"Memorial," Plains Folk #502 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

This Veteran's Day I thought about where I was a year ago and about two things that made me consider how we should memorialize ordinary heroes.

Last November found me in Central Otago, the Maniototo Valley of New Zealand. I was driving into remote sheep country in search of a shepherd-poet named Ross McMillan. Having read some of his work, I regarded him as the authentic voice of that pastoral country.

Eventually I found him, but on the way I was compelled to stop in the village of Patearoa. At roadside stood a remarkable statue. It was obviously a soldier of the Great War, rifle in hand, pack on back, but just as obviously a farm boy. Life-size, the statue was a local product formed of concrete and hand-painted. The paint job looked a little surreal, like one of those colorized movies, but still life-like. The eyes peered out with no steely heroism, the lips seemed as though they might quiver. A callow citizen soldier.

Both Australians and New Zealanders make a big thing of soldier memorials and celebrate their own version of Veteran's Day called Anzac Day. A New Zealand historian named Jock Phillips has done a book about the war memorials of New Zealand because they are so important to the national character. Every town has one, generally large and costly. Fortunate, I thought, that the folks in Patearoa, whether from poverty or from design, fashioned their humble statue instead.

So when I found McMillan, I asked him in particular about one of his poems, a sentimental one called "The Soldier Who Never Came Home," published in his book, Tracks from the High Country. The poem begins, "There's a bottle of beer in the Waihou Forks bar," an old-fashioned Ballins Four X bottle with a story:

It was bought long ago by a young soldier brave,

On his final leave there these instructions he gave,

Don't sell or break it, just keep it in store,

And I'll drink it when I come back home from the war.

Do I have to spell this out for you? The young fellow, of course, never came home, but got killed in Crete. Now people traveling through join the locals in the pub in drinking to, and thinking of, "the soldier who never came home for his drink."

If this does not seem to you like a proper memorial, then you're not familiar with the New Zealand pub scene. Along with McMillan, compare this glass monument to the many others:

There are many stone cairns scattered over the land,

But I wonder how many are polished by hand;

Though the cap is all rusted it outshines the chrome,

As it honors the soldier who never came home.

For me, the face of the soldier remembered in Waihou Forks will always be the face of the ever-youthful statue in Patearoa. And when I get back to New Zealand, I'm going into the Waihou Forks bar.

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