The effects of the Great War lasted for generations. The political effects remain with us now, the effects on personal health could take years to kill, as they did for Sergeant Henry John Webb.
Henry Webb's RSA gravestone is barely readable, but shows he died in 1927. From being struck off the Army list as unable to perform further service, it took him ten years to die of tuberculosis. His final diagnosis reads "cavition of lung, perforation of pleura, cardiac failure."
Henry Webb joined up with the Otago Infantry Regiment on August 14, 1914 and served on Gallipoli. He spent some time in August, 1915, in hospital with diarrhoea - a common complaint of men sharing hot trenches with flies, corpses and human waste. He was promoted to Sergeant at about this time but saw no further action, being sent to hospitals in Malta and then England. By the end of 1916, he was back in New Zealand on the Hospital Ship "Marama." He was struck off the Regimental lists as unfit for further service on his return.
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| Palmerston Cemetery. |
(From Our Own Correspondent.)
PALMERSTON, November 24.
OBITUARY. The late Henry John Webb was born in Palmerston, and went to Invercargill with his parents when he was a boy. He was in the ironmongery trade prior to the war, to which he went with the main body, and rose to the rank of sergeant. He went through the Gallipoli campaign, and was invalided to England. He had been in ill-health ever since his return home. Mr Webb leaves a widow to mourn his loss. The Rev. D. G. Wilson conducted the service at the local cemetery this afternoon, and there was a firing squad of returned soldiers present to pay him a last tribute. The ‘‘Last Post” was sounded. -Otago Daily Times, 25/11/1927.
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