Today, the Otago Daily Times begins publishing commemoration notices for those with Otago links who died during World War 1. Here, Timothy Brown recounts the story of Otago's first WW1 fatality.
On October 20, 1914, Otago's first fatality among the New Zealand Expeditionary Force occurred when 21-year-old Trooper Percy Bullard, who spent some time living in Dunedin, died from an illness which was suspected to be typhoid.
And in Europe, Captain Arthur Craven Charrington died while serving with the 1st Royal Dragoons during the First Battle of Ypres.
Capt Charrington (32), presumed to have lived in Caversham at some point in his life, was British.
To find the first Otago born and raised fatality of World War 1, you in fact have to return to the blood-soaked quagmire of Aisne a month earlier.
Aisne marked the beginning of trench warfare in World War 1.
The German and French and British forces, realising neither would give an inch, dug in and attempted to outmanoeuvre each other's northern flank.
Among the British was Dunedin man Private Daniel William Donovan.
Pte Donovan was born in Dunedin on February 24, 1879, and attended Forbury School, Kensington School and Macandrew Road School, as did his seven siblings.
He left school at age 12 to work. His father died eight years later. How or why he ended up serving in the Devonshire Regiment is a mystery.
John Donovan, a relation, said descendants of Pte Donovan had died and he knew very little about him.
''From what I can recall, he took himself off to England,'' Mr Donovan said.
He had a photo of Pte Donovan and on the back it said he was awarded the Mons Star, Mr Donovan said.
Toitu Otago Settlers Museum curator Sean Brosnahan said he was also unable to explain why or when Pte Donovan left for England.
''I don't know when Will [Pte Donovan] left Dunedin and how he ended up in a British Army unit but he was definitely one of ours, a Dunedin boy, and apparently our first casualty of World War 1,'' Mr Brosnahan said.
After Pte Donovan's death, his mother applied for a gratuity from the New Zealand government and his death was noted in the ODT on November 19, 1914.
Pte Donovan's mother was in possession of the Mons Star and lived in Bay View Rd, Mr Brosnahan said.
The First Battle of Aisne was a bloody two-week campaign in which more than 13,000 British forces were killed or wounded. Unknown casualties were accrued by the French and Germans.
By the end of the war, the Aisne region was little more than muddied and dead fields littered with trees reduced to sharpened stumps by artillery.
It was here that Pte Donovan died from battle wounds on September 22, 1914 - the same day Otago's main body left Dunedin to join the war.
He is buried at the Braine Communal Cemetery in Aisne, France.
By the end of 1914, six men with links to Otago had died while serving in the war, Mr Brosnahan said.
Those deaths will be marked with notices in the ODT also.
Next year, the in memoriam notices will became more frequent.
''It's huge and ... they were called the unlucky Otagos for good reason,'' Mr Brosnahan said.
''The Otago Infantry Battalion had the highest rate of deaths of all the provincial battalions.''
He estimated about 1850 soldiers from Dunedin died - the city had a population of 69,000 at the time - but the full toll on Otago and Southland was impossible to calculate.
''We don't know how many died from Otago,'' he said.
''We don't even really know how many went to war from the Otago military district.''
He estimated up to 20,000 men had served with the Otago Infantry Regiment, but unknown numbers served in other regiments and with other countries' forces, as Pte Donovan did.
By the end of the war, 100,444 New Zealanders had served, with 16,697 killed from the country's population of just over a million.
• ''For the Empire's Cause'' commemoration notices will be published in the Otago Daily Times on the anniversary of the death of World War 1 service men and women who have links to Otago.
