Scars on the Heart: Two Centuries of New Zealand at War.

• Author: Rolfe, Jim

Authors: Chris Pugsley with Laurie Barber, Buddy Mikaere, Nigel Prickett and Rose Young Published by: David Bateman in association with the Auckland War Memorial Museum, 1996, 309pp, $69.95.

Military history is too often presented only in terms of battles and their tactics, generals and their opponents, and the high politics of diplomacy, alliances and grand strategy. Important stuff indeed, but not the story within Scars on the Heart. Instead we have a very personal history of New Zealand at war. Personal in the way the group of writers has approached the subject and, more importantly, personal in the way the book focuses on the experiences of the individual men and women who were involved in and affected by New Zealand's wars.

The book is based on a new exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. That exhibition sets out to tell the story of `ordinary New Zealanders doing their best for other New Zealanders and for their children's future'. This book puts words and additional images around the pictures and artefacts in the exhibition. The result is some 300 pages of text and images which must make the ordinary reader alternate between tears and laughter. Tears at the destruction of war and what it does to the human spirit, laughter at the way the human spirit manages to rise over adversity to prepare itself for the next adventure.

New Zealand's involvement in warfare is covered from the earliest days when European traders provided firearms to warring Maori tribes in the 1820s, through the New Zealand Wars, the imperial adventure of South Africa, the world wars, the end of the colonial era to the most recent international peacekeeping operations in equally far-flung locations.

But this is not a formal narrative history giving the `facts' so much as a series of snapshots designed to illuminate the `truth'. The student of warfare who needs to know, for example, the detail of the tactics used by General Freyberg in the battles in Italy or the detailed course of the New Zealand Wars should look elsewhere. There are just sufficient facts and enough `proper history' to ensure that the wider story retains its context. On the other hand, anyone who wants to know what it was like to be a nursing sister near the front line, or an ordinary soldier and sailor subject to all the hardships of warfare, or a woman `manpowered' into war work back in New Zealand, or how it felt to return to home and family after years at war, needs go no further.

The...