CAPTAIN JAMES BRUCE
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
25TH JULY 1917 AGE 29
BURIED: POPERINGHE NEW MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
Yesterday the widow of an elementary school headmaster quoted from the portrait of the knight in the prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for her son's inscription. Today the grandson of an earl quotes from the same source for his brother's inscription.
Captain James Bruce was the grandson of the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine. His father, Frederick John Bruce, was a landowner in Arbroath. James, the third son, was reading for the Scottish Bar. On the outbreak of war he immediately joined the Forfarshire Battery, 1st/2nd Highland Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. After a period of training, the Brigade left for France on 1 May 1915 where it became A Battery, 256th Brigade and was involved in all the major actions on the Western Front.
Bruce was killed in Flanders in the week before the brigade took part in the launch of the Third Ypres Offensive. Apparently, whilst on his way to an observation post somewhere to the east of the Yser Canal, he was caught by shell fire and "died instantaneously". The writer of this document quite rightly questions whether this can be true as Poperinge New Military Cemetery, where Bruce is buried, was relatively far behind the front line and attached to a group of Casualty Clearing Stations. Is it significant that three members of A Battery 256th Brigade, who all died on 25 July 1917, are all buried in a row in the same cemetery and that the mother of one of them has recorded for the cemetery register that her son died of wounds (gas).
There is a family memorial in St Vigean's New Cemetery, Arbroath. James' death is recorded here along with his parents, three brothers and a niece and nephew, the lettering is less definite than it is on the later inscriptions but you can just make out the words:
He never yet no vileinye ne sayd
In all his lyf unto no maner wight