For King And Other Countries: The New Zealanders Who Fought In Other Services In The First World War
Glyn Harper
Massey University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9780995102996
New Zealand, like Australia, Canada, India, Newfoundland and South Africa, contributed enormous numbers of citizen soldiers to serve in response to the British Empire’s call to fight the Great War. Some 124,211 served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), drawn from a population of around one million. Forty-two per cent of the men eligible to enlist did so. And yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that even more New Zealanders served, possibly as many as 3,000, in other dominion or imperial forces. As this cleverly titled book indicates, this is the story of those other New Zealanders – now calculated at 12,000 – who served the King, but in other national armed forces. This significant re-evaluation of New Zealanders at war is quite remarkable, and this new figure has been drawn from research into census, newspaper, archival and genealogical sources.