About 5.30am, October 12, 1917, the New Zealand Division struggled to its feet and dragged itself through the mud to attack German lines on the Bellevue Spur, near the Belgian village of Passchendaele.
In a matter of minutes, 843 men lay dead or dying: the single bloodiest day in New Zealand military history, if not New Zealand history entirely.
That morning, in just two and a-half hours, about 5% of the total number of New Zealanders to die in the entire 1914-18 war met their end.
On the other side of the wire, the Germans lost 21 dead and 55 missing.
Things had started badly: an artillery barrage scheduled for 5.25am largely dropped short of its intended target, meaning many New Zealanders were killed and wounded by their own guns.
Things only got worse.
Battalions of the Otago Infantry Regiment were among the soldiers who tried to gain purchase on a sodden landscape churned to a mire by artillery fire.The 2nd Otago Battalion went forward at 5.29am, struggling through waist-deep mud in places. Amidst the swamp lay barbed wire, 20m to 40m deep: it was meant to have been cut by the artillery barrage, but the shelling had been largely ineffective.
"The greater proportion of officers and men comprising the leading waves were shot down as they left their trenches," the Official History of the Otago Regiment records.
By 6am, those few men remaining could go no further, and the 1st Otago Battalion joined the battle.
"In succession, waves of infantry moved forward to the attack, but were unable to make any definite impression, and finally wilted away under the storm of fire," the official history says.
Canterbury troops attempted the same attack soon after, and met the same fate.
Headquarters, unaware of the appalling slaughter at the front line, ordered a fresh attack — an order later rescinded.
The Otago troops reorganised and took up defensive positions: just 170 men from the 2nd Battalion could be accounted for, and 160 from the 1st. An estimated 242 of their comrades remained in No Man’s Land, with many more either in or on their way to field hospitals. The mud was so cloying six men were required to carry each stretcher: four to carry the wounded man, two to pull the legs of the stretcher bearers out of the morass.
Among the dead were Private John Eden, a Dunedin mechanical engineer; Gunner Clair Nelson Sutherland, a Kaikorai divinity student with aspirations of becoming a Presbyterian Minister; Private James Kitto of Kaikorai, who had tried to enlist three times and was rejected the first two times; and Major W. Turner, headmaster of Balclutha District School, who the official history records "succeeded in advancing some distance through the wire before he was shot down."
Randolph Gray, a law clerk at the Dunedin firm Downie, Stewart and Payne, later recounted the events of the morning in his journal.
"Not a single man in the Canterbury or Otago regiments got more than 300 yards. They found great bands of solid wire, 50ft thick, absolutely untouched by our artillery, and pill boxes just behind belched forth machinegun fire in thousands of rounds. Our poor chaps were literally mown down in droves and deeds of superhuman valour availed nothing.
News swiftly reached Dunedin that a major attack involving Otago soldiers had taken place: the Otago Daily Times carried wire agency copy on October 15.
Under the headlines "Attacking In A Sea Of Mud" and "Many Important Positions Carried", it was reported the British had "taken all their first objectives and are still sweeping on, carrying all before them".
Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the British armies, told United Press that British and Anzac troops "navigated the mud seas and mud mountains like miracle men."
However, it rapidly became apparent something more macabre than miraculous had occurred in the Flanders mud that morning.
After headlines such as "Germans fighting better than usual" and "In A Tight Corner: Why The Attack Ceased", by October 16 ODT correspondent "Shrapnel" stated ominously "The descriptions by correspondents of the attack upon the southern end of the Passchendaele ridge do not make pleasant reading" and added "Never before, it is said, had the Germans concentrated so many machineguns on a short front."
Readers would have blanched at the lengthy "Roll Of Honour" columns which appeared in the ODT in subsequent days, recording the men killed and wounded in an attack on nearby Broodseinde on October 4 — an attack in which the 3rd Otago Battalion took part, and which claimed the life of former All Black captain Dave Gallaher.
That bloody assault had been regarded as a victory, but readers were beginning to realise the heroic headlines they had read on the 15th did not reflect the hell in to which the New Zealand Division had been despatched three days beforehand.
By October 20 the ODT was calling Bellevue Spur "A Veritable Death Trap".
A week later, knowing that for days to come the newspaper would soon be running huge "Roll Of Honour" lists, the paper editorialised: "The Cablegrams had prepared us for heavy casualty lists in connection with the fighting at Passchendaele a fortnight ago ... Those lists, now coming to hand, will be scanned and differentiated in some degree by thought of the special circumstances in which the losses occurred."
By November 2, the Roll of Honour lists extended to seven full columns of names, spread across three pages.
There were almost as many columns listing dead and wounded in the following day’s edition.
Also printed that day, spread across pages seven and eight, were the names of the reservists who had been drawn from the conscription ballot and who were now likely to be sent abroad to fight.
Belgian Freddy Declerck, the former chairman of the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, said many of the men who died on October 12 likely still lay where they fell.
"During the entire war, in that area, there are still 100,000 people from the Commonwealth countries who are missing. Half of them have a grave, Unknown Soldier: 50,000 are still in the surrounding fields.
"Today you can get from Ypres to Passchendaele in 10 minutes. Back then, to get to the front line, sometimes took 11 to 12 hours.
"Imagine trying to go back with someone on a stretcher ... the whole place was a swamp.
"We cannot imagine it today."
Declerck, the curator of an exhibition about Passchendaele now on show at Toitu Otago Settlers Museum, said Belgium had not forgotten the New Zealanders who fought in its fields 100 years ago.
"One in New Zealanders came to the war: almost 100,000 of the country’s one million inhabitants came.
"There were 18,000 killed, 40,000 wounded ... you cannot forget these things."
The impact of the campaign in Passchendaele on Dunedin was significant, University of Otago history Professor Tom Brooking said.
"As a country we lost 2000 men at the Somme in 1916: we (Otago) were over-represented in that, as we were in Gallipoli: the Otagos always seemed to be the unlucky regiment in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"So, there was some getting used to death, but nevertheless the scale of Passchendaele must have been a shock. After we had apparently won at the Battle of Messines, so to then turn around and have this debacle must have been very demoralising."
Toitu Otago Settlers Museum curator Sean Brosnahan has made a documentary for the museum website on the history of the Otago Regiment: it features modern day footage from the very spot where so many died that fateful October day.
His studies of the battle estimates 110 men from Dunedin city died that morning: news of those deaths took a while to filter back to a city already decimated by the battles of 1915 and 1916.
"If you think of the experience we are having now of the war commemoration and whether people are getting a bit sick of it, well, no one’s died have they?," Brosnahan said.
"If people are indeed getting war weary with the commemorations, magnify that 1000-fold for people trying to deal with the actual impact of loss."
Since 1915, the Otago Witness newspaper had been publishing pages of photographs of fallen soldiers. While daily coverage of war fatalities may have conditioned people to death being routine, that did not make them immune to its impact, Brosnahan said.
"Over time it might have become what you were expecting, although the shock of seeing someone you knew must have always been a bit raw ... it was all pervasive."
Appalling as the toll of 1917 was, worse was to come for anxious families back home in New Zealand.Brosnahan has studied how many Dunedin men died, where in the city they lived, and the year they died. Incredibly, 1918 took an even bigger toll on the city than the preceding years, than Gallipoli, than the Somme, than even Passchendaele.
"I think it is because of the nature of the battles, as they shifted to open warfare," he said.
"It was progressive, they were moving across ground, but they were taking a lot of casualties as they went. Even though it was very effective and they wound the war up in those last 100 days, it came at a high cost."
Fog of war
Estimating battle casualties in World War I is a difficult science. Historian Ian MacGibbon has made the most recent survey of Passchendaele and estimates 843 New Zealanders died on October 12 as a result of the attack. Some of those would likely have been wounded and died a day or two later, stranded in No Man’s Land — but for official purposes the date of their death is listed as October 12, when they were posted as missing.
In addition to those who died that day, 1860 men were wounded. MacGibbon calculates that a further 114 men died from wounds sustained in the October 12 attack, meaning the final ghastly toll that day was likely to be some 957 men.
