HRH the Duke of Edinburgh attends the mass funeral at Karori Cemetery, Wellington, on 31 December 1953 for 21 of the victims of the Tangiwai tragedy. A few months later the grave was exhumed when it became clear that a number of the bodies were misidentified.
In 1914 most New Zealanders made sense of the costs of war through the idea of the good Christian death. This form of consolation and ritual could not prepare people, though, for the scale and manner of death experienced during the war, particularly in France and Belgium.
