Private McPhail

As part of the Library's remembrance of the First World War, I'm researching a local soldier, Private Leonard Thomas McPhail. We've all been allocated a name from the Waltham Park Memorial Gates, (picture above) and asked to find out something about "our" soldier. The Library's reference team have provided us with Internet addresses for research, and some of the material is available digitised by the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Private McPhail's army record turns out to be an interesting one.
    The records are handwritten, which makes for difficult reading. I've got to decipher these records, and make a timeline for Private McPhail. He enlisted in the Otago Regiment, although he was from Christchurch, as he was working in Dunedin at the time. He travelled with a large group of reinforcements, and was in France from 1917-1919. He survived the war, but drowned in a ditch after a drunken fight with another soldier, while waiting to be repatriated. He is buried in a military cemetery in France.
     Private McPhail was no saint; he was listed as AWOL fourteen times, was fined for disobeying an officer's orders, and at one stage was about to be posted as a deserter, but he was stationed at Etaples, a large military camp with hospitals attached, which was considered such an awful place that wounded soldiers would escape from hospital to go back to the front line. Medical care was surprisingly good - the death rate was low, but the segregation of officers and men (officers in luxurious accomodation in nearby Le Touquet, men in stinking, muddy tent-cities) caused on-going problems with morale. The men mutinied in 1917, and this episode of the was was covered in the book and TV series "The monocled mutineer".
      I'll continue reading about this aspect of the war, and about Private McPhail.