The New Zealand Herald features Anna Rogers’ book on the New Zealand medical personal who served in the Great War:
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, stretcher-bearers, 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.
Read the full article here.
