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As the first Anzac troops landed on the tiny stretch of Turkish coastline now known as Anzac Cove, the first 50 New Zealand army nurses were still steaming their way to England.  In this excerpt from Nursing Review's upcoming print edition FIONA CASSIE reports those first nurses had to fight for the right to serve their country.

One hundred years ago this month, the first ever contingent of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service sailed out of Wellington clutching bouquets and waving multicoloured streamers.

We've all heard the stories of farm boys riding into town and carpenters dropping their tools to rush to enlist on hearing New Zealand declare war on 5 August,  1914.

Less is heard about the nurses who clamoured to serve their country. More than 400 volunteered within two months of the outbreak of war, but troopship after troopship left to defend the 'home country' without a nurse on board.

This was much to the frustration of the country's feisty nursing leader Hester Maclean – the founding editor of Kai Tiaki and the driving force behind the New Zealand Trained Nurses Association – who in 1911 had been given the titular title, Matron-in-Chief, of an army nursing reserve yet to exist.

Her urgent efforts – and those of her predecessor Janet Gillies – to create an army nursing reserve in the lead-up to the 'Great War', and in its early days, were continually hindered by a government reluctant to take the proposal seriously.

Apart from the seven nurses the Government sent to Samoa (not as military nurses but to replace German nursing staff in the hospital in Apia), it was initially the Boer War all over again, with only those New Zealand nurses who could make their own way to Britain able to do what many more nurses were longing to do – care for their brave lads fighting on foreign fields.

Requests to go officially continued to be stonewalled, with Minister of Defence James Allen telling a delegation from the Trained Nurses Association that it would be difficult to have female nurses on crowded troop ships and "until the Mother Country asks us to provide nurses, it would be a presumption to send them".

Maclean was well aware of hundreds of New Zealand nurses keen to "share to some extent in the dangers and hardships of the troops" so kept pressing the Government until finally, in January 1915, it was agreed to create a military nursing service and send 50 nurses to England.

The matron-in-chief sprang into action, selecting the 50 from hospitals and district nursing services across the country and nominated herself to accompany the contingent to London in April and hand them over to the British War Office before sailing back to New Zealand.

Finally, on 8 April the first 50 official New Zealand Army Nursing Service (NZANS) nurses to leave for overseas service set sail from Wellington on the Rotorua, making what their proud matron described as a "picturesque group" in "their coats of grey and scarlet".

These first nurses were feted on both sides of the Tasman with farewell ceremonies and gifts, including silk umbrellas from David Jones in Sydney for the Australian 'dozen' and deckchairs and electric torches for the nurses from Dunedin.

Upon their arrival in London in late May, the first 50 nurses were given orders to travel on to Egypt to nurse those arriving from Gallipoli with "terrible wounds and the most distressing diseases". The unstoppable Maclean accompanied them and stayed on in Egypt to await the second NZANS nursing contingent, and then the third aboard the specially equipped hospital ship Maheno.

The early contingents of nurses were posted to a variety of military hospitals in and around Cairo and the port towns of Alexandria, Suez and Port Said. One of those Cairo hospitals, caring for New Zealanders evacuated from Gallipoli, quickly grew from 300 to 1000 beds. Maclean says the hospital was frequently short-staffed, the heat was “very trying” and working in tents and pavilions pitched on the sand tested the New Zealand nurses’ endurance to the limit. Most nurses did find time though for a trip to the pyramids and a photo on a camel.

The first New Zealand nurses to come within sight of Anzac Cove were the nurses aboard the Maheno, which arrived in late August as a new attack was launched on the peninsula. For two days the ship's two operating theatres never stopped as boatload after boatload of wounded soldiers were brought on board so the deck was always overloaded with mattresses and men.

One nurse on board, Lottie Le Gallais, wrote of the "terrible, terrible wounds”. “The bullets aren't so bad but the shrapnel from exploding shells is ghastly. It cuts great gashes, ripping muscles and bones to shreds,” she wrote.

The Maheno made six trips from Anzac Cove to military hospitals on the Greek Island of Lemnos with 400 to 500 wounded at a time.

In October it finally left the Gallipoli peninsula but, like its larger sister ship, the Marama, its service continued transporting invalided soldiers back to New Zealand. In 1916 both were part of the White Fleet that continually shuttled back and forth across the English Channel ferrying the wounded and the shell-shocked soldiers from the trenches of the Somme back to hospitals in England. On one occasion the Marama, fitted with 600 beds "bore no less than 1636 patients from Havre". The sisters and orderlies were engaged all day and night dressing wounds from soldiers with even the walking wounded often severely injured.

New Zealand nurses served on hospital and transport ships across all theatres of war – fighting back seasickness and nausea at treating patients with dysentery, lice, fleas and festering wounds. One nurse talked about the "appalling heat” of the Persian gulf, which saw them end the day soaked with sweat and their long white dresses "wet to the knees" from using ice baths to try and revive patients, engineers and crew suffering fatal heat stroke – an affliction that took 21 patients in four days.

(More in Nursing Review's International Day Edition out in early May)