100 Kiwi Stories from WWI: Chaplains died alongside troops

Major William Grant.

41 Chaplain killed tending to enemy

The Gallipoli landings occurred on April 25, 1915. It was eight months of bloodshed before evacuations began in December.

Chaplain-Major William Grant died in a trench on the dusty, barren peninsula, like 2800 other New Zealanders. The difference was that Grant died tending wounded Turks.

If the Great War was for king and country, some believed it was for Christianity, too. Donald Cochrane of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa's Photo Archive Research Centre said the sermons Presbyterian ministers shouted at the time covered "a just holy war to the bitter end, to smashing German militarism in order to free the German people".

The League of Nations was praised; alcohol was scorned.

Because they went everywhere the troops went, chaplains were constantly caught up in the killing. The Rev G. S. Bryan Brown was killed at Passchendaele by a shell in October 1917.

"He had been helping the wounded at an advanced dressing station, and had come out to get a breath of fresh air when a shell burst beside him," a war correspondent reported.

The Rev Alexander Allen was also killed on the Western Front, in May 1918.

Chaplain-Captain J. R. Stewart was holding a funeral service for multiple men shot dead in Flanders in May 1916 when a shell exploded, killing the chaplain.

A Rev R. H. Fulford was to have gone to New Zealand at the end of the war to organise the Church of England Men's Society, but was killed in Mesopotamia in January 1917.

Chaplain-Major Grant, 56, was serving as Presbyterian chaplain with the Anzacs at Gallipoli in September 1915.

During a firefight on August 28, Grant had gone searching for wounded New Zealanders, Australian war correspondent Captain Charles Bean reported.

Instead, Grant found a trench full of wounded Turkish troops. Grant dressed their wounds and discussed further treatment with his companion.

"The chaplain crept forward to the bend of the trench. Suddenly there was a report and the chaplain fell forward. A rattle of rifle-shots broke out, making it impossible to reach him."

Grant was buried roughly a mile from where he fell, on Hill 60.

He received the Star British War Medal and the Victory Medal, and left a widow and five children. Two of his sons continued to fight in other parts of Europe.