Recommended: Flanders 1917

The story of Flanders, 1917

“Shoulder to shoulder with the Australians, the men of the New Zealand Division began their attack in gales and driving rain, faced with a morass of mud, uncut barbed wire up to 13 metres deep, an erratic and ineffectual artillery barrage to protect them and withering machine-gun fire. Slowed by the weather and struggling through thick mud, they died in their hundreds. In four hours on the morning of October 12, 1917, New Zealand suffered a casualty toll of 60% of those who took part - 3,296 men of whom 1,190 were killed. It took two and a half days to clear the New Zealand wounded from the battlefield.”

The website http://www.flanders1917.info/ has been created to tell the story of Messines and Passchendaele; their histories and their people; of the New Zealanders, the soldiers, the four New Zealand VCs in Flanders; and of the projects and commemorative events that will begin at Messines on Thursday June 7 - the day, 90 years ago, that the New Zealand Division captured the town. The site has been compiled by Steven Reynaert, of the Messines Council, Freddy Declerck, of the Passchendaele organising committee, and Martin O'Connor, a New Zealander who lives in Belgium.

“The battles of Messines and Passchendaele are among the most iconic events in New Zealand history. Less well known today than Gallipoli, they were, however, just as devastating if not more so. Flanders 1917 touched virtually every family the length and breadth of the land. It left a legacy that exists to this day. “Messines was a great victory - a rarity on the Western Front. It came at no small cost. In the three days historians assign to the battle, New Zealand alone, with a total population of just over one million, sustained 3,660 casualties, 700 of those killed. Many of those casualties occurred not in the attack itself, which was fast and successful, but from shell fire the following day.

“Four months later, just the other side of Ypres, there was another costly success - this time in the Battle of Broodseinde, part of the Third Battle of Ypres and the build-up to what is now known as Passchendaele. Eight days later, the First Battle of Passchendaele became the country's most tragic day. It remains so.”

Ettie Rout: Guardian Angel of the Anzacs

The nzedge.com conversation started with Kevin Kelly on the road to Karekare in 1996. He was asking me a torrent of questions about New Zealand and I said "For some reason a disproportionate number of New Zealanders seems to have changed the world in some way or other." The Eureka Moment reply was that change happens on the edge of the species. Part of the edge storytelling process has been to research and publish definitive short biographies of these world-changers. There are about 35 on the site (out of an initial list of 100), from the automatic Rutherford, Hillary, Pearse, Mansfield, Sheppard, Lovelock and MacDiarmid, to people largely unsighted such as Joseph Sinel, Colin Murdoch, Nancy Wake and Alexander Aitken. Their stories are "heroic" simply because they are. Inspirational New Zealanders. Paul Ward and I have written most of the stories. I have wanted to include Ettie Rout's story because she is a role model who did it tough. BS.

Activist in the prevention of the scourge of WWI – venereal disease – Christchurch’s Ettie Rout was infamous for breaching social mores in sexual health and practice. An original career woman, socialist, nurse, equal rights campaigner, condom distributor, wartime Paris safe-sex brothel operator, banned author of “Safe Marriage”, a “wicked” and “scandalous woman” of the sisterhood. Ettie Rout was a focused, relentless and empathetic humanitarian who faced danger, opposition, ostracism and eventually self-exile. 1700 words. Illustrated. Story by Paul Ward and Ingrid Horrocks with thanks to biographer Jane Tolerton. www.nzedge.com/heroes/rout.html