Tate - For Team and Country - Sport on the Frontlines of the Great War

Our soldiers are individual. They embark upon little individual enterprises. The German is not so clever at these devices He has not played individual games. Football, which develops individuality, has only been introduced into Germany in comparatively recent times.

A LFRED H ARMSWORTH, L ORD N ORTHCLIFFE

(N EWSPAPER P ROPRIETOR )

T his is a book about the First World War. It is a book which tells individual stories of remarkable sportsmen men who were heroes in a way that their counterparts today have, perhaps, forgotten how to be.

Imagine the reaction your own as well as that of newspapers and television were the most prominent stars in sport to exchange their football or rugby shirts for army uniforms; if Wayne Rooney, Jonny Wilkinson, Andy Murray and Alastair Cook volunteered to serve indefinitely in Afghanistan or Iraq.

A century ago the brightest sporting stars of their generation did just that. Thousands of sports stars rallied to their countrys colours; many never returned from the mechanised carnage of the Great War. The names of Walter Tull, Edgar Mobbs, Tony Wilding and Percy Jeeves are unfamiliar today lost in the terrible lists of the dead of the First World War. But they belong among the pantheon of true British sporting heroes. All were at the top of their game; all made the ultimate sacrifice in the greatest game of all war.

Of almost nine million British Empire soldiers mobilised during the four long years of the Great War, around one in eight 1.1 million individuals were killed in battle or were posted as missing, presumed dead. Another two million were wounded. On the front line, one in five perished. Yet no one knows exactly how many sportsmen were among the terrible and seemingly endless lists of the dead. Even for the forerunners of modern international sports celebrities men whose names were as familiar to the early twentieth-century public as Rooney and Wilkinson are today there is often little precise information (in some cases none at all) about their sacrifice. All too often their bodies were never found either blown to smithereens by the appalling technology of artillery or unrecovered from the all-consuming mud of Picardy and Flanders.

Instead we have glimpses of them and hundreds of thousands of their team-mates who swapped Britains sports fields for the devastated lands of France and Belgium or the blood-soaked beaches of the Dardanelles. Tottenham Hotspur FC staff enrolled and fought together from 1915, and the deaths of 11 of them were recorded in the clubs handbook after the war.

Heart of Midlothian and Leyton Orient signed up en masse, respectively to the 16th Royal Scots (known as McCraes Battalion) and the 17th Middlesex Regiment (the Footballers Battalion). Newcastle United lost seven men, the same number as Hearts, three of whose players Harry Wattie, Duncan Currie and Ernie Ellis died on 1 July 1916 alone, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme.

Cricket suffered a disproportionate number of deaths almost one in six who went to war. At least 34 first-class players were killed among 210 county players who served. Rugby union a sport which has always prided itself on valuing loyalty and sacrifice was a standard-bearer for the war effort; by the end of November 1914, every England international player from the past season had signed up for service in France.

But there were other, perhaps less obvious, sports which gave to the cause, and not just from the ranks of players in the British Isles. Tennis lost its greatest player New Zealand legend Tony Wilding while American football and ice hockeys brightest star, Hobey Baker, was extinguished after fighting daring aerial battles with the German air ace Manfred von Richthofen also known as the Red Baron.

Their stories are told here, their sacrifice pulled from the fog and pain of world war to represent the heroism of all those who gave their lives, but in particular all the sportsmen who heard the final whistle in the terrible carnage of that conflict.