Two soldiers of the Great War

It has been reported that the last survivor of the trenches in northern France has died in England - leaving now only one surviving sailor of all those who served in the Great War 1914-1918 - at least on the Allied side.

Here are two other soldiers of that conflict. They are Leonard Stanley Holdaway and Harold Lee Spark - and they were my grandfathers.

Len Holdaway was a 30 year old farmer from New Zealand who served on Gallipoli and in France. He was a bandsman and played the trombone.

Harold Spark was a 17 year old Englishman when he enlisted. He served in France. Some years after the war he made his way to New Zealand - and eventually married a young woman called Margaret McCallum who grew up at

Riverlands on the southern side of the Opawa River near Blenheim.

Just across the river Len Holdaway and his wife Miriam Hammond were living on a farm settled by Len's father some 60 years before. I can feel the warm silty soil of that farm between my toes as I write now - as I remember these two men as I knew them in the 1950s, 60s and into the 70s.

The next two photos show them as they were then - as part of large, close farming families. Len gentle and self contained, Harold more in the centre of things, and almost always with a twinkle in his eye.

Actually I do specifically remember each of these occasions.

In the first photo Len was farewelling his youngest son Barry (in a very fashionable duffle coat) as he left the farm to attend Lincoln College. Barry was the first in our family to go to University. Today one of Len's great grandsons is a PhD candidate at Cambridge University - I wonder what my Papa would make of that.

Harold is at Waikuku Beach (maybe a little further north). Grandad is surrounded by family - and on the table is his then brand new Canon camera - that went on the record so much of the life of his family, their farming activities and travels.

Both these men marched each year on Anzac Day and responded to the questions of grandsons about their war experiences - each in his own way.

Just recently Barry and my brother Alan visited northern France and tracked their movements over the final days of the war. From various records and memories Alan has worked out that they must have passed within a few hundred yards of each other.

What could we who were not there ever know of what they endured?