It's 1917 in Messines and a shell-splinter has just hit the knee of Lindsay Inglis, a Kiwi soldier.
He's given an anti-tetanus serum from a syringe the "size of a bicycle pump" and told he's just earned a ticket back to England. "Good Lord, Doc - I can't go to Blighty with a scratch like this." "Oh yes", the Doc replies. "Cushier ones than that are enough."
This is the detail from the letters and memoirs of Inglis, who rose through the ranks to become a Major General and one of New Zealand's most prominent citizen soldiers.
His words have been edited together in a book called "Death Among Good Men" by Nathalie Philippe, a French historian based at the University of Waikato who's also been a strategic advisor on the New Zealand Memorial Museum that will open later this year in Le Quesnoy.
She tells Kathryn about the unusual way she came across Lindsay M Inglis and how it's helped shape the understanding of her own family's history in World War One.
Photo: Supplied
