Remembering a brave soldier

A forlorn, eroded headstone in Kelvin Grove cemetery marks the grave of a World War I soldier who four times won bravery awards.

A hundred years ago this month, James Bell was preparing to move to France. He was one of the British regular soldiers who, reinforced by territorials, withstood the initial storm of the German Army. Bell was the eldest from a large rural Ayrshire family which migrated to Southland in 1911.

Bell had already enlisted in a British regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Six of his brothers fought as members of the New Zealand Army -- three in World War I, four in World War II (one served in both).

The Kaiser reputedly described the few hundred thousand British regulars and territorials sent initially to France as a contemptible little army, and they were soon known as the Old Contemptibles. Bell was at the first battle of Ypres, described by historian Anne Tuchman as the "real monument to British valour", where the initial regular force "fought until they literally died and stopped the Germans".

She says it was the grave of four-fifths of the force.

Bell, a corporal, endured trench fighting for four years. He won the British Military Medal three times and France's Medaille Militaire, but equally prized his 1914 campaign medal with its clasps for those who had been in the thick of the fighting. He was wounded four times finally leading to his discharge.

Bell brought his wife to New Zealand after the war and worked as a power lineman and rabbiter. His house burned down destroying his military records. Family historians have verified his three M.M. awards and the Medaille Militaire, but have been unable to confirm or refute his statement he was also recommended for the Victoria Cross and was Mentioned in Dispatches a number of times.

Bell, his wife, and two children were living in Palmerston North when he died at age 36 on November 8 1930 while installing a milking machine on a Fitzherbert West farm. Newspaper reports claimed head injuries indicated he had fallen and his headstone says he died of war injuries.

The family's misfortune continued; Bell's son was jailed as a conscientious objector in World War I and later died a bachelor, apparently schizophrenic. His daughter married an American sailor serving in the Pacific war but this left her a widow.