Three Years With The New Zealanders [Illustrated Edition]

Book excerpt: Illustrated with more than 25 photos and 3 maps. In these gripping battlefield memoirs of Lt.-Col Weston, he recounts his experiences of the bloody fighting that the New Zealanders experienced fighting in Europe during the First World War. The Author sailed from his home in New Plymouth in 1915, as an ex-cadet he volunteered for active service, his destination was to be Egypt as thence to the hellish conditions of Gallipoli. He fought side by side with his men of the Wellington Battalion until the eventual evacuation of all the Allied forces. Little respite was allowed to the author and the other Anzacs who had survived Gallipoli as they were pitched into the fighting on the Western Front during the battle of the Somme in 1916 and then again in the fierce battles of Messines, La Bassée and Passchendaele. By this point Weston had been promoted Lieutenant but was wounded by artillery fire at Ypres in 1917 his war was at an end, being invalided from the service with full honours.