Off to War

“Your Empire calls you, and England expects!”

The Great War began for New Zealand on 4 August 1914 when Britain declared war on Germany, the news received with much enthusiasm and patriotic fervour. New Zealand had no large standing army in 1914, however military reforms started in 1909 enabled the country to rapidly put together an Expeditionary Force. There was no shortage of volunteers with 14,000 enlisting in the first week, but to maintain a regular supply of reinforcements for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force ongoing recruitment efforts were needed.

Posters were hugely successful, appealing to a sense of duty, patriotism, guilt (‘Daddy what did you do in the war?’) or anti-German feeling.

New Zealand’s first action was the taking of German Samoa, a small force landing unopposed on 29 August 1914, while the main body of 8417 men left New Zealand on 16 October. After training in Egypt, the first major campaign began with the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. Back home the news was met with excitement and pride, but the reality of war was soon revealed as lists of the dead and wounded began to be published. By the end of the failed eight month campaign, 8556 New Zealanders had served at Gallipoli with 2721 dead and 4752 wounded – a graphic confirmation of the price New Zealand would have to pay, and of the need for a steady supply of reinforcements.

After Gallipoli the New Zealand forces were re-organised. The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade served in Egypt, Sinai and Palestine as part of the Anzac Mounted Division, the remaining troops became the New Zealand Division and sailed for France and the Western Front in April 1916.

The Western Front campaign came to represent the epitome of military futility, a symbol of horror, waste, and incompetence where men struggled to survive in a hellish landscape of muddy shell holes, quagmires and flooded trenches. Freezing temperatures in winter, persistent rain, and long periods of frustrated boredom coupled with the prospect of sudden and random death from unrelenting artillery barrages, trench mortars, machine guns, snipers, and poisonous gas all added to the physical and mental anguish of trench warfare. The appalling conditions were a breeding ground for disease, lice and rats; dysentery and trench foot (a fungal infection caused by prolonged exposure to cold, wet conditions which literally ate away the flesh) were ever present enemies.

It was a shattering experience that took the lives of 12,483 New Zealanders and maimed many thousands of others physically and mentally. The Somme, Messines, Ypres, Passchendaele, and Bapaume are names that have been written in blood across the pages of New Zealand history.