Three sons killed in action during World War I left a legacy of correspondence addressed to ‘My dear Home’.
81 Nellie Knight carried a heavy burden to her grave when she died at 94.
The mother of 10 outlived six of her children. Of the seven sons she bore, four of them were casualties of war.
Her three eldest boys - Douglas, George and "Chub" as third son Herbert was called - never returned from World War I. Marty, the youngest child of Nellie and her husband Herbert, served as a captain with Britain's Royal Artillery in India in World War II. In September 1944, just a few weeks before he was to return to New Zealand, he contracted malaria and died. He was 36.
The three siblings killed in World War I left behind a rich collection of correspondence addressed to "My dear Home" - a reference to the Knight family and their home (complete with tennis court) in Dannevirke.
Before being deposited at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, the letters passed through the family and were transcribed by Nancy Croad for a book called My dear Home.
Nellie was anxious at the thought of her sons going to war. "My dear Georgie", she wrote to her second son in the middle of 1914 when war broke out. "I have often thought about the song Men must work while women weep and wondered where it came from, now I know."
She lost Chub first, at Gallipoli. The 20-year-old was killed in action at Cape Helles on May 8, 1915, a day after arriving on the front line. He had volunteered with a party to bury a mule.
During this work he was shot through the heart by a sniper. George, his brother, had arrived the day before, and wrote a few days later to his mother "to tell you of the greatest sorrow that has ever happened in our family".
On the convoy that took the Otago Regiment to the Mediterranean, Chub Knight and four other soldiers dropped a message in a bottle between New Zealand and Australia. It washed up in South Australia and made its way back to Wellington in August 1915. The message carried the wish that "these lads may return to their homes after having wiped the floor with the Germans".
Two years later, it was Nellie's turn to grieve again when second son George, promoted to lieutenant, was cut down by machine gun fire in the Battle of Passchendaele.
Lieutenant Knight, a natural leader with ability and charm - like Chub he was a prefect at Wanganui Collegiate - was never recovered. He was among the 846 New Zealanders killed on the blackest day in the country's military history.
Douglas died in France.
Sybil Lee, a friend of Nellie's, wrote a poem after George's death. It said: "Over the hill he lies there sleeping. And spring has come; he loved the spring."
Douglas, the Knights' eldest son, was the last to head overseas, called up to duty from the reserves.
At Sling Camp on Salisbury Plain in the Christmas of 1917, he wrote home having learned that the war had claimed two of his brothers and expressed the hope that he would be "half as brave if the time comes".
That time came nine months later in France. Knight was cut down by German fire on September 1 near Bapaume.
His last letter to "Dear Mother and Dad" ended: "It is not entirely our fault for many trades and fortunes have been ruined by this war but afterwards, God willing, may we be able to build up again a prosperous home and a happy one."
