100 Kiwis Stories: Tough man of the Somme dies in Africa

Men of the King's African Rifles at Njombe, German East Africa.

Wellington schoolteacher and officer in Britain’s ‘Die Hards’ shot twice in the head and survived.

62 William Clachan was made of tough stuff.

The Wellington schoolteacher was wounded three times on the Western Front. He twice suffered head injuries, and on the second occasion, doctors found the bullet which caused his first head wounds. Each time Clachan recovered and, after time away from the battlefront to recuperate, threw himself back into action.

Born in Sydney to Scottish parents, Clachan grew up in New Zealand. He went to Te Aro Primary School, then Wellington College, before studying German and science at Victoria University. He enlisted at the outbreak of war in 1914 and was one of seven young soldiers selected after a stiff exam for a commission in the British or, as it was called, Imperial Army.

Clachan sailed with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force as far as Egypt, then went on to Britain, where he joined the Middlesex Regiment - the so-called "Die Hards", named after their commander, William Inglis, who, wounded and having had his horse shot by Napoleon's forces in 1811, called to his men to "Die Hard".

In London, Clachan was directed to a tailor for his uniform and equipment. He would need, he was told, the considerable sum of 100 to 200 depending on the unit.

He had his first taste of trench warfare in March 1915. During fighting in the battle for Hill 60 in Flanders, he took a bullet in the head. Despite treatment, the lead remained undiscovered. Clachan stayed at the front and in July took part in the battle of Hooge in Belgium, where he suffered a further head wound, and nearly lost an eye. The silver lining was that the bullet lodged in his head for three months was recovered.

William Clachan.

The soldier was soon back on his feet and took charge of his company in the first major Somme offensive in July 1916. This time he was hit with machine gun fire above his ankle and was sent back to England to recover.

A year later, having completed further officer training, Clachan was seconded for duty with the King's African Rifles in East Africa. For a young man from Wellington - he was in his mid-20s - the sights were stirring.

In a letter, he wrote: "By day we had great fun shooting crocodiles; my word, their tails do lash. The hippos and rhinos also kept us amused. At one very interesting mission station we visited Mary Moffat's [David Livingstone's wife's] grave."

Clachan's destination was Nyasaland - what is now Malawi. Handed command of a company of Askaris, Clachan's task was to train the young men, mostly members of the Yoo tribe.

He was impressed: "They are a hundred times keener than the recruits we were getting in England," he wrote. He felt they would give the Hun a rough time, but saw that fighting in Africa was not easy: "The great trouble is the food and ammunition supply - Africa being a country of miles - not yards," he observed. The grass was "so high that it is quite easy for two opposing forces to miss one another".

With the Askaris, Clachan was called on to settle disputes.

"A man steals another man's wife - so then he has got to pay the original hubby 30 shillings for her, and so on. This case does not occur every day, but every now and then it crops up. The men all have their wives and kids in the lines with them, so frequently you have a wife (umkazii in native lingo) run in before you for some minor offence. They come in with a cloth round the hips, usually a kid slung round their shoulders by another cloth."

In early 1918, the British attacked German forces at the confluence of two rivers and Clachan's company, the first to advance, came under heavy flanking fire. The commander fell early in the fight. His name is on a memorial in Mangochi, near the shore of Lake Malawi.

100 Kiwi stories runs every Monday and Thursday.