Sport has long been affected by war—it has even caused conflict in a few instances—with some of its most promising lights extinguished at a tragically young age.
With the passing of the Armistice's 90th anniversary, Remembrance Day, and Veterans Day (and other incarnations) continue to resonate.
Whatever your political beliefs, no matter how polarising and divisive current conflicts may be, it is as important today as it was 90 and 63 years ago to acknowledge and remember human loss.
To evoke the sentiment of enduring adages, if history is forgotten the traumas and suffering of the past are liable to be repeated. This article is intended neither to present condemnation or glorification, just remembrance.
The cumulative total of deaths for the world wars exceeded 90 million. I struggled with that figure and tried to translate it into something I found remotely comprehensible; those deaths would equate to a city roughly comparable in size to Birmingham, England, vanishing every month for about 76 months.
Football (soccer) brought fleeting respite to the carnage with the Christmas Truce of 1914 but each sport was drastically impacted by the grief and loss; athletes would die and sustain personally devastating wounds, while those who survived had their careers disrupted or ended and returned to unrecognisable communities.
The War to End All Wars
In the First World War, many athletes served and perished in the trenches of the Western and Eastern Fronts, the deserts of the Middle East, the disease-ridden morass of Macedonia/Salonika (modern Thessaloniki) and East Africa, the beaches of Gallipoli, and in the world's oceans and skies.
The attitudes that prevailed in contemporary society have been extensively documented and debated since the war ended.
So instead, it seems more appropriate to try to encapsulate the rhetoric that appealed to athlete and fan alike—so many of whom appear now to society to have been idealistically naive and fatefully ignorant of what awaited them—with the words of author and amateur cricketer Arthur Conan Doyle:
"There was a time for all things in the world. There was a time for games, there was a time for business, there was a time for domestic life. There was a time for everything, but there is only time for one thing now, and that thing is war. If the cricketer had a straight eye, let him look along the barrel of a rifle. If a footballer had strength of limb, let him serve and march in the field of battle."
In the British Army, entire battalions were composed of people associated with sport: The 16th Royal Scots derived much of its strength from players and supporters of Hearts and other Scottish teams; the 17th Middlesex also attracted both footballer and fan, notably 41 members of Clapton (Leyton) Orient; the 15th West Yorkshire contained cricketers from Yorkshire CCC and other athletes; while the 23rd and 24th battalions of the Royal Fusiliers also had an array of sport talent.
Despite soccer clubs initially being accused of reticence, some 2,000 of an estimated 5,000 British-based footballers served in some capacity.
By February 1918, when the 17th Middlesex disbanded, just about 30 remained of more than 200 footballers who had been assigned to the battalion.
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