(i) In Report on Experience, John Mulgan commented that his generation 'had never ... outgrown the shadow of that earlier war', World War I: 'It brooded over our thoughts and emotions.... We felt the tragic waste and splendour of this first Great War, and grew up in the waste land that it produced'. (1) That shadow was evident in Mulgan's own writings. In 'Old Wars' from 1935, the speaker, 'Thinking there would be war again', asks Johnson, 'old-timer', of 'the long campaigns / in Suvla, Lemnos and Passchendaele,/and of the retreat from St. Quentin to Amiens'. Johnson refuses to talk about that war, insists there will not be another one, and talks instead of 'the bush we cleared and burned, / the rata, rimu and black matai' and the men now dead who 'long since laboured here'. (2) The Johnson of the poem leads to that other Johnson of Man Alone. Questioned by the frame narrator about his war experiences, he refuses to speak about them and says he will tell him 'truer things' about 'the bit in between' and goes on to tell him of his experiences in New Zealand in the 1920s and 30s, with strong overtones of war: about Thompson on his poor hill farm with his 'obsession about the war', and his neighbours who 'haunted' the valley, 'strange men who had been to the war'; or about Stenning's's farm, where the burned trees and logs gave the landscape 'the derelict air of a battlefield' (certainly the Western Front in World War I is what Mulgan had in mind) and Johnson's and Stenning's efforts with the land and the Depression on Stenning's King Country bush farm are called a 'battle'. (3)
