Disgusted by what he saw as an unjust peace treaty, he became a Christian pacifist after the war. He would remain one for the rest of his life, going to jail during World War 2 for speaking out against it and breaking with the Methodist Church.
Burton got his start in publishing by writing a small history of the New Zealand Division for the army at war's end. He returned to the subject more fully in 1935 with The Silent Division, rightly considered one of the few classic accounts of New Zealanders in World War 1.
By then, of course, he was strongly opposed to war. Here and there you catch glimpses of that. On the very first page he laments that no-one seemed to dispute the declaration of war.
''There was no troubled conscience in New Zealand'', he says.
''The schools and the editors and the parsons had done their work too thoroughly for that.''
He is tough on army chaplains.
But for the most part he is uncritical of his fellow diggers. In a series of short chapters, The Silent Division takes the reader from enlistment through arrival in Egypt, Gallipoli, regrouping in France and the various bloody battles such as the Somme and Messines. It finishes the war in occupied Germany.
Burton tells the story with sympathy and journalistic directness. It is not all fighting. We see the tourist sites in Egypt and mix with them behind the lines on the Western Front where they mix surprisingly easily with ''Mademoiselle from Armentieres''.
Burton wrote in the third person and famously mentioned only the commander, General Godley, by name. The second half of this package, Concerning One Man's War, switches to the first person. It is part of an unpublished, unpublishably sprawling autobiography that Burton - by late in life rather touchy - refused to allow prospective publishers to trim or edit.
It takes us through most of the same territory as The Silent Division, but with a lot more personal detail about food, health and above all the men he fought alongside. The book is full of names. There are a few glitches. Editor John Gray did not seem to have touched The Silent Division part of this compilation (i.e., not correcting the name of HMS Nelson to HMS Lord Nelson) but he makes extensive editorial interpolations in Concerning One Man's War. Several of the soldiers mentioned by Burton are given brief biographies and photographs and maps assist the narrative.
There are a few blemishes that may have arisen from the scanning exercise and some of the photographs in the second section are pixelated or blurred.
Overall, though, the package should appeal to war history buffs. The book is handsomely hard-backed, printed on near-cardboard-thick paper and is thoroughly indexed. A short preface by Chris Pugsley and a brief biography by David Grant round out the package.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
