A few inquiries would have revealed to her the fact that two at least of the schoolmasters referred to in chapter one are still living in Invercargill, and would no doubt have been pleased to correct her picture of the boyhood of her hero; that the Magistrate she refers to by name is resident in her own city; that ‘the battle of the Wasr’ was fought before the Fifth Reinforcement (not ‘Regiment’ by the way) left New Zealand; that ‘Y’ Beach was separated from Anzac Cove by nine or ten miles of the Peninsula from which New Zealand and other allied troops were rigidly excluded by the Turks. But why go on? It is sufficient to say that the verity of the story could have easily been checked at many points, and Robin Hyde’s palpable failure to do so has rendered her work worthless as a record of truth. The literary worth of it would in no wise have suffered had the preface run something like this: ‘This book is not the product of my imagination. I have related its incidents and the circumstances under which they happened, as Starkie told them to me. To what extent he has drawn on his imagination I cannot say, but I thought them sufficiently interesting to publish.’ In such case, while one might have criticized her taste in the selection of her material, her talent for vivid writing would have been fully appreciated.30

When Hyde replied citing J. A. Lee and Downie Stewart in her defence, Tait returned to the attack with pedantic tenacity:

If you will permit it I should like to point out the fundamental weakness in her position as it appears to me. Let me explain that before writing my private letter I had discussed the book with many of my fellow returned soldiers and had confirmed my own belief that the book cannot be relied on as a truthful record of facts. I took particular care to give full credence only to those who had personal knowledge of the events which they described and I checked their recollections as far as possible by reference to such records as were available to me. I do not doubt that much of the narrative is substantially true but it contains so much intrinsic evidence of the author’s failure to check the facts that the whole story stands suspect. It is in this sense that I maintain that the book is worthless as a record of truth. It is clear of course that considerable portions of the narrative could be verified from independent sources only with difficulty and that in some instances corroboration is impossible. Much of it however could have been checked with comparative ease, and, had Robin Hyde made any attempt to do so, she would not I feel sure, have commenced her preface with the sentence, ‘This is not a work of fiction.’ The points I mentioned in my first letter were a few of those which should have led the writer to suspect the accuracy of her information. Robin Hyde dismisses them as trivial. Some of them are, perhaps, mere straws indicating the direction of the wind but the march from ‘Y’ Beach to Anzac Cove was a military impossibility and ‘the battle of the Wasr’ as described took place during the Easter of 1915 while ‘Starkie’ with the Fifth Reinforcements was still in camp in New Zealand. Men who were actually there have told me that the description of that event is remarkably accurate but the point is that Starkie was not there.

The reviews referred to do not, I submit, alter the position. Their laudations can properly be regarded as paying just tribute to Robin Hyde’s literary talent but the writer must have assumed the narrative to be true. This applies to the two distinguished New Zealanders referred to by Robin Hyde. The period mentioned as covered by the Hon. W. D. Stewart’s somewhat cautious authentication affects only some 40 pages of the book (144–183). The Hon. J. A. Lee served—I speak from memory—with the machine gun corps and would have few if any contacts with Starkie on service. He would be the first to agree that realism is a virtue in literature, or any other form of art, only when it conforms strictly with reality. I do not suggest that Robin Hyde added to or varied the facts of her story; those embellishments were there when she received it. She pleads in excuse the youth of her hero but even this will not stand. J.