WWI: High spirits - then the reality

Corporal Neville Hawkes was killed in action at Passchendaele. Inset: One of his postcards to his brother, Jim.

No 42: Postcards, letters sent to little brother tell poignant tale.

On board the troop ship Aparima in 1915, Neville Hawkes was in high spirits as he penned a postcard to his little brother.

"I wish I could get you on board here with me, you would have a good time," the 17-year-old wrote to 8-year-old Jim in Timaru.

Having convinced enlistment officers he was 20, the slim trainee engineer was off to Gallipoli where he would be shot in the chest on his first day of action.

Neville arrived at Cape Helles with the Third Reinforcements a fortnight after the Allied landing of April 25. "I am on the way to the fighting line tonight," he wrote home. "Give my love to little Jim."

The New Zealanders had just taken part in the disastrous Battle of Krithia in which 6500 Allied troops were killed or wounded charging into a hail of Ottoman machinegun fire. Neville was hit in the chest. Shipped back to Cairo, he was told the bullet was lodged too close to his heart to risk removal. Five months later, he'd officially "recovered" and returned to Gallipoli in time for the Allied evacuation.

"I can't give you the account of how we got off, but I shall tell you all about it someday. You will know a great difference in me when I get home," Neville wrote. "I think our next shift will be to France. It will be rather decent to have a bit of a scrap over there."

But bravado turned to awe in the trenches of the Somme where the New Zealand Division came to respect the true impact of industrialised warfare.

"We are bombarding the Germans every night and I can tell you it is not very pleasant. The sooner it is over now the better it shall be for all of us. I only hope I am one of the lucky ones to get through it all right."

Neville survived but the Somme Offensive dragged on for the rest the year and as conditions deteriorated, so did morale.

The bullet nestled next to his heart was causing problems. He was hospitalised for a fortnight with a lung haemorrhage, then confined to barracks and docked seven days' pay for falling out of march.

The concerned Hawkes family tried to get him home. Jim recalled the efforts of their sister Lil's fiance Chris Davies, an officer in the Medical Corps attached to the Maori Pioneer Battalion. "Chris had the firm intention that when he caught up with my brother he would ensure that he was invalided home because he had no right to be still in the Army with this bullet against his heart ... and Chris missed him by 14 days," said Jim.

Neville had rejoined the Otago Battalion on June 3 in time to take part in the victorious Battle of Messines in which he captured a German soldier, souvenired some German binoculars and was promoted in the field, first to lance corporal and then corporal. In what was to be his last letter, he told his father the good news.

"I suppose by now you have heard I got through the Messines stunt all right. It was about the best of all the stunts I have been in yet. We absolutely had the Germans at our mercy ... "

Neville was killed at Passchendaele in the attack on Bellevue Spur on October 12, 1917. It was New Zealand's blackest day of the war, with 3700 casualties.

Neville's body was never found. The Imperial War Graves Commission informed his parents in 1922 they'd exhumed "a large number" of unidentified bodies from the area and would reinter them in central cemeteries. At Tyne Cot Cemetery, Ypres, on the New Zealand Memorial to the Missing, his name is inscribed -- R.N. Hawkes.

Jennifer Dann (nee Hawkes) is the granddaughter of "Little Jim" Hawkes, who preserved this archive of his hero's war records.

*100 Kiwi Stories runs every Monday and Thursday. Click here to read the first 41 stories in the series.