Scotish astralian bagpipe player3/27/2023 ![]() Harper does not subject the actual battles themselves to significant re-examination but then this is not the focus of his work – the focus is on the performance of the New Zealand Division within those battles. In doing so he succeeds in producing a nicely balanced narrative that utilizes first-hand accounts adroitly whilst also maintaining a coherent operational overview of the division, brigade and battalion level actions unfolding around them. Harper concentrates on the New Zealand Division's actions in three key battles: Passchendaele in October 1917, the defence of Amiens (Second Battle of the Somme) and the Battle of Bapaume in March and August 1918 respectively. The NZEF contributed brigade level forces to the ill-fated Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 (hence the "NZ" in "ANZAC" – not that you would know it to read the work of some Australian authors on the subject), but the largest single formation fielded by the NZEF was in fact the New Zealand Division which served on the Western Front between 1916-18. Despite being a nation of just under one million people in 1914 New Zealand sent a total of 100,000 men overseas to serve in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) of whom 59,000 became casualties. Thankfully, Associate Professor Glyn Harper, head of the Centre for Defence Studies at Massey University and a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the New Zealand Army, rises above such simplistic distortions despite the fact that Dark Journey is squarely aimed at reminding his fellow New Zealanders of the experiences and, perhaps more pointedly, the achievements of their forebears on the Western Front. Unfortunately it is this intimate connection with the theme of national identity that has often resulted in comparative assessments of the operational effectiveness of dominion troops vis à vis their British counterparts being reduced to a prima facie case of family one-upmanship by populist authors in both the "Old Dominions" and the United Kingdom. South Africa and Newfoundland – were profoundly affected by their experiences on the Western Front, as were, in turn the emerging national identities of the countries they returned to. There is little doubt that the soldiers of these European settler societies of the British Empire – Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The Seaforth Highlanders’ March to the Battle of Loosįor a number of decades now there has been an ongoing and at times lively debate at both the academic and populist level with regard to the performance of the dominion armies within the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front in the First World War. The Royal Scots Fusiliers Advance on Mons, 1914 Meldrum’s Welcome to the Cameron Highlanders, 1914 King George V’s Welcome to the Battlefield ![]() ![]() Music scores created using Bagpipe Player software (Doug Wickstrom)ġ/5th Seaforth Highlanders Welcome to FranceĢnd Battalion Scots Guards Farewell to France Jonathan Swan has been playing the bagpipes for twenty years and has an extensive collection of pipe tunes. ![]() In this centenary year of the end of the Great War this collection is a fitting tribute to the pipers who served and died in the conflict. Others have had less attention and have not been played much outside the regimental messes of the Scottish regiments. Some are very well known and played by pipers and pipe bands today, such as “Battle of the Somme” and “The Bloody Fields of Flanders”. Many of these tunes were composed by pipers serving in the Scottish regiments of the British Army and commemorate the great battles and campaigns of the Western Front, such as Mons, the Somme, and Passchendaele. ![]() This is a collection of fifty bagpipe tunes written during or following the First World War. ![]()
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