Brush

Made my own brush for future experimentation.

Style

These images (by Dean Cornwell, Wyndham Lewis, Charlie Griak, Peter McIntyre and Ivor Hele) show the style I am interested in.

My personal style is quite realistic so I want to incorporate my style with their aesthetic, also considering the art movement from the period.

Art movements from the period 1914-1918

Art movements from 1914-1918

Vorciticism, Cubism, Analytic-cubism, Orphism.

Themes

These are the following themes that interests me:

• First world war medical services
• The New Zealand soldier at war
• The western front

So at this stage I am tossing up between First world war medical services and The New Zealand soldier at war.

NZ Nurses

New Zealand Army nurses and medical officers pose in front of the carved gateway of the New Zealand Stationary Hospital at Wisques, France.

Forty New Zealand nurses worked in the 1000-bed hospital at Wisques. The work was tough and constant: three hours off a day and a half-day’s leave once every 10 days – unless there was a rush of wounded, and then all leave would be cancelled. This was one of the hospitals that treated New Zealanders wounded in Passchendaele during October 1917.

The New Zealand Army Nursing Service had been set up in 1915, largely at the urging of Hester Maclean (1863–1932). She had been made matron-in-chief of a proposed military nursing reserve in 1911, but she wanted New Zealand soldiers injured overseas to be nursed by New Zealanders. As head of the Army Nursing Service from 1915, she selected and equipped all army nurses. The first group of 50 sailed to Egypt in April 1915 with Maclean as escort. They later went to England, with 35–40 crossing to France in 1916 and Belgium the following year.

Helping the wounded

And poor Jim was laying there cuddled up in a heap as men die. Don’t forget we was all young, we didn’t die easy. You don’t die at once, you’re not shot and killed stone dead. You don’t die at once. We were all fit and highly trained and of course we didn’t die easy, you see. You were slow to die and you’d find them huddled up in a heap like kids gone to sleep, you know, cuddled up dead.

From interview with Sidney Stanfield

 

War meant casualties. New Zealand’s battles in Belgium took their toll in lives and limbs – more than 14,000 New Zealanders were wounded between June and December 1917. Shellfire and shrapnel punctured flesh and severed limbs; gas poisoned bodies; bacteria from the stinking mud infected wounds. Those who recovered felt the effects for years afterwards; hallucinations and nightmares wracked men suffering from shell-shock.

Moving the wounded

Wounded men would be moved (by stretcher-bearers if necessary) to regimental aid posts for hurried medical treatment. Another team of stretcher-bearers would carry them to dressing stations. There, treatment was limited: bleeding was stopped; splints were applied; wounds were quickly stitched; shock was treated as well as possible; and badly shattered limbs were removed. Morphia and other anesthetics would be given only in small doses, if at all. The use of penicillin for fighting infection had not yet been developed.

Stretcher-bearers in the thick of it

The wounded were then taken to the relative safety of casualty clearing stations, which were often a few miles from the dressing station. Ambulances (motorised or horse-drawn) and stretcher-bearers carried those who could not walk. Surgical teams made up of a surgeon, anaesthetist, sister and orderly – worked at clearing stations, along with other medical staff, orderlies, chaplains and stretcher-bearers. Once treated or diagnosed, men would be sent on. Some went to the New Zealand Stationary Hospitals in Hazebrouck or Wisques for more serious operations or treatments. Others went to hospitals in the United Kingdom where some remained for the rest of the war. Still others returned to the front. 

New Zealand nurses

New Zealand Stationary Hospital at Wisques, France

In May 1917 medical staff, including 35 nurses from the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, moved from Amiens to set up the New Zealand Stationary Hospital at Hazebrouck, closer to the front. It was a makeshift hospital: a girls’ boarding school and a couple of big tents converted into wards and operating theatres.

There the doctors and nurses waited for the wounded who would inevitably come once the planned offensive against the Germans started. The first New Zealanders arrived on 9 June, two days after the Battle of Messines had started. Many had head injuries, which this hospital specialised in.

It is terrible to see these men wounded in the head — numbers of them become paralysed and quite a number were minus arms and legs or eyes. For the first few days they were quite silly — lost their reasons and some speechless. Oh, it was ghastly and desperately busy — we just went on and on doing dressings no hope of finishing … Crowds died of course.

Elsie Grey, New Zealand Army Nursing Service, in Anna Rogers, While you’re away: New Zealand nurses at war 1899–1948, 2003

Resources:

*New Zealand nurses and medical officers

Information from New Zealand History Online.

*Helping the wounded – Passchendaele

The medical experience of Passchendaele.

*New Zealand Army Nursing Service

Links to all mentions of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service in the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection. 

*Christchurch Nurses Memorial Chapel

Information on the chapel which was inspired in part by the sinking of the Marquette.

• World War, 1914-1918 – Medical Care – New Zealand
• Military nursing – New Zealand

A brief video over how the medical services in the first world war operated and how efficient it was.

Other found resources on medical service:

• THE NEW ZEALAND MEDICAL SERVICE IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918
• THE NEW ZEALAND MEDICAL SERVICE IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918 (Notes on some military formations)

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN WWI

WOMEN IN WWI

During WWI over 6 million men enlisted to go and fight overseas, when they left their jobs had to be filled, so women had to take over these jobs, women had many well-known roles such as nurses, factory workers, sewing bandages, and selling war bonds, shipyards and spies. The Women’s Royal Air Force was created during this, which is where women worked on planes as mechanics. By 1917 68% of women had changed jobs since the war began, 16% had moved out of domestic service, 22% that were unemployed in 1914 now had work, and 23% had changed to different factories.

HOW DID THE NURSES GET ENLISTED INTO THE WAR

A lot of women volunteered to join the VAD’s (Voluntary Aid Detachment) and FANY’s (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.) VAD’s came from a variety of backgrounds – cooks, domestic servants, laundry workers etc. Their medical training was basic but the fact that they went to the war zone meant that they could comfort badly injured soldiers and give them basic medical treatment even if they were originally not allowed to give injections.

LIFE STYLE OF NURSES

Nurses of WWI worked from sun up to sun down, and barely got any sleep. However, this did not bother many nurses. The conditions were cold and sometimes rainy. The sounds of the battlefield could be heard in the nurses’ living quarters.5 An American nurse wrote a detailed description of her morning and nights on the front lines:It is a marvelous life; and strangely enough, despite all the tragedy, I call it a healthy one. One works, and when that is over one sleeps enough to keep in condition, and that is absolutely all, except a cold sponge bath (no bath-tubs here), and a cologne rubdown in the morning, and the walk to and from the Hospital. In the morning now it is bitter cold and misty and half dark, and one gets weird glimpses of departing regiments, and white-capped old market-women, and pointed gables across the gloom; and at night the splendid stars, and now a great lustrous moon, and every day and night the boom, boom of the cannon which sounds very awesome these days. That is all I know of the world I live in.

Nurses sometimes shared rooms with civilians while serving in the war. In some nurses case, they write about night’s spent in Belgian woman’s home while serving overseas:

It was now getting very late, and we were told nothing could be done till the morning, so we gratefully accepted the offer of one bed from a kind Belgian woman.  We spent a sleepless night.  The guns sounded so close and shook the house

An anonymous nurse also wrote about the food in a passage of her diary:

Food was getting beautifully less and less, meat very occasional, and we lived for the most part on beans and potatoes and soup made of the same, flavored with many frying’s in the frying-pan.

HOW THE NURSES FELT

Nurses had a lot of mixed emotions while serving over seas and a lot of these feelings were put into diary entries, poems etc.A nurse Gertrude Doherty, from WA, wrote to her cousin Muriel in Sydney:

We look forward to our letters on mail day. Of course we can never make our letters sound as cheerful as yours. I am sure you will understand why when I tell you that we are surrounded by sadness and sorrow all the time … do you know, Muriel, that as many as 72 operations have been performed in one day in our hospital alone … you could not imagine how dirty the poor beggars are, never able to get a wash, mud and dirt ground in and nearly all of them alive with vermin.

They feel ashamed being so dirty, we always tell them that if they came down any cleaner we would not think they had been in it at all.

In this letter Gertrude Doherty talks about how they feel so ashamed to be dirty like its something that they’re not used to and something that is difficult to deal with. How every day they deal with beggars every day and how they deal with so many.

Things like this was how the nurses felt throughout the war and there are a lot more examples.

WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN WESTERN COUNTRIES?

Prior to the First World War, a woman’s role in western countries was generally based on the domestic sphere, not even in there homes sometimes. Great Britain as an example ,prior to World War I, out of an adult population of around 23 million women, around 1.4 million worked in the domestic services, 700,000 worked in the textile production industry, 700,000 worked in the clothing manufacturing industry, 600,000 worked in commerce and 250,000 worked in local and national government (including teaching roles). The Great British textile and clothing industries, in particular, employed many more women than men and could be regarded as ‘women’s work’.While some women managed to enter traditional career paths, for the better part of women were expected to be primarily involved in “duties at home” and “women’s work”. Before 1914, only a few countries had given the right for women to vote, and apart from these countries women were little involved in the political process.

The two world wars hinged as much on industrial production as they did on battlefield clashes. With millions of men away fighting and with the inevitable horrendous casualties, there was a severe shortage of labour in a range of industries, from rural and farm work to city office jobs.

During both World War I and World War II, women were called on, by necessity, to do work and to take on roles that were outside their traditional gender expectations. In Great Britain this was known as a process of “Dilution” and was strongly contested by the trade unions, particularly in the engineering and ship building industries. Women did, for the duration of both World Wars, take on jobs that were traditionally regarded as skilled “men’s work”. However, in accordance with the agreement negotiated with the trade unions, women undertaking jobs covered by the Dilution agreement lost their jobs at the end of the First World War.

DID WOMEN JOIN MEN ON THE BATTLEFIELD?

Women were not allowed to fight in World War 1. But thousands of women worked in munitions factories, offices and large hangars used to build aircraft. Women were also involved in knitting socks and preparing hampers for the soldiers on the front, as well as other voluntary work, but as a matter of survival women had to work for paid employment for the sake of their families.Nursing became the one and only area of female contribution that involved being at the front and experiencing the horror of war. In Britain the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and Voluntary Aid Detachment were all started before World War I. The VADs were not allowed in the front line until 1915.

DID WOMEN HAVE TO WORK THE CROPS?

Women did grow the crops and take care of the  children. But they worked as members of the land army (farming), as nurses, in munitions factories, in public transport, as police women, in post offices and making weapons. By the end of the war women were also being recruited into the army forces as cooks, clerks, telephonists, electricians, instructors and code experts to free up men to fight. Many lady’s still does their usual jobs as cleaning their own homes and looking after their children. This changed the way we saw women in the 20th century.

WHAT JOBS DID THEY HAVE DURING THE WAR?

During WWI over 6 million men enlisted to go and fight overseas, when they left their jobs had to be filled, so women had to take over these jobs, women had many well-known roles such as nurses, factory workers, sewing bandages, and selling war bonds, shipyards and spies. The Women’s Royal Air Force was created during this, which is where women worked on planes as mechanics. By 1917 68% of women had changed jobs since the war began, 16% had moved out of domestic service, 22% that were unemployed in 1914 now had work, and 23% had changed to different factories.The first nurses of the war went to help the troops overseas in England, Egypt, France, Belgium and Mesopotamia. They helped out in hospitals, hospital ships and hospital tents that were set up with just dirt floors. There were more duties that the nurses had to carry out in the war than at home. They didn’t have many resources or much equipment, and had to work at a fast pace in order to keep up with the constant demands. The women suffered aswell, also suffering from psychological traumas from the experiences of the war and the wounds of the men.

Soldiers went through tough times in terrible conditions on the battlefields, but what about the women that were left behind? For those women that had been left behind by a son, their husband, brothers, fathers, or friends, they were constantly waiting for their return. With the lack of communication between the home front and the battlefield, the most common news women received from the war was when a clergyman appeared at their doorstep giving them the news of their loved one’s death. This was traumatizing and caused grief to the women. Women also had to deal with managing children and family responsibilities alone, shortages of resources and their fears for the future.

WHAT JOBS DID WOMEN HAVE BEFORE THE WAR?

Before the war, it was commonly believed that a woman’s place was in the home or doing ‘feminine jobs’. For example, house cleaning and looking after the kids. The only power they had in politics was the right to vote, which wasn’t common in a lot of countries around the world. Yet women still received wages about 50% lower than men’s. A woman’s place was seen to be at home, doing their domestic tasks and raising their children. They were not even permitted to work in factories as it was seen as unladylike for them to be open to that kind of environment, which was common among most countries.

WHAT WAS THERE LIFE LIKE AFTER THE WAR?

Not all women left their homes to do their bit in the factories. Some women spent their time knitting socks for the troops, rolling bandages and getting medical kits and that ready, or raising money for war causes. All over the Britain and in America, women were supporting the troops as best they could. The war ended on the 11th November 1918. The world had to try to regain normality. For millions of women, that meant returning to the lives they had before. In February 1918 the British government passed the Representation of the People Act, which gave women the right to vote. Women over the age of 30 who were either householders or married to householders were allowed to vote. This gave around 8 million women the right to vote. Later in the year, women were given the right to be elected to Parliament. It took another ten years before women were given the vote on an equal footing with men.

HOW DID WOMEN’S ROLE OF A MOTHER CHANGE:

The women’s role of a  mother had changed when the men had left to go to war. They were left on their own to raise their children. The men were gone for nearly a year from 25th of April 1915 to January 1916 during the first world war. Some of the women had raised over five children on their own. When they left the mothers had started making fundraising for the war and try to make jobs in the war. If the women weren’t at home with the kids they are normally working in factories. Most of the women that had family in the war had worked in factories or services for the war. Women were in the Gallipoli campaign to be mostly nurses.

HOW DID THE WOMEN HELP

The role of women in world war one had many jobs. They were nurses, Doctors, cooks, transport drivers and they did fundraising.  Women were sent over to help the medics in the Gallipoli campaign.  They helped the cooks make all the food for the men. For a long time women have been in the war. They did many jobs .Australian nurses have dealt face to face  with the war in helping the sick and wounded.  The cooks have made a lot of food over the wars.

HOW DID WOMEN GET INVOLVED

Women started getting involved in  the war because they not allowed work in some job sites. When they joined the war most of them were nurses and cooks. The nurses that were in Gallipoli had to deal with mostly wounded than sick. When they were cooks they had a separate room in their trenches away from everything. They would make things like Bully beef, canned meat, hard biscuits, tea and Jam.  Food and water was very hard for the soldiers in the Gallipoli, it was considered and taken for granted.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE MEN LEFT THEIR FAMILIES

When the men left their families the women were left to raise all the children on their own. The mothers had to feed them and take care of them just by them selves. The women were also left to fend for them selves. With not a lot of money it was hard to take care of many children on their own. 

 Reference: http://ethankokkola.weebly.com/how-did-womens-role-as-a-mother-change.html

The Seven Medals

The thirty-one New Zealanders who died on Saturday 23 October 1915 when the Marquette went down are commentated on the Mikra Memorial. The Mikra Memorial, at the south end of Mikra British Cemetery, commemorates almost 500 nurses, officers and men of the Commonwealth forces who died when troop transports and hospital ships were lost in the Mediterranean, and who have no grave but the sea. They are commemorated here because others who went down in the same vessels were washed ashore and identified, and are now buried at Thessalonika. The three photographs directly below were kindly taken in 2005 by Nontas Meletiou of the Municipality of Kalamaria, Greece, for Victor Walter, Wellington, New Zealand, nephew of John Bruno Walter, a casualty of the Marquette tragedy.

ROGERS, Nurse Margaret was a prominent member of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Christchurch.  She was a student volunteer for Foreign Missions and had offered her services as a trained nurse for work at the New Hebrides to assist Dr Bowie, when the eruption there brought the work to a close and changed her plans.  She then took up district work under Nurse Maude. Thomas Rogers, Wainui, Banks Peninsula (father).

In a recent letter Nurse ROGERS said:

There is no romance about war; it spells suffering, hunger, filth.  How thankful I am every day that I came to do what I could to help and relieve our brave boys. [AWN 11.11.1915]

 

WWI in NZ

We live so much under the shadow of sudden death, that one sees things very differently to ordinary times. Life is normally complicated, here it is savagely simple. Eat while you can, help all you can, sleep when and where you can, and above all, grin and keep a stiff upper lip. Even a mechanical smile is better than an anxious look. Worrying is not good for the men.

Percival Fenwick, medical officer on Gallipoli, 1915

Borrowed some books from the library for further research/inspiration. There are a few pages that I found quite interesting so I decided to take some photos. See images below.

World War I

World War I is remembered as one of the most traumatic events in New Zealand’s history, because of the scale of the country’s loss. Over the war’s four years, 124 211 men from a total New Zealand population of about 1 million volunteered for military service or were conscripted; the dead numbered 18 166, and the wounded 41 217.

New Zealand entered the war as a member of the British Empire. The first major action in which New Zealand soldiers fought as part of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (the ANZACs) was on the Gallopoli Peninsula. Allied strategies hoped that the capture of the peninsula would end Turkish participation in the war and open up a scene supply route to Russia. The campaign lasted eight months and ended in failure for the Allies. Of the New Zealanders that fought at Gallipoli, nearly a quarter (2721) died.

New Zealand and Australian soldiers landing at Anzac Cove, 25 April 1915

The landing at Anzac, April 25, 1915 by Charles Dixon.
Charles Dixon (1872-1934) was an English artist who specialised in marine scenes, working in both oils and watercolours. He is probably best known for his depictions of activity on the Thames River in London, but he is also known for his paintings of major events in maritime history. Although not an official war artist, according to an article about him by Stuart Boyd in Antique collection, April 1986.

Each year on 25 April – Anzac Day – New Zealanders (and Australians) mark the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings of 1915. On that day, thousands of young men, far from their homes, stormed the beaches on the Gallipoli Peninsula in what is now modern Turkey. For nine long months New Zealanders, Australians and allies from France and the British Isles battled harsh conditions and Turkish opponents who were desperately fighting to protect their homeland.

By the time the campaign ended, over 120,000 men had died: more than 80,000 Turkish soldiers and 44,000 British and French soldiers, including over 8500 Australians. Among the dead were 2721 young New Zealanders, about a quarter of those who had landed on the peninsula.

In the history of the Great War, the Gallipoli campaign made no large mark. The number of dead, although horrific, pales in comparison with the number that died in France and Belgium during the war. But for New Zealand, along with Australia and Turkey, the Gallipoli campaign played an important part in fostering a sense of national identity.

A soldier loads a New Zealand trench mortar.

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie were assassinated in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. The fallout from this faraway event would ultimately claim the lives of 18,500 New Zealanders and wound as many as 50,000. Places thousands of miles from home with exotic-sounding names such as Gallipoli, Passchendaele and theSomme were forever etched in the national memory during what became known as the Great War.

The war took more than 100,000 New Zealanders overseas, many for the first time. Some anticipated a great adventure but found the reality very different. Being so far from home made these New Zealanders very aware of who they were and where they were from. In battle they were able to compare themselves with men from other nations. Out of this came a sense of a separate identity, and many New Zealand soldiers began to refer to themselves as ‘Kiwis’.

The significance of the war on New Zealand society was summed up by a man who participated in it from Gallipoli to France. Ormond Burton went from being a stretcher-bearer at Anzac Cove to a highly decorated infantryman on the Western Front. He believed that ‘somewhere between the landing at Anzac and the end of the battle of the Somme New Zealand very definitely became a nation’.

Quick facts and figures

• The total population of New Zealand in 1914 was just over one million.
• In all, 120,000 New Zealanders enlisted, of whom 103,000 served overseas.
• A total of 2227 Maori and 458 Pacific Islanders served in the New Zealand forces.
• At least 3370 New Zealanders served in the Australian or imperial forces, winning four Victoria Crosses.
• In all, 550 nurses served with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and many others enlisted in the United Kingdom.
• A total of 18,500 New Zealanders died in or because of the war, and around 41,000 were wounded. More than 2700 died at Gallipoli and 12,500 on the Western Front.
• The names of those who died are recorded on approximately 500 civic war memorials throughout New Zealand.

Link below is a short film which shows conditions on the Western Front during the First World War. It includes the recollections of New Zealand veterans who were there.

Film: Trench life in the first World War

Transcript

Narrator: Down on the ground, winter conditions made life unbearable.

NZ soldier 1: Ghastly, hell. Just mud mud mud. Trenches half full of mud. And you’re wet through, oh all the time.

NZ soldier 2: Oh, frightful. You’ve no idea what it was like. You lived in dugouts and you were wet well over your ankles and mud all the time. You had no protection, you just had a ground sheet over you, you would wake up in the morning with the snow over your feet, and you were everlastingly in dampness.

Narrator: Messines, the Somme 1916 and 1918, Passchendaele, Ypres, the Hindenburg Line, Le Quesnoy. The cost of maintaining our division in France for two and a half years was appalling. Our total casualties were 18,500 dead, nearly 50,000 wounded – many twice over. This was a terrible price to pay, and our population then was just over a million.

First World War Timeline

This timeline lists key events in New Zealand’s experience of the First World War.

1914

28 June – Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife in Sarajevo triggers the build-up to the First World War. By 4 August, Europe’s major powers are at war. Read more (Te Ara)

4 August – Britain declares war on Germany

New Zealand receives the news of the outbreak of war at 1 p.m. on 5 August (NZ time). It is announced by the Governor, the Earl of Liverpool, on the steps of Parliament to a crowd of 15,000. Read more

29 August – NZ forces capture German Samoa

A 1374-strong ‘Advance Party NZEF’ captures German Samoa, the second German territory, after Togoland in Africa, to fall to Allied forces during the war. Read more

16 September – Maori Contingent formed

Government announces the formation of a ‘Maori Contingent’ of 200 men for service with the NZEF. This is expanded to 500 at the suggestion of the British War Office. Read more

16 October – NZEF Main Body departs

The NZEF Main Body, consisting of 8454 soldiers and about 3000 horses, departs Wellington in 10 troopships. They arrive in Egypt on 3 December and establish a camp at Zeitoun, near Cairo. Read more (Te Ara)

29 October – The Ottoman Empire enters the war

The Ottoman Empire enters the war as an ally of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The British Empire (including New Zealand) and France declare war on the Ottoman Empire on 5 November. Read more

8 December – ANZAC name introduced

The NZEF combines with Australian Imperial Force units to form the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. ‘Anzac’ is adopted as the label for Australian or New Zealand soldiers following the Gallipoli landings. Read more

1915

3 February – New Zealand soldiers see first combat

New Zealand soldiers see first combat of the war when they help defend the Suez Canal from an attack by Ottoman troops. Private William Ham, severely wounded during the fighting, becomes the NZEF’s first combat fatality two days later. Read more

25 April – Gallipoli landings

The ANZAC land near Ari Burnu at what has become known as Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli peninsula of Turkey. The first New Zealand troops land in the late morning. Read more

5–8 May – Second Battle of Krithia

The New Zealand Brigade deploys south to Cape Helles, Gallipoli and takes part in a series of unsuccessful attacks toward the village of Krithia on the slopes of Achi Baba. They suffer over 800 casualties.Read more

8 August – NZ troops capture Chunuk Bair

The Wellington Battalion captures the Chunuk Bair summit during the Battle of Sari Bair. New Zealand units hold the summit for two days until relieved by British troops on the night of 9-10 August. Chunuk Bair is recaptured by the Turks the next day. Read more

12 August – National coalition government takes office

The Reform and Liberal parties join together to form a National government under the leadership of Prime Minister William Massey and Sir Joseph Ward. The coalition lasts until August 1919. Read more (Te Ara)

15–20 December – Evacuations from Gallipoli

Authorities in London decide to withdraw from the Gallipoli peninsula. New Zealand troops are evacuated from the Anzac area between 15 and 20 December. The campaign has cost New Zealand nearly 7500 casualties, including 2721 dead. Read more

1916

1 March – New Zealand Division formed

The New Zealand Division is formed with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd (Rifle) brigades. Major-General Sir Andrew Russell is given command. The division is sent to the Western Front and arrives in France from Egypt in April 1916. Read more (Te Ara)

25 April – First Anzac Day service

First Anzac Day services are held in New Zealand to mark the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. The government had announced the establishment of ‘Anzac Day’ as a half-day holiday on 5 April. Read more

31 May–1 June – HMS New Zealand takes part in the Battle of Jutland

In 1909 New Zealand offered a battleship to Britain to help strengthen their naval fleet. The battle cruiser HMS New Zealand joined the British battle fleet in 1912 and took part in the Battle of Jutland (1916). Read more

1 August – Conscription introduced

Conscription is introduced in New Zealand by the Military Service Act. As a result 32,000 conscripts serve overseas with the NZEF alongside 72,000 volunteers. The first conscription ballot is held on 16 November 1916. Read more

4 August – Battle of Romani

Following Gallipoli, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade take part in campaigns against Ottoman forces in Sinai and Palestine, 1916-1918. They see their first major action near Romani in the Sinai. Read more

15 September – NZ Division goes into action on the Somme

The New Zealand Division takes part in its first major action near Flers during the Somme offensive (July-November 1916). Over the next 23 days, the division suffers 7000 casualties, including more than 1500 killed. Read more.

1917

9 January – Battle of Rafah

New Zealanders become the first Allied troops to cross into Ottoman Palestine. A charge by the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade results in the capture of Rafah and its Ottoman garrison on the Sinai-Palestine border. Read more.

7 June – Battle of Messines

The New Zealand Division takes all its objectives, including the village of Messines. The New Zealanders suffer 3700 casualties, including 700 killed during the battle. Read more.

25 June – German raider lays mines off NZ

The German armed merchant cruiser Wolf lays mines off the Three Kings Islands and off Farewell Spit two nights later. These mines sink the merchant ships Port Kembla (18 September 1917) andWimmera (26 June 1918). Read more.

4 October – Third Battle of Ypres

New Zealand’s 1st and 4th brigades take part in a successful attack on Gravenstafel Spur, which runs off Passchendaele ridge. The attack costs more than 320 New Zealand lives, including that of former All Black captain Dave Gallaher. Read more.

12 October – New Zealand’s blackest day

The 2nd and 3rd (Rifle) brigades suffer over 2700 casualties in a disastrous attack on Bellevue Spur, Passchendaele. About 845 men are left dead or dying. Read more.

1918

26–30 March – Back to the Somme

A massed German attack on 21 March tears a hole in the British front. The New Zealand Division is among several units rushed to fill this gap near the Somme. They fight off several German attacks and hold their line. Read more (Te Ara)

23 September – Last major action in the Middle East

New Zealand mounted troops help capture Es Salt and Amman (25 September) in Jordan. Read more.

29 September–5 October – Breaking through the Hindenburg Line

New Zealand troops help break through the Hindenburg Line – the main German defence system on the Western Front. Read more (Te Ara)

31 October – Ottoman Empire sues for peace

With her armies defeated, and her German ally on the verge of collapse, the Ottoman Empire seeks an armistice with the Allies. This comes into effect on 31 October. Read more.

4 November – Liberation of Le Quesnoy

New Zealand troops liberate the walled town of Le Quesnoy, advancing 10km and capturing nearly 2000 prisoners in the process. This is the last major action of the war for the New Zealand Division. Read more.

11 November – Armistice Day

Fighting on the Western Front stops when an armistice comes into effect at 11 a.m. Read more.

20 December – Occupation duties

The New Zealand Division crosses into Germany. They take part in the occupation of Germany’s Rhineland, stationed near Cologne. This is a short-lived assignment and the division is disbanded on 25 March 1919. Read more(Te Ara)

1919

15–16 March – Troops riot at Sling Camp

New Zealand troops at Sling Camp in Wiltshire, England riot over delays in their repatriation home. Transport issues and the influenza pandemic mean that the last group of New Zealand soldiers do not arrive home until May 1920. Read more (Te Ara)

28 June – Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles peace agreement is signed between Germany and the Allies. Prime Minister William Massey signs for New Zealand.

First World War Newspaper Timeline

(Click link below)

http://www.digitalnz.org/user_sets/b33879b5007b5bf1