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Speaker 1: Right now we have Jamie McKay, Host of the Country.

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Speaker 2: Hey, Jamie, good I head you've.

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Speaker 1: Got an Armisters Day story for us.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, about a Southland farmer. I thought I better have

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Speaker 2: a rural link in this rural slot on your high

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Speaker 2: rating show. It's about a Southland farmer who was an

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Speaker 2: Otago mounted rifle and he was wounded twice at Gallipoli,

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Speaker 2: evacuated to Egypt, got back and participated in the rearguard

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Speaker 2: action on the last night of the evacuation from Gallipoli,

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Speaker 2: went back to Egypt, got transferred to the Western Front

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Speaker 2: in nineteen sixteen. That's the equivalent of a deadly World

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Speaker 2: War One cornella. At the Battle of Messines in June

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Speaker 2: nineteen seventeen, a prelude to Passiondale, New Zealand, suffered three

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Speaker 2: thy seven hundred casualties. On the day before the big attack.

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Speaker 2: He badly sprained his ankle evading shell fire laced with

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Speaker 2: poisonous scars. His breathing deteriorated. He was listed as dangerously

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Speaker 2: ill with pneumonia. He was shipped to a hospital near Southampton,

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Speaker 2: whereas conditioned worsened, and later years he recounted the story

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Speaker 2: of being in an overcrowded, unsupervised war, and for reasons unknown,

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Speaker 2: being denied water. Severely dehydrated and in a state of delirium,

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Speaker 2: he refused to give in, and in the middle of

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Speaker 2: the night he climbed down from his bed, crawled to

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Speaker 2: a bucket of filthy mop walk at water which had

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Speaker 2: been left in the ward, and he drank it. He

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Speaker 2: always maintained that water saved his life. Like other soldiers

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Speaker 2: disenchanted by the horror of verse of the First World War,

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Speaker 2: he became something of a pacifist, drank heavily in the

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Speaker 2: company of his army cobbers, and spent a lifetime be

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Speaker 2: deviled by nightmares. He smoked a tobacco pipe until the

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Speaker 2: last week of his life. His nurses at the hospital

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Speaker 2: and in Chicago had to pry it from his hand,

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Speaker 2: and he died of pneumonia, aged eighty in June nineteen seventy.

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Speaker 2: He was Hugh McKay, my grandfather and Barry's grandfather. What

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Speaker 2: a great story.

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Speaker 1: And as it turns out, my children's great grandfather. Hey,

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Speaker 1: thank you very much, thank you, Jamie. I appreciate it's

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Speaker 1: a lovely young that's Jamie mackay. Hosts The Country Okay.

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Speaker 2: For more from Hither Dupless Yellen Drive, listen live to

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Speaker 2: news talks It'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow

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Speaker 2: the podcast on iHeartRadio