SUB-LIEUTENANT SAMUEL GEORGE JAMES
ROYAL NAVAL DIVISION
9TH OCTOBER 1917 AGE 28
BURIED: LA BRIQUE MILITARY CEMETERY NO. 2, BELGIUM
This inscription comes from an unusual source, the Bhagavad Gita, a 700 verse Hindu text concerned in one part with a warrior's duty to fight in a just war. The text was reasonably well known in late nineteenth-century England thanks to a translation by Edward Arnold, which he called The Song Celestial (1885). William Thomas James, Samuel's younger brother, chose the inscription, which is a contraction of Arnold's lines:
Nought better can betide a martial soul
Than lawful war; happy the warrior
To whom comes joy of battle - comes as now,
Glorious and fair, unsought; opening for him
A gateway unto Heav'n.
Educated at Sir Roger Manwood's Grammar School in Sandwich, Kent, Samuel James is described in the 1911 census as a science student His parents were stewards at the Royal St George's Golf Club in Sandwich and Samuel gets various mentions in the local paper in the years before the war for winning golf competitions.
He served as a naval rating in the Royal Naval Division during the fall of Antwerp in October 1914, where he was wounded in the back. During the next three years he was hospitalized with various illnesses and injuries before returning to England in December 1916 to take a commission. He returned to the Western Front on 27 September 1917 and was killed in action twelve days later.