The 18-year-old will deliver her prize-winning speech about the Otago Mounted Rifles, which won her the Otago-Southland regional final of the National Bank RSA Cyril Bassett VC Speech Competition last March.
Sarah then travelled to Wellington to deliver her speech at the national RSA competition, which she said was a sombre, sobering experience.
"It was very poignant. It's not the kind of thing you forget."
Sarah said her speech would be personal, not because of any family members who served in World War 1, although she had discovered that a relative served in the Waikato Mounted Rifles, but for "a different" reason.
As a horse-lover, she felt deeply for the men who fought as part of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade.
The soldiers were not traditional cavalry.
They used their horses to move around the battlefield, before dismounting to fight on foot.
The human death and injuries within the brigade were "horrific" but the death and injuries sustained by the men's beloved horses made the fighting even more tragic, Sarah said.
"The horses fought for our country as much as those men did."
There was no military funding for shipping the horses home, and many men, some of whom had taken their own horses from New Zealand to war with them, made the agonising decision to shoot their horses after the war rather than leave them in Europe with locals, who were known to treat
horses badly, Sarah said.
Of the more than 6200 New Zealand war horses sent overseas, only one came home - a mare named "Bess", to whom a monument in Bulls, in the lower North Island, exists.
These days, the efforts of the troopers and their horses were remembered in the annual Otago Mounted Rifles games, but it was vital to keep teaching new generations about the sacrifices the men and their horses had made, Sarah said.
Alexandra-Clyde RSA president Kevin Harding said he knew Sarah would have "the right presence" to deliver the keynote addresses, as he was one of the judges in the Alexandra qualifying round of last year's speech competition.
"I was that impressed with her speech that I thought it would be very fitting for the people that were listening to it."
* In recognition of Sarah's speech, the Otago-Southland RSA gave her a painting by official New Zealand war artist the Hon Captain Matt Gauldie which shows the attack of the Otago Mounted Rifles at Messines, in Belgium, on June 7, 1917.
- Pam Jones
