The Ruggers of the Great War

One hundred years ago, the rugby pitches of the British Empire and France emptied out, and a generation of players traded in their hoop jerseys for khaki uniforms. A terrible number of them ended up littering the battlefields of France, Belgium, and Turkey, never to return to the game they loved.

Rugby union was still a young sport then. It had been only a bit more than 60 years since the first set of rules was codified and roughly 80 since William Webb Ellis, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football,” as the apocryphal plaque at Rugby School declares, first picked up the ball and ran. But by 1914 rugby was a solid institution among middle- and lower-upper-class England, and the men who played it were filled with Edwardian notions of masculinity, glory, and empire. When England declared war on August 4, 1914, rugby players volunteered by the hundreds. Because of their social class and background, most of them ended up as junior officers. In other words, the first over the top of the trench.

Overall, 140 international rugby players from nine countries died in the war. Author Nigel McCrery profiled every one in a book released last year, Into Touch: Rugby Internationals Killed in the Great War. Scotland lost 30 international players, more than any other nation. They included not only the best of their day, but some of the greatest of all time. 

There was Dave Gallaher, the captain of the original New Zealand All Blacks team. Gallaher was too old to be conscripted, but when his two brothers were killed in the war, he falsified his age and enlisted. After he was killed by shrapnel at Passchendaele, the Auckland Star wrote in his 1917 obituary: “Standing six feet in height, thirteen stone in weight, hard as nails, fast and full of dash, he bolted from the mark every time, played right up to the whistle and stopped for nothing big or small.”

There was Ronald Poulton-Palmer, a renowned English center. A sniper killed him on the Western Front just 13 months after he scored four tries (the rugby equivalent of a touchdown) against France. His last words were reported to be: “I shall never play at Twickenham again.”

They came not only from the British Isles, but in droves from New Zealand and Australia. It is estimated that 98 percent of the rugby players in Australia enlisted.

“We arrived at Heliopolis about three weeks ago,” Clarrie Wallach, an Australian forward, wrote in a letter on his way to Gallipoli. “We have been in some pretty solid work, but expect to go into the real stuff next week. All the rugby union men are well here, from the Major down to the privates. Twit Tasker told me how Harold George died the death of deaths—a hero’s—never beaten till the whistle went.”

George, also an Australian player, was mortally wounded by a sniper. By the time the ANZAC forces finally evacuated Gallipoli, seven Wallabies had been buried on the Dardanelles Peninsula.

Tasker, who held the distinction of being the first Wallaby to be ejected from a match, was evacuated after his legs were peppered with shrapnel. “It will be some time before he can do any of that sidestepping he used to do,” one of his old rugby colleagues wrote home in a letter. Tasker was discharged in 1915 but reenlisted and saw action on the Western Front, where he was wounded twice more and gassed before a shell killed him three months short of the war’s end.

Wallach was later killed in action and received the Military Cross. His brother Neville, also a rugger, enlisted at 18 and received a Military Cross for his actions at the First Battle of Bullecourt. According to his citation, Neville Wallach “was a Platoon Commander in the attack on the Hindenburg Line near Bullecourt on 11 April 1917 and though he received a bullet through his thigh .  .  . led his men over 1,200 yards of ground swept by shell and machine gun fire.” A shell killed him in 1918.

They were young and old. Welsh international player Richard Garnons Williams was 59 when he was killed in action at the Battle of Loos in 1915. The officer corps rejected former English rugby captain Edgar Mobbs, 31, for being too old, so he enlisted as a private. He recruited 250 men and later rose to become their battalion commander. According to legend, Mobbs would punt a rugby ball into no man’s land before leading the charge. He was wounded twice in battle and received the Distinguished Service Order before being killed while assaulting a machine gun nest in the muddy abattoir of Passchendaele. Only 85 of “Mobbs’ Own,” as his battalion was called, survived the war.

If one has played rugby, there is a recognizable attitude in their actions and words—that fine disregard for the rules and a certain dogged indifference to danger and bleak odds. In rugby, a team is either advancing down the field or being pushed back. There is no standing still.

Sergeant Billy Nanson, an English forward, was last seen singlehandedly clearing a Turkish trench with his rifle and bayonet, yelling back at his troops, “Come on, lads, let’s shift them.” Likewise, Cambridge fly-half Horace Thomas’s last known words during the Battle of the Somme were, “Come on, boys, we’ve got ’em beat.”

When the stretcher-bearers came across dying Wallaby Edward Larkin at Anzac Cove, he waved them off, saying, “There’s plenty worse than me out there.” In 1916, English player Jack King wrote in his last letter home that “so long as I don’t disgrace the old Rugby game, I don’t think I mind.” 

By their own high standards, none of them let the old game down. The English international rugby players alone were awarded 28 Military Crosses and a Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honor. 

Arthur Leyland Harrison, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy—and a “sturdy and tireless forward” for the English side, according to the Rugby Football Internationals’ Roll of Honour by E.H.D. Sewell—was post-humously awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions at the Raid of Zeebrugge, a volunteer-only mission. According to his citation, Harrison’s ship was coming alongside the German Mole when he “was struck on the head by a fragment of a shell which broke his jaw and knocked him senseless.”

“Recovering consciousness he proceeded on to the Mole and took over command of his party, who were attacking the seaward end of the Mole,” the citation continues,

Besides the international players, the lost members of the Blackheath Football Club received two Military Crosses, two Distinguished Service Orders, and one Victoria Cross. Blackheath’s Capt. Walter Napleton Stone was in command of a forward observation post about 1,000 yards ahead of the front line when he noticed the Germans preparing to advance. He ordered his company to retreat, save for a couple platoons to provide a rearguard.

“He stood on the parapet with the telephone under a tremendous bombardment, observing the enemy and continued to send back valuable information until the wire was cut by his orders,” his citation states. “The rearguard was eventually surrounded and cut to pieces, and Capt. Stone was seen fighting to the last till he

was shot through the head.”

It was not just the British. Twenty-one French international rugby players died in the war, including Maurice Boyau. The captain of the French side before the war, Boyau became a fighter ace and skilled at destroying enemy observation balloons, notching 14 confirmed kills and 21 flamed balloons. Boyau received the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest military award for gallantry. His citation described him as a “pilot of remarkable bravery whose marvelous physical qualities are put to use by his most arduous spirit and fights at great heights.” He was shot down on a balloon-busting mission by defending German fighters in September 1918.

It was not until the war ended that the full scale of the loss to rugby sunk in. “Of the English fifteen which played before the King at Twickenham early in 1914, scarcely one is left,” a columnist for the Times wrote after the war. “They might indeed on that occasion have hailed their distinguished spectator, only too appropriately, with the ancient gladiators’ cry, ‘Morituri te salutant.’ ”

Blackheath lost 58 members. The Rosslyn Park Rugby Club, 85. One of Blackheath’s rivals, the London Scottish, lost 103 members, including 45 of the 60 players in its last set of matches before the war broke. The club was immortalized in Mick Imlah’s poem “London Scottish (1914).”

In a more sane world, the London Scottish toasts would have remained as all rugby toasts have traditionally been and should be: dirty and joyous.

C. J. Ciaramella is a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon.