From the book . . .

Thousands of New Zealand men went through hell fighting for their country in World War I. Fighting to keep them alive was a force of brave medics. Doctors, nurses, stretcherbearers, orderlies, ambulance drivers, chaplains, dentists and chiropodists risked their lives, often in appalling conditions, to care for the sick and wounded.

Veterinarians did the same for horses, donkeys, mules and camels that accompanied the soldiers onto battlefields.

A new book, released as Armistice Day is marked today, is dedicated to the skill, compassion and courage of those Kiwi medical personnel.

“I really want readers to understand what an amazing job these people did,” says Anna Rogers, author of With Them Through Hell: New Zealand Medical Services in the First World War.

“They’re sometimes overlooked.” New Zealand sent around 100,000 men, about 9 per cent of our population at the time, to fight in the “war to end all wars”.

They faced the horrors caused by sophisticated new artillery shattering bodies and minds, blinding and blistering by chemical weapons, deadly disease and gruelling trench warfare.

Around 18,000 of them died, and 40,000 were wounded or fell ill.

Paradoxically, from the hell of the Great War came groundbreaking medical advances such as widespread use of X-rays and more effective blood transfusion methods.

It also led to pioneering of plastic and facial reconstructive surgery, with New Zealanders Harold Gillies and Henry Pickerill at the forefront.

With Them Through Hell

concentrates on telling the story of the men and women of New Zealand’s medical services in their own words where possible, says Rogers.

The Christchurch author spent two years researching material for her book, including scouring diaries and letters at libraries and museums, old newspaper articles and soldiers’ personal records.

“The thing that struck me over and over again is how young those guys were,” Rogers says. “And also the extraordinary courage of the people looking after them.”

The battle wasn’t over for many Kiwi soldiers when the war ended on November 11, 1918.

Sick and wounded still needed medical treatment, the permanently injured had to rebuild their lives.

When Armistice was declared, one nurse wrote in her diary she “did not know whether to laugh, shout or cry”.

“There seems a short distance between laughter and tears.”

War is about killing and being killed, about being wounded physically and psychologically, Rogers points out.

“But war is also about courage — the courage to continue working, in appalling, perilous conditions and for inhumanly long hours, to save lives — and it is about compassion.”

Doctors used to treating patients in comfortable rooms found themselves in battleground trenches and dugouts. Nurses went from calm wards to crowded tent hospitals full of severely hurt and dying men.

Clerks or shop assistants or students or farmers found themselves staggering through deep mud carrying stretchers while trying to dodge snipers’ bullets.

Rogers wants readers to appreciate the bravery, skill and care of the New Zealand medical personnel in World War I.

“And I also like them to understand just what a terrible, terrible thing a war is.” The poor state of many New Zealanders’ teeth in 1914 meant hundreds of men were turned away from recruiting offices around the country and denied the chance to enlist.

Dental surgeries were set up at Army camps in New Zealand. From November 1915 to November 1918 dentists filled more than 220,000 teeth, performed almost 100,000 extractions and made 24,000 artificial dentures.

Four dental surgeons went to Gallipoli. A surgery was set up. It had 40 patients the day it opened.

Among them was Yorkshire-born New Zealand signaller Bill Leadley, who had broken his bottom set of dentures on hard biscuits while sailing to Gallipoli.

Both these and the loathed bully beef were ruinous for teeth, real and false . . .

Leadley had lost his upper set of teeth in a bayonet charge.

By April 27, 1915, he was reduced to pounding the biscuits into a powder. By May 8 he was “feeling the effects of poor feeding, and had to drop out for a spell, as I was so weak”. His request to be sent to Alexandria in Egypt for teeth was turned down.

On May 20, having heard that a dentist had arrived at Anzac, he found him on the beach and was told that his problem could be remedied as soon as the necessary dental instruments arrived.

As May became June, Leadley was “still persevering with powdered biscuits, but [feeling] awfully weak”.

Finally, he had an impression taken on June 13 and received his top teeth a few days later.

Although they initially seemed a good fit, they soon made his mouth “rather sore, but [it] is better than being without any”.

The Gallipoli dentures, which lasted for many years, were so tough that Leadley amused his children by bouncing them on the floor and catching them. Otaki-based Ethel Lewis, who was originally from Cornwall in England but came to New Zealand in 1912 in her early 30s, was affectionately known as The Little Nurse. She may have stood only 150cm tall, but she had colossal courage and determination, as shown during the great retreat from Serbia after it was invaded in 1915.

Later, while home on leave, she helped fundraise £700 to buy “an up-to-date motor ambulance” for Ma¯ori troops at the war front.

From the book . . .

Former Otaki native health nurse Ethel Lewis was in England when war was declared.

Within a few days Lewis was nursing in a Belgian field hospital, then spent nine weeks in an Antwerp hospital until it was evacuated when the Germans arrived and she returned to England.

She then departed for Serbia. In the trenches on the Bulgarian frontier, she received a slight shrapnel wound to the shoulder and saved the life of a Serbian officer.

During the great retreat, Lewis and another nurse took 400 patients, none of whom survived, through the mountain passes of Albania, on foot, in knee-deep snow, eating a single slice of bread a day and often sleeping in pigsties.

Lewis carried one man on her back for two miles and was suffering from a frostbitten knee when the exhausted hospital staff finally reached safety.

King Peter himself would honour