Heroes in the slaughter

The Battle of the Somme saw the most murderous days in New Zealand's history. Picture / New Zealand Herald

Next year, France will get its largest influx of young New Zealanders in 90 years. Thousands are expected to travel to follow the All Blacks in their quest to regain their status as World Cup champions.

In 1916, thousands of Kiwis also converged on France - and went to war on the Western Front.

Some had seen war as part of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli against the Turks but none had experienced the horrors of trench warfare.

Other New Zealanders from across the Empire followed their own paths to Flanders, often volunteering to serve in Australian and British units.

In the summer and autumn of 1916, the stubbornness of one man - General Douglas Haig - would throw them all into the furnace that would become known as the Battle of the Somme.

Three Kiwis would prove themselves heroes in the slaughter. A farmer, a builder, and one son of the Empire. Two would not survive, one would and go on to further fame, a little infamy and high office.

New Zealand's servicemen have won proportionally more Victoria Crosses than those of any Commonwealth country, but Donald Forrester Brown, Thomas Cooke and Bernard Freyberg could not have guessed their country's future or their roles in its national story when they arrived on the Somme in 1916.

On July 1, Britain's New Army of 1914 volunteers serving in their own "Pals" battalions had been fed into an industrial mincer of barbed wire, machine guns and artillery. The result - 20,000 dead on the Empire's bloodiest day.

But Haig was convinced the Germans were close to cracking.

He renewed the offensive but by mid-July Britain's county regiments were bleeding dry, and it was time to let the colonials take their turn.

First in line were the Australians who had already carried out one semi-successful diversionary attack to draw German reserves away from the Somme.

This time the 1st Australian Division was earmarked to break through the German line at Pozieres and push up the main road - now the cemetery-lined D929 - between Albert and Bapaume and on into the open countryside beyond.

Kaikoura-born Thomas Cooke must have had little idea of that grand plan. Serving in the 8th battalion of the 2nd Victoria Brigade in the 1st Division, he was a little old to be a soldier at 35.

At some point before 1902, he quit Marlborough and New Zealand for Australia. After a decade jobbing around Victoria with a wife and young family in tow, he settled in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond.

He became a builder and played the cornet in a local band. But the quiet life ended when he decided to enlist in 1915.

By July 25, 1916, he was in charge of a Lewis machine gun waiting in reserve as his battalion clambered into No Man's Land at Pozieres.

Some time late that day in the words of his citation, "This man was detailed forward to take his gun and crew to a dangerous part of the line."

Once in place "they did great work but came under a terrific fire with the result that Cooke was the only man left but he still stuck to his post, firing his gun." Cooke continued firing but when reinforcements were sent forward, his corpse was spotted by the gun.

"For this splendid example of determination and devotion to duty," according to the London Gazette of September 9, 1916, he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Like a multitude of others, Thomas Cooke has no final resting place.

The fields outside Pozieres where he fought have long been returned to agriculture and to find the only trace of him in France, you have to travel a little further to a small town on the road west to Amiens.

There at the Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery, high above the valley of Somme, look closely at the gigantic sombre memorial to the missing of the Australian forces and you might spot the VC before his name among 11,000 others.

His medals are in the collection of the QEII Army Memorial Museum at Waiouru.

Elsewhere on the Somme, a few months later, his fellow countrymen finally were given their chance in the front line.

Like the All Black tour of the Mother Country in 1905, the Battle of Flers-Courcelette was to prove a forging ground of nationhood. But this time a blood sacrifice was required.

In the Dardanelles, New Zealand's brigade of soldiers had been sandwiched with leftover Australians into a joint division.

Recruits were still streaming out from New Zealand and were regrouped into their own division in Egypt in January 1916 before embarking for France in April.

Among them was Dunedin-born Donald Forrester Brown. A farmer before the war, he joined up and rose quickly to the rank of sergeant by 1916.

On September 15, the 26-year-old with the 2nd battalion of the Otago Infantry Regiment awaited the order to attack near the village of Flers.

Clanking somewhere ahead of him were Haig's new secret, war-winning weapons - tanks. The last offensive on the Somme was beginning and so were the most murderous days in New Zealand's history.

Brown's company advanced and soon ran into machine-gun fire southeast of High Wood - then and now barely a copse.

After their initial shock value, the tanks proved of little worth, breaking down and unable to surpass walls and ditches.

Pinned down without help, Sergeant Brown decided to take matters into his own hands, crawling with another soldier to within 30m of a German machinegun and killing its crew.

Minutes later when the advance bogged down again, he and his companion repeated their feat, rushing another position before Brown single-handedly captured a third machinegun. How many lives he saved is difficult to calculate but it was more than enough for a Victoria Cross.

Between September 15 and October 4 when the division was relieved, 1560 men had been killed and 7048 wounded. Ground gained was 3000m.

Many are buried or at least remembered at the Caterpillar Valley Cemetery near Longueval where one 40m wall lists the dead of the regiments of Wellington, Auckland, Otago and Canterbury.

Sergeant Brown lies elsewhere. He would live through that first day but not survive long enough to receive his medal.

Killed while shooting at snipers from the front line near Eaucourt L'Abbaye on October 1, his first grave was over-run by the enemy advance of 1918. Later his remains and those of 3505 others were given a final resting place at Warlencourt British Cemetery alongside the D929 on the German side of the old front line. His headstone is the only one inscribed with a Victoria Cross.

His medal came back to New Zealand to his parents' home in Wharf St, Oamaru.

Haig's offensive on the Somme was to continue for two more months after Brown's death and in the final days one more New Zealander would seize his moment.

Nothing was straightforward about Bernard Freyberg's route to his destiny. Born in Richmond-upon-Thames in London, his family emigrated to New Zealand two years later.

At Wellington College from 1897 to 1904, he was renowned as a swimmer, winning the national 100 yards championship twice.

Dentistry was his first career - gaining registration in 1911 before practising in Hamilton, Levin and Morrinsville. Enticed into a local Territorial Army unit, he did not impress enough to be granted the status of a King's Commission.

He left New Zealand in March, 1914, pitching up in San Francisco and Mexico before heading to England on hearing of the outbreak of war that August.

Freyberg made influential friends, and quickly persuaded First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to grant him a commission in the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. This unit was Churchill's pet project - a special force to one day carry out his grandiose schemes of raids on German ports.

First though, his other grandiose venture - the Dardanelles campaign - took Freyberg to Turkey's Gulf of Saros, where he would suffer the first of his many wounds.

By late 1916 Haig was short of troops again. The Royal Naval Division, including Freyberg's battalion, found themselves pressed into the Somme front line 100km from the sea.

On November 13, they attacked at night close to the hamlet of Beaucourt-sur-Ancre - alongside the current train line between Paris and Lille.

In the confusion of darkness, many managed to get into the wrecked German trenches but would not move further before Freyberg arrived to lead them.

He had been wounded twice by shrapnel, and his battalion held its gains for 36 hours before being reinforced. Again Freyberg led the advance into Beaucourt-sur-Ancre, taking 500 surprised Germans prisoner.

Wounded twice more, he refused to go back until he had issued instructions on how to beat off the expected counter-attack.

Today, behind the high walls of Ancre British Cemetery, you can find the graves of dozens of Freyberg's men, next to the overgrown lane they died to capture.

Freyberg would leave France in 1918 with nine wounds and his VC. He became the youngest general in the British Army, adding two more medals to his collection and being mentioned in dispatches five times.

He stayed in the military before being classified unfit for more service in 1937. However, he was allowed to rejoin in 1939 when he was approached by the New Zealand Government to command its expeditionary force to Europe.

But Freyberg's inspiring on-the-spot style of leadership could not stop the German advance through Greece in 1941.

Next followed the nadir of his career. He was given command of the Allied forces on Crete, and controversy surrounds whether he should have made better use of the intercepts of the Nazi high-command messages gathered at Bletchley Park's Station X code-breaking centre.

Some claim he should have acted more decisively when he was made aware of the German plan to invade by parachute; others that his men lacked the equipment and air support to defend Crete properly.

Whatever, a numerically superior Allied force was forced to evacuate leaving 671 New Zealanders dead and 2180 as prisoners for four years.

However, Freyberg never lost the confidence of his men - or Churchill - leading them through North Africa and Italy and leaving his command in 1945 as his adopted nation's most famous soldier.

He returned to New Zealand as Governor-General in 1946 for six years before taking a peerage as Baron Freyberg of Wellington and settling in England.

In the 1950s, he was appointed Deputy Constable of Windsor Castle living in the palace's Norman Gateway until his 1963 death and burial in Surrey.

The cause? A rupture of one of his nine World War I wounds. So perhaps - like Thomas Cooke and Donald Forrester Brown - the Somme claimed Freyberg too.