100 Kiwi Stories: Valiant doc cool under fire

Arthur Martin recorded his grim experiences at the WWI front in A Surgeon in Khaki. Photo / University of Wellington

59: Arthur Martin was quick to operate on wounded soldiers - even in the heat of battle

Arthur Martin was hard to keep away from the front.

In his early 20s he volunteered for service in the Boer War and spent a year and a half in South Africa.

When Britain declared itself at war with Germany, Martin was in Britain at a medical conference. Unhesitatingly he offered his services once more and spent eight months in France and Flanders.

In his first tour of Great War duty, with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Martin was an advocate of immediate surgery - even under fire - for soldiers with wounds to the abdomen, chest and legs. Like many brave doctors, he frequently placed himself at risk while tending the injured.

For his courage he was mentioned in dispatches by General John French in 1915 and General Douglas Haig in 1916.

Returning to New Zealand for a spell away from the dying and wounded, and to reunite with his wife Constance in Palmerston North, Martin was asked to join an inquiry into health conditions at Trentham military camp, where there had been outbreaks of measles and cerebrospinal meningitis.

He stayed in New Zealand just long enough to record his experiences in a book A Surgeon in Khaki and to train recruits for ambulance and first-aid work on the battlefield.

Then he was off again once more to France and the Somme frontline.

It was there that Major Martin was injured by a shell blast. He died, aged 39, less than a day later.

Martin was one of 662 New Zealand Medical Corps casualties - either killed or wounded - and one of nine officers killed in action. He died on the same day as another admired New Zealand doctor, Gilbert Bogle, and their deaths gave rise to orders for much more caution by doctors.

Contemporary accounts of the Milton-born surgeon suggest he was relentless in his determination to stand firm in the field with the troops.

An obituary at the time called Martin a man of "inexhaustible energy and exceptional ability".

After high school, Martin travelled to Scotland in 1894 to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 1900 he went to South Africa as a civil surgeon.

His field cases appeared in the British Medical Journal, and became the basis of a thesis for his doctorate in medicine. Back in New Zealand, Martin started work in Palmerston North, where his restless curiosity led him into the treatment of cancer.

He secured financial support for a radium clinic and in 1914 travelled to the United States in search of up-to-date clinical information and further funding.

He was in Aberdeen, as the New Zealand delegate to the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, when war broke out.

An acute wartime observer, Martin's book is now considered a classic memoir of World War I.

In one passage, Martin describes coming across French civilians shot and killed by retreating German soldiers near Marne, France.

"I examined the wound with great care and would be quite prepared to swear in any court of law that the man who shot him had pressed the revolver against the dead man's chest when he shot him," wrote Martin. "This is the German way."

He was was buried at Amiens on the Somme.

100 Kiwi Stories runs every Monday and Thursday

To read the first 58 stories see: World War 1