It is the culmination of M.K. Joseph’s exploration of war in poetry and prose, and the most acute and powerful expression of his central themes. The war seems to have awakened his literary creativity, moving him to draft poems in an army-issue exercise book he carried with him in France, the Netherlands and Germany; and then it supplied material for most of his subsequent output. Often the poems, like A Soldier’s Tale, depict occupied Europe in quieter moments, the Allied forces stalled and awaiting action or mopping up after it, surrounded by its debris. When I set out to study Joseph’s poems, I soon found myself tracing a web of connections between the poetry and fiction, at the centre of which sat the great, grim fact of this conflict. Joseph (1914–1981) wrote two novels specifically about World War II—I’ll Soldier No More (1958), a straightforward autobiographical chronicle of military life, and A Soldier’s Tale (1976)—but the war leaves a residue in all of his work, long after his return to New Zealand, to what he called ‘a time of mildness and hope’.
