Of 1700 soldiers who boarded a troop ship at Port Chalmers a century ago, 1100 were in the Otago Infantry Regiment and 600 in the Otago Mounted Rifles, most bound for what would become the killing fields of Gallipoli, Flanders, Ypres and the Somme.
In opening the service, attended by more than 40 people plus the cathedral choir and army personnel, the Very Rev Dr Trevor James, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, said the theatres of war mentioned would ''too soon, become etched in our memory and carved in the memorials around our nation ... [the men] shutting the farm gate for the last time''.
The service included a reading of Rupert Brooke's poem Peace, written in 1914 following the outbreak of war and the first of a series of sonnets that became some of the most praised and widely read poems of the time.
The Dunedin City Council's World War 100 committee has been planning a city-wide event for each of the next four years. Future events will include the centenaries of the Anzacs' landing at Gallipoli, in April 2015; the second battle of the Somme, in 2016; and Passchendaele, in 2017.
