the place for a spree in ‘Finders and Losers’; and in ‘The Day Mum Died’ the batman’s excessive high jinks while on leave there cause him to be put ‘in the glasshouse’.

When Davin came to write war fiction, though, he was most interested in the plight and conditions of the average soldier or the officer under pressure, and the diaries show how he draws on anecdotes for his material, particularly for the early war stories. In Cairo he picked up gossip and conversation that he drew on later. A friend of his flatmate told of the bombing of villagers sheltering from a blitz under a road bridge in Crete, the source of ‘Under the Bridge’;³⁴ a story of a New Zealand soldier from Canea cathedral who helped another wounded soldier he met along the road to Sphakia is used in ‘Danger’s Flower’;³⁵ several brief references in the diaries to a story about ‘an Australian drunk and lost in Athens’ who meets an Italian patrol may be the inspiration for ‘The Persian’s Grave’, about a Kiwi soldier who hides away in Athens after missing the evacuation to Crete;³⁶ and a diary comment referring to ‘X Gillespie [member of C Company 14 platoon], and the wounded man at Olympus’, combined with Brian Bassett’s report of a soldier calling for help in no man’s land, may be the germ of ‘Below the Heavens’.³⁷ Other stories based on Davin’s observation of those for whom he feels little sympathy draw on stereotypes of class, belief or morality to describe a particular mindset. The brief story ‘Jaundiced’, about the wounded narrator’s encounter with a padre in hospital in Alexandria, for example, conveys his abhorrence, or metaphorical jaundice, at an alienating preaching voice that aims to promote the comfort of a creed. His acquaintance with British command when working for the army unit J Force in the North African desert in 1943 produced ‘Bourbons’, about three British officers whose genteel, innately conservative attitudes reflect the political limitations of an outdated officer class. Such sketches – about the British or Italians, as in the ironically titled ‘Liberation’, or about hypocrisy concerning Jewish persecution, as in the scathing satire ‘Unwrung Withers’ – have no apparent source; whereas the needling, interior monologue ‘Jaundiced’ is almost completely adopted from his diary entries from Helwan Hospital in Cairo.

Davin’s interests in his more developed stories, on the other hand, are with his Southland characters, such as Red in ‘Under the Heavens’, whose father had been killed at Gallipoli and who now relishes the chance of revenge. In ‘Finders and Losers’ and ‘Cassino Casualty’ the characters are friends of the narrator, men he met at school, whose social backgrounds he knows and whose predicaments he can write about with insight. Davin’s narrators trace these back to early influences – whether psychological or behavioural as in the case of Major Reading in ‘Coming and Going’, or through estrangement from a fiancée as in ‘Finders and Losers’, or being trapped by dependency such as Ben Comerford’s on his mother in ‘Cassino Casualty’. These and other stories written in the 1970s and 80s are more reflective and cosmopolitan, as his narrators and characters weigh up what they have witnessed, been caught up in or discussed with others. Through their more educated voices Davin creates parallels between the present moment and legendary, historical and political events, and so positions the wartime episodes in a wider cultural sphere. The title ‘The Persian’s Grave’ comes from Byron’s epic poem Don Juan, and his protagonist quotes Byron’s stanza about freedom from tyranny; and his reference to the ‘new Thermopylae’ implies a mock heroic parallel to classical history. A typical train of thought appears in ‘Cassino Casualty’: ‘War is a pretty odd thing’, and ‘once you’ve been in a serious war there’s never really peacetime for you again’; in ‘North of the Sangro’ the Intelligence Officer discusses Heinrich Heine with a German prisoner who had obtained a copy of his forbidden works; and in ‘Psychological Warfare at Cassino’ and ‘North of the Sangro’, knowledge of contemporary military engagement on the Russian front sharpens the private responses of his narrators to the perceived fickle impulses and idiosyncratic obsessions of the General. These figures are occasionally reminiscent of the Davin of Closing Times (1975) – his memoirs of a group of friends, whom he portrays with the urbane, expansive tolerance of a Dr Johnson.

Davin’s movement through the ranks of both armies and his participation in the Mediterranean and African desert campaigns involved duties and responsibilities ranging from front-line action, officer training, command experience and intelligence (information gathering, interpretation and dissemination) as he familiarised himself with the operational and tactical aspects of war. After the abortive Greek campaign of April 1941, in which he served as a platoon commander, his main work was with Intelligence. He served as 23 Battalion’s Intelligence Officer in Crete, replacing Brian Bassett in this post, and then, after he was wounded in the Battle of Crete and returned from convalescence in August, he was seconded to GHQ in Cairo as Intelligence Staff member of the British Army. By October 1942 he was working with a newly formed British unit, a staff information service called J-Force, moving around the desert and listening in on radios to send information from the forward troops to HQ. In January 1943 he received training at the British Army Staff College in Sarafand, Palestine, and returned to the 2NZDiv. as Chief Intelligence Officer. He then took a period of leave and joined his wife Winnie and their daughter Anna at the University Settlement in Bristol.³⁸ From January 1944 he resumed duties as Intelligence Officer for GOC, Bernard Freyberg,³⁹ serving in the Italian campaign when the specially formed New Zealand Corps advised the bombing of the monastery of Monte Cassino. His final stint was working for Allied Control Commission in London from August 1944 to June 1945.

To read the stories in the light of this trajectory through the 2NZDiv. and the Eighth Army – from Greece to Crete, to Cairo and North Africa, and finally to Italy – is to move through the various phases of the soldier–narrator’s developing awareness of all serving soldiers: privates, batmen, NCOs, junior officers, majors, brigadiers and generals. This chronology reveals how Davin’s technique changed from the early, shorter stories and sketches – whose brevity stems partly from his being close to events, and partly because he had to snatch moments to write in – to a preference for the more complexly plotted narratives of later stories written with hindsight in the 1970s and 80s.⁴⁰ The successive campaigns in which the Div. was engaged provide the historical foundation for the stories and underpin the collection’s organisation, suggesting a twofold division of the 20 stories: the first 11 stories are about the Mediterranean and North African campaigns from April 1941 to January 1943, and the following nine stories (12–20) refer to the Div.’s Italian campaign north of the Sangro River and the third battle of Cassino and its aftermath, from January 1943 to June 1944.

The first five stories cover the 2NZDiv.’s disastrous Greek and Crete campaigns and convey the raw destructiveness of war as experienced by the uninitiated: the unpredictability of open combat, the horror at indiscriminate strafing of civilians, the pain of being wounded, immobilised and evacuated as Davin suffered in Crete, the chance encounters and accidents of war, the Kafkaesque surrealism of enemy interrogation. These subjective responses by soldiers and their officers to the dangers of war mark out the battlegrounds and occupied terrain as zones of extreme tension, excitement or agony. Davin introduces snatches of conversation or thoughts about situations experienced as hyperreal or nightmarish. In the first story, ‘Below the Heavens’, the tense anticipation and jumpy nerves of the soldiers give way to the adrenalin charge of direct combat and then unease about killing and death. There are lapses into dream states, reverie or semi-consciousness in the two Crete stories, ‘Under the Bridge’ and ‘Danger’s Flower’, and psychological displacement and amnesia after a drunken binge that ends with German cross-questioning in ‘The Persian’s Grave’. All these stories concern the foot soldier’s moments of testing and crisis in war: fear of combat and death, the camaraderie and fellowship, the stimulus of alcohol, the pain of wounds, illness and discontent. Written during or shortly after the war, they focus on a single incident or anecdote, and they range from the impressionistic sketches of ‘Under the Bridge’ and ‘Jaundiced’ to the linked motifs of wounding and rescue in ‘Danger’s Flower’.

The six stories that follow – from ‘Coming and Going’ to ‘Unwrung Withers’ – reflect the changes in Davin’s status after he moved to GHQ in Cairo in October 1941 and began working for ‘I’. They deal mainly with the period of the North African desert campaign against Rommel, and the focus shifts from the front-line soldier and operations to the more educated, highly trained officer class, and to issues of command, protocol and tactics. These stories are marked by a satirical edge and a more covert moralism than the first group, as Davin’s narrators point to the self-protective hypocrisies, evasions and duplicity associated with officer rank. In targeting particular groups or individual officers the narrator’s attitude is one of wry detachment, in contrast to the earlier stories’ impressionistic shock effects: ‘Bourbons’, concerning three complacent British officers, and ‘Unwrung Withers’, about a speech made by a hypocritical, elitist English official and politician visiting Palestine, are brief satirical sketches. The tone darkens in two stories about officer cowardice presented as a fatal flaw, and in this sense they are reminiscent of the fatalism of Davin’s early novels, Cliffs of Fall and Roads from Home. ‘Coming and Going’ is told by a naïve first-person narrator whose detachment at the revelation of Major Reading’s betrayal of the battalion he commanded during the battle of Miteiriya Ridge – disappearing and leaving others to take over – is tested by Reading’s attempt to explain. ‘East is West’ takes place in the desert and exposes the captain’s insecurity and fear in the way he pulls rank over the sergeant and driver he is travelling with. This disorientation is summed up in the title, with its allusion to Kipling’s poem: the counter-claim that east and west become indistinguishable when lost in the desert is a geographical metaphor for the captain’s unwillingness to tell ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ according to the army’s code of loyalty.

In these psychological explorations, the educated narrator – in contrast to the soldiers and officers he associates with – reflects on the dilemmas that the men find themselves in. In three of the stories, writing or receiving letters demarcates shifts in setting and time – back and forth from the present to the past, between the Div. and New Zealand – and creates critical space for the narrator’s musings. In ‘East is West’ the narrator’s attempts to write to the protagonist’s mother to break the news of her son’s death frame the story of how he met his fate. In ‘Finders and Losers’, letter-writing is a way of staying in touch and also a plot device: the literary narrator writes long, semi-fictional letters to the New Zealand wife of his friend Herbie after he goes missing, maintaining the pretence of Herbie’s devotion and inventing reassuring details of his soldiering existence. In ‘The Dog and the Dead’, a letter from Southland jogs the narrator’s memory about dogs there that he had loved, as he ponders how dogs live and die. That a beloved dog may pine away on the death of his master – the subject of this story – also appears in two of Davin’s Southland stories; and the child’s response to the shooting of a dog in ‘Death of a Dog’, written about the time war broke out, indicates how strongly he felt about such deaths.⁴¹

‘Finders and Losers’ and ‘The Dog and the Dead’, both set in the battles of El Alamein, were first published in the early 1980s but may have been written earlier; and ‘Coming and Going’ was probably written sometime in the 1970s. These stories mark a shift in style and approach from the sketches or semi-satirical vignettes of the 1940s, as Davin draws on his own background by introducing narrators from Southland and using memory, dream and reflection to define his local Kiwi characters and represent their actions: the narrator’s prior knowledge of them authenticates his engagement with their dilemmas. The more developed structures may be one consequence of Davin’s novel-writing in the intervening years.⁴² Like the stories about Cassino these finely crafted tales are marked by soldiers’ slang and idiom, cryptic in-jokes, coded allusions and multiple timeframes. His heroes are star sportsmen and outstanding soldiers. Herbie Haines in ‘Finders and Losers’ was a Southland rep when the province won the Ranfurly Shield; Ben Comerford in ‘Cassino Casualty’ captained the first fifteen at Otago University, as he had at school. In these stories, Davin correlates such prowess with bravery in battle. The middle-class Major Reading in ‘Coming and Going’ comes not from rural Southland but from metropolitan Christchurch, and his fastidiousness about appearance, the narrator remembers – giving ‘his platoon commanders hell’ if all details of their uniforms were not ‘exactly so’ – is a warning sign of how he will behave under the pressure of battle.

The 11 stories in this first section give insights into Davin’s methods of composition: retelling anecdotes or oral versions of tales with additional details from other events, splicing two episodes together so that the join is invisible. ‘Danger’s Flower’, for example, combines his diary entry about finding himself among the wounded on a cathedral floor in Canea after the battle of Maleme with a story about a New Zealand soldier who supported another wounded soldier during the evacuation of Crete. The narrative of ‘Coming and Going’ can be traced to two episodes that have been suppressed from the official histories: a commanding officer’s disappearance from his company during the battle of Crete, and the suicide of another officer.⁴³ For the story of Herbie Haynes in ‘Finders and Losers’ Davin combines an incident recorded in Howard Kippenberger’s memoir, Infantry Brigadier ⁴⁴ – the capture of the Brigadier’s Junior Signals Officer by the Germans and Kippenberger’s subsequent concern about how to keep up his junior’s letter-writing to his wife – with the death of Captain Peter Norris, a promising soldier, winner of the Military Cross and commander of A Company of 23 Battalion from July 1942.⁴⁵ Herbie’s death at Nofilia on the same day as Norris’s at Cassino, on 17 December 1942, is an example of Davin’s use of number symbolism, usually for memorialising purposes. The same fictive technique appears in ‘When Mum Died’, in which three characters hear of the death of a loved one on the same day. Number 11, the day in May 1944 on which Davin’s mother died, suggestively reappears in the batman Shorty’s obsession with the Number 11 bus route in London; all three deaths, including that of the Boss’s mother, to which Davin’s own loss correlates, coincidentally occur on 23 March, a date that also marks the final night of the Div.’s engagement at Monte Cassino.

Of the nine stories in the second group, those written in the 1970s and 80s are considerably longer than any written in the 1940s, showing that several decades later Davin was reconstructing events into complex, detailed narratives that examined the sources of power, and the information-gathering and decision-making processes that went on at the heart of the Div. By now a historian of World War Two, responsible for the official version of the New Zealanders’ war in Crete and unofficially assisting with the preparation of Angus Ross’s history of 23 Battalion and Howard Kippenberger’s memoir, he was well aware of the power of historical narratives in shaping public understanding of outcomes in war, just as he knew that they did not always tell the truth.⁴⁶ As a sequence this group of stories traces the New Zealanders’ uneven fortunes in the Allied Italian campaign from 1943 to 1944: the battles and skirmishes north of the Sangro River, the monumental third battle of Cassino and the liberation of small towns in Italy during the fourth battle, concluding with the Allied victory of late spring 1944.

The first story, ‘In Transit’, is about Davin’s train journey from Naples in January 1943 to rejoin the Div. in Italy after a period of leave in England. The three that follow, ‘North of the Sangro’, ‘Psychological Warfare at Cassino’ and ‘Cassino Casualty’, concerning the Div.’s offensives against the Germans, and a fourth, ‘When Mum Died’, set in May 1944 just after the third battle of Cassino, all feature the Intelligence Officer for General Freyberg, the role that Davin held during this period. All four are late stories written in the 1970s and 80s, and they touch on the vicissitudes of this relationship, the problems of command and the demands on Intelligence to provide reconnaissance information and assessments of enemy locations and morale. Interrogation of prisoners of war (PWs), on which the generals put great weight, is often treated as a source of disagreement, because Davin’s Intelligence Officer narrators believed that this intelligence was often unreliable, given the PWs’ frequent confusion and ignorance.

The other five stories, set in locations in northern Italy to which the Div. moved after the third battle of Cassino, are a counterpoint to this first group, which features characters responsible for tactics and command: the General or GOC, and the Intelligence Officer or the ‘Boss’ of ‘When Mum Died’. In contrast, these five offer the perspective of the common soldier, the batman, the padre or the off-duty officer who encounters the war through the lens of death, sex, religion, friendship and fighting. And they provide alternative yet complementary perspectives to the first four. In this way the nine stories represent the Div. as a fluid but organic and efficiently functioning community, with checks and balances, rules and regulations that tolerate idiosyncracy, criticism, even mockery – but with little deviation from a strict moral code based on courage, loyalty and sacrifice.

Something of Freyberg’s towering presence and reputation emerges in these stories. Freyberg was saluted as ‘Salamander of the British Empire’ by Churchill; he commanded an impressive following among his men and was acknowledged as an outstanding divisional commander.⁴⁷ He ensured that the cleverest and most able young men in his army – that is, the ‘formidable triumvirate of Cox, Costello and Davin’ – were promoted to become his Intelligence Officers (IO), and he acknowledged them as stimulating company,⁴⁸ as the descriptions of the antics that took place in the ‘I Truck’ suggest.⁴⁹ As Staff Intelligence Officer, Davin was initially caught in ‘a tiff’ with Freyberg, who favoured his predecessor Paddy Costello and had not wanted to let Costello go on leave when it was his turn.⁵⁰ This difficult relationship and the hazards of the Cassino campaign, based on Allied tactics that the newly founded New Zealand Corps under Freyberg’s command had to execute, constitute the background of the five stories that concern Freyberg. But these stories also reveal Davin’s exhilaration, stemming from his proximity to command: the IO’s capacity to comment on the intricacies of the campaign, and even his apparent potential to influence its progress, appear in byzantine, elaborate schemes, proliferating rumours, complicated coincidences and fateful outcomes. The narratives point to the difficulty of reaching balanced assessments in the confusions of war and the possibility of misjudgement at all levels – from generals to brigadiers to privates – by misinterpreting enemy manoeuvres, inaccurately reading signs or using the wrong tactics. Davin uses his insider knowledge of Freyberg and the Eighth Army’s war strategy to compose comic narratives aimed at several targets – intelligence officers of the US Fifth Army, the Allied Forces generals, German PWs – while simultaneously being weighty, considered responses to the events they are based on.

‘North of the Sangro’ strikes a rollicking note through the inventive antics of the aptly named Intelligence Officer Con Ganley during the stalemate of December 1943, after unsuccessful attacks by the New Zealanders north of the Sangro River and the entrenchment of the enemy line. Bemused at his general’s obsession with the larger theatre of war on the Russian front at a time when the great Russian General Rossokovsky was making tactical advances to outmanoeuvre the German army, Ganley comes up with his own madcap scheme: after hearing from a German PW that some of the troops were deserting, he plans to dash towards the enemy line to persuade the foreign riff-raff of the 65th Division to desert to the Allies and so punch a hole in the enemy’s defences and break through the Orsogna line.

An equally elaborate and unlikely scheme appears in ‘Psychological Warfare at Cassino’: a leaflet propaganda war to persuade the German troops to desert, launched by the rival Intelligence unit of the US Fifth Army, and instantly dismissed as bogus by the IO narrator, because it is opinion based on rumour. This complex and detailed story, which satirises US endeavours to outwit the enemy and dwells on the IO’s problematic relationship with the General, is a tour de force, a comic-serious exposé of Allied tactics in the Cassino offensive. The IO (aka Davin) feels his reputation is under threat because his predecessor, Des Cassidy (aka Paddy Costello) was held in higher esteem by the General. Yet by tactics of his own he asserts his authority. Behind the narrator’s knowing voice and send-up of the US ‘psychological warfare’ initiative, alarm can be discerned among the commanders during the third battle of Cassino as, after the massive bombardment attack on 15 March 1944, the follow-up fighting in Cassino township founders. After the battle, General Freyberg and Commander-in-Chief General Alexander (with ‘a touch of God about him’) consult the IO as if he were ‘a shifty Delphic oracle’ about the possible failure of morale among the invincible German 1 Para Div. Comforted only by ‘the poisonous stuff we called cognac’, the narrator implies, in referring to ‘the names of the friends who had been killed’, that the price of war is now too high – and he glimpses the burden the General has to bear.

This mood of resignation – because of tactical errors rather than a superior enemy – appears in ‘Cassino Casualty’, a close-up view of how men are psychologically shattered during relentless periods of combat. The narrator, a medical orderly caught in the thick of the third battle of Cassino (15–20 March 1944), reports on the extreme conditions as the troops fought desperately and ultimately fruitlessly on the ground in a battle against the odds.⁵¹ From the rubble and bombed-out craters of buildings in Cassino town, he writes of ‘the seething mass of men’ in the crypt of a church that the various battalions used as their HQ and ad hoc medical station.⁵² The story draws attention to the largely invisible ‘casualties’ due to mental distress – what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder – caused