Not One Civilian Died — The Story of New Zealand’s Last Battle and the French Town That Never Forgot

The day after Anzac Day is often a quieter moment of reflection, but the commemorations that have just passed carry a story that stretches far beyond Gallipoli. For the medieval town of Le Quesnoy in northern France, Anzac Day is not a distant foreign holiday but a deeply personal occasion — the anniversary of a debt the French say they will never fully repay.

New Zealand’s last battle of the First World War was fought on 4 November 1918, exactly one week before the armistice that ended the conflict. The New Zealand Rifle Brigade arrived at Le Quesnoy to find a town that had endured four years of German occupation. Its pre-war population had halved to around 1,500 people, many of them starving and living under the weight of an occupying force.

The military problem the New Zealanders faced was unusual. Le Quesnoy sits behind 20-metre-high medieval ramparts — stone walls built centuries before to protect the town from exactly the kind of assault now being planned. Shelling the walls to create a breach would have killed the very civilians the New Zealanders were there to free. For many commanders of that era, a bombardment would have been the default solution. The New Zealanders chose differently.

Jacob Siermans, marketing and operations manager of Te Arawhata, the New Zealand Liberation Museum on the Western Front, says the decision speaks to something lasting about the character of New Zealand soldiers at that point in the war.

“The New Zealanders know that if they launch their shells into the town they will kill all of the civilians,” Siermans told RNZ. “So they have to develop another way of getting in — and in the kind of typical number eight wire New Zealand way they decide to not bombard the town, they encircle the town and they find a way in — by ladder. They literally climb ladders into this town.”

The soldiers scaled those walls and pushed the German garrison out. The town was free. Not one civilian died in the liberation.

The cost to New Zealand was enormous. Siermans said 193 New Zealanders were killed in the action. The final week of a four-year war claimed their lives within sight of the end.

“And by doing so they manage to liberate the town, they push the Germans out,” Siermans said. “193 New Zealanders will die during that action but not a single civilian is killed.”

Siermans describes the event as a symbol of a developing national identity for New Zealanders — young men from a small country at the bottom of the world who had gone to fight an imperial war and found their own way of doing it. The French, he says, held onto that memory.

They still do. A war memorial in Le Quesnoy carries an inscription that, translated, says the New Zealanders restored Le Quesnoy to France. The language is precise — not that they won it, not that they took it, but that they gave it back.

The connection between New Zealand and Le Quesnoy has grown into something tangible in the decades since. The Waikato town of Cambridge is now twinned with Le Quesnoy, a formal recognition of a bond formed in the mud of the Western Front. The link runs through the story of Reverend Clive Mortimer-Jones, who left his Cambridge parish to serve as a chaplain with the men in France. His church, St Andrews in Cambridge, now carries three stained glass windows depicting the battles New Zealanders were part of — Gallipoli representing truth, Ypres representing freedom, and Le Quesnoy representing justice.

The museum in Cambridge holds the wooden writing case of Mortimer-Jones, a small physical thread connecting New Zealand’s Waikato heartland to the ramparts of a French medieval town. Heather Wellington of the Cambridge-Le Quesnoy Friendship Association guided an RNZ reporter through the memorials this week, tracing the links that have endured for more than a century.

Te Arawhata, the New Zealand Liberation Museum on the Western Front, has become New Zealand’s formal home in that part of France. The museum sits close to the landscape where the ladder assault took place and preserves the story for those who make the journey from New Zealand to see it.

Author Tania Roberts has also found the story compelling enough to build a literary project around it. She has launched the first of three planned books inspired by the liberation of Le Quesnoy, bringing the story to a new readership a century on.

The ladder used by those soldiers on 4 November 1918 is more than a piece of equipment. It has become a symbol — of ingenuity, of care for civilian lives, and of what New Zealand soldiers chose to do when faced with a choice that would have cost them nothing to make differently. It cost them nearly 200 lives instead.

Le Quesnoy marks Anzac Day alongside New Zealand each year. Halfway around the world, in a medieval town in northern France, the memory of those soldiers and that wooden ladder remains.

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