WITH it being 100 years since the First World War, the Gazette recalls the heartwarming story of a Somerset soldier in India who may have been saved by the stations of the West Somerset Railway.

The story, told in Philip Gosse's 1934 'Memoirs of a Camp Follower', is about a Somerset soldier suffering from Spanish Flu and likely to die in King George Hospital in Poona in the summer of 1918.

Gosse was treating a very sick patient and noted he had been a porter on the Great Western Railway back home.

Gosse recalled travelling on the railway between Taunton and Dunster as a child, and particularly the way the porter would call out the stations in a thick Somerset accent.

Gosse recited the list of stations and said the effect on the patient was remarkable.

"At the name of Stogursey he raised his head and whispered with contempt: 'Stogercy b'ain't got no station'."

Later that day the nurse asked Gosse if he would try reciting the stations again as it seemed to have done the patient a lot of good.

He recited them twice daily while the patient's life hung in the balance.

The passage concludes: "I repeated my chorus and by slow means my patient recovered. I firmly believe he owed his recovery not to medical skill, drugs, or even nursing, but to the sound of the familiar names which he used to call out so often in days gone by."