KEY POINTS:
ALBERT, France - A military identity tag, discovered in the battlefield of the Somme by a small girl, is heading back to New Zealand, taking with it a tale of luck and a token of friendship.
Six-year-old Zoe Corselle found the dog tag in a field while on
a school trip with her dad to the trenches near her home in Albert.
Scraping away more than 90 years of grime on the stamped letters of the metal oval, they could read the words: "NZE Forces. Serg. R.J. Kemp. E. Coy. Hawkes Bay. Wellington Battalion."
For months, the pair carried out an unofficial detective mission, badgering anyone they thought could help them to identify the mystery owner of the tag.
Their persistence paid off, for the New Zealand authorities, through the Paris embassy, have identified him as soldier Richard Kemp - and a man who defied the odds.
Kemp came from Te Kao in Northland but enlisted into the NZ armed forces in Takapau, military records show. He joined the Wellington Infantry Battalion, which was dispatched to Gallipoli and then to the Western Front, where it was sent into the Somme, one of the biggest meat-grinders in military history.
On the first day of that offensive, July 1 1916, 20,000 men were killed and another 40,000 wounded. The New Zealand troops were sent into the campaign two months later; of 15,000 men, 2,000 were killed - more than half of whom have no known grave - and 6,000 were wounded.
How Kemp became separated from his dog tag is unknown. Perhaps he lost it in battle or it fell from him. But he returned safely to New Zealand after the war and lived in Auckland, resuming his pre-war job on the railways, and died in the late 1960s.
On Friday (NZ time), the town of Albert hosted a ceremony in which Zoe and her father handed back the tag to Mahara Okeroa, associate minister of arts, culture and heritage. It will be brought back to New Zealand and presented to Kemp's grand niece, who lives in Wellington and has taken on the role of whanau.
Zoe's school, the Ecole Paul Langevin, is now developing links with the primary school that Kemp attended - the Te Kao Primary, which has 24 pupils and is predominantly Maori.
"When we found the tag in the ground, we had actually been looking for something precious, a coin or some treasure," said Zoe's father, Nicolas Corselle.
"But in fact what we found was something far more precious, something that will develop into a project between Zoe's school and New Zealand."
