3/1552 Private James Reid Struthers NZMC, 11/6/1890-12/10/1917.

James Struthers was working as a Hospital Attendant at Seacliff Mental Hospital when he enlisted, which might have marked him immediately for the NZ Medical Corps.  He was at Bellevue Spur, Passchendaele, when New Zealand troops made their futile, fatal assault on German positions, walking through knee-deep mud to attack concrete fortifications and undamaged barbed wire.

For the stretcher-bearers of the NZ Medical Corps, it was also hard going.  The mud meant that six men were needed for each stretcher case recovered from the battlefield.  And, although the wounded and those helping them were generally left alone by the enemy's rifles and machine guns, artillery did not discriminate.

It is a grim fact that cause of death on James' Army record is stated with no more detail than "killed in action."  If he had "died of wounds," there would be some short note of what those wounds were.  So it is impossible to know in which of the many fatal episodes of the 12th he met his end.  He might have been in the stretcher bearers' relay post called "Dump House" which was destroyed by enemy artillery, with several fatalities.  He might have been at Wimbledon Post, which lost 25 men to poison gas.  He might have been the unfortunate man described in the NZMC's Official History as follows:

At Kron Prins Farm, further north in the valley, and equally exposed, an almost identical situation existed. Two small concrete rooms sheltered 50 men, of whom, the majority seriously wounded. Here Captain Benham, N.Z.M.C., and Lieut. Baxter, N.Z.M.C., both attached to the Rifle Brigade, were working under hazardous conditions. The concrete structure was hit repeatedly by shells which filled the compartments with dust and acrid vapours and drove down heavy fragments from the ceiling on to the huddled wounded below. Close by one of the low windows in the foremost compartment a Lieut.-Colonel of the Rifle Brigade, sitting on the floor, hemmed in by wounded, for a time directed the movements of his battalion. An ambulance bearer in body armour, crouching in the doorway during a shell storm was pierced in the throat by a fragment flying in through the window and, as he sank to his death, a torrent of blood gushing from his wound deluged the unhappy battalion commander at whose feet the lifeless body fell.

James' father inserted "In Memoriam" notices in October 12 newspapers until at least 1929.

Andersons Bay Cemetery, Dunedin.