The Gallipoli campaign affected the subsequent lives of all who survived their time on the peninsula to one degree or another.
Few members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, however, could have experienced wartime reversals of fortune as dramatic and strange as those that befell Private Leslie Wylde, of the small West Coast town of Runanga.
When he enlisted in August 1914, a month shy of his 21st birthday, Wylde noted his occupation as motor mechanic, but when he returned to New Zealand briefly in March 1919, his occupation was “gentleman”. In four short years, he saw active service, lost a leg and, in convalescence, was reborn as an officer from the colonies with a far more storied background.
Wylde’s earlier life was typical of a young Coaster: the family lived in various mining communities – his father was a mining and dredging engineer. There was school, cadets, amateur musical performances (he formed asmall minstrel group), cycling and motor-cycle racing, Territorials, then work as a motor and cycle mechanic in the shop he ran with his father in Greymouth.
Signed up, Wylde landed in Gallipoli with the West Coast and Nelson contingents of the Canterbury Infantry Battalion late on the afternoon of April 25, 1915. He went into action that
