100 Kiwi Stories: Cool soldier led by example

The Notre Dame memorial outside Arras commemorates Allied and German soldiers and lists 580,000 names, without country or rank.

Memorial to be unveiled tomorrow includes names of 4333 Kiwis who died on Western Front.

44 George Masters
George Masters fought his war on the ground and in the air.

Hastings-born Masters took part in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 before being posted to Europe. Attached to the New Zealand Pioneer Batallion, Masters showed courage when his company came under heavy shellfire.

His bravery was recorded in the London Gazette, which reported on an incident in September 1916.

With his commander dead and other officers wounded, 2nd Lieutenant Masters, through "coolness and personal example", kept his platoon working on a vital communication trench to reach a captured enemy position. His citation remarked on his "good work and devotion to duty" in the grim struggles on the Western Front in France.

In October 1916, Masters was attached as an observer to the Royal Flying Corps. He served a probationary period with 11 Squadron, which was based at Izel-les-Hameau, a village in northwest France near Amiens. Aviation historian Errol Martyn has reported that Masters survived being shot down in March 1917.

As a trained observer, the New Zealander would sit in the nose of a Royal Aircraft Factory Farman Experimental 2 aircraft, mixing the duties of gunner, artillery spotter and reconnaissance man.

The pilot in these awkward craft sat behind the observer, with the Rolls-Royce engine and propeller immediately behind him. To defend the plane against enemy attack the observer needed to stand up in his tiny cockpit and fire a 303-calibre Lewis gun while clinging on to the weapon.

George Masters, left, would sit in the nose of the Farman Experimental 2 aircraft acting as gunner, artillery spotter and reconnaissance man.

At 1pm on April 3, 1917, Masters, then 26, took off with pilot Lieutenant Edgar Brandon, a South African. Brandon, at 22 a veteran of the campaign in German Southwest Africa, was on a reconnaissance patrol. At some point their aircraft was hit by flak. Errol Martyn, in For Your Tomorrow, a three-volume account detailing the fate of New Zealanders who flew with the RNZAF and allied air services, reported that an eyewitness saw the plane come down in the Scarpe River.

In Masters' service record, there is a hand-written line that the New Zealand High Commissioner recorded soon afterwards, saying a message confirming the fate of the aircraft and its crew had been dropped into British lines by a German pilot. Masters is commemorated on the Arras Flying Services Memorial, which lists the names of nearly 1000 World War I casualties with no known grave.

Now the divinity student's name appears on another permanent panel -- the international memorial at Notre Dame de Lorette, designed by Paris architect Philippe Proust, which President Francois Hollande will inaugurate on Armistice Day tomorrow. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron will both be at the inauguration outside Arras.

The names of 4333 New Zealanders are among the 580,000 on the monument.

Click here to read first 43 stories in the series.

*100 Kiwi Stories runs every Monday and Thursday.