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Every Anzac Day, the legacy of the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli casts a long shadow as we remember those who died on April 25.
Thousands of Anzac troops lost their lives, but supporting them were the auxiliary services – the non-combatants who worked behind the front line. Among them were 550 New Zealand nurses.
When war broke out in 1914, New Zealand had no official army nursing service, and the government initially refused to establish one despite many women offering to serve. In 1915, the Minister of Defence relented, and 50 nurses boarded the SS Rotorua bound for Alexandria to care for the sick and wounded from Gallipoli. Two more contingents followed, sailing on the Marama in May and the Maheno in August.
Aboard the Marama was my grandmother’s aunt, Edith McLeod, a 27-year-old nurse from Masterton. She may have expected hardship, but neither she nor her fellow nurses could have imagined what followed.
On October 23, just five months after arriving in Egypt, Edith was among the medical staff of No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital travelling from Egypt to Salonika aboard the troopship Marquette. The ship also carried 500 men and officers of the British 29th Division, along with mules, horses and ammunition.
Because the Marquette was a troop ship and not marked with a Red Cross, it was not protected under the Geneva Convention. At 9am, it was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Accounts say the nurses, well drilled in lifeboat procedures, calmly took their positions on either side of the ship, ready to board. Tragically, on the port side, after one boat was successfully launched, a second became trapped on the davits and crashed into it, killing several nurses and throwing others, including Edith, into the sea.
Her back was injured in the impact, but she managed to swim clear – no easy task in the heavy Edwardian uniform nurses were required to wear.
Edith later wrote to her sister describing her ordeal.
“I knew that I had to get away from the ship, so I swam a little way and saw two men clinging to a plank. I asked if I could get hold of it, and the man said there was not room, but the other man held out his hand and pulled me up to them, and we got a good distance away from the ship before she sank.”
They waited hours for rescue.
“One of the men I knew had been a patient at Port Said. The poor fellow soon became exhausted. I held his hand for some time, but he became quite cyanosed. One of the other men held him for a while, but he cramped and had to let go. It seemed dreadful to let him go. I begged him to hold on, but he could not.”
Eventually, the survivors were rescued by a British destroyer. Ten nurses and 22 New Zealand men died. Of the 741 people on board, 167 lost their lives.
The sinking caused outrage in New Zealand, coming so soon after Gallipoli. Questions were raised about why medical personnel were travelling on a troopship when a hospital ship had left the same day.
Edith returned home to recover, but she was obviously a determined woman because in February 1916 she returned to service first in Egypt, then at No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital in Amiens on the Western Front. She continued her work through the influenza pandemic before finally returning to New Zealand in 1919. For her service, she was awarded the Royal Red Cross (2nd Class).
The debt owed to these nurses is immense. They worked in extreme conditions, through heat and cold, long exhausting hours, treating horrific wounds as well as diseases such as dysentery and typhoid, and the effects of mustard gas.
A further 16 New Zealand nurses died during the war, in addition to the 10 lost on the Marquette.
These determined and extraordinary women cared for thousands of soldiers and laid the foundations for the military nursing services that continue today. In all likelihood, any New Zealand soldier who needed medical care during World War One was treated by one of these women – our other Anzacs.
Read about Sister Florence Winifred Upton Local Matters April 27, 2023. For a book, try: The Other Anzacs: Nurses at War 1914-1918 by Peter Rees (2008)
