Too often, simple sports matches are described like war: The area of play is a “battlefield,” or a pivotal game is “do-or-die.” But sometimes the sports-war comparison is actually fitting, such as in the World War I book, A Bigger Field Awaits Us: The Scottish Football Team that Fought the Great War.
The book by Washingtonian’s Andrew Beaujon follows the tale of Heart of Midlothian Football Club, a soccer team in Edinburgh. Just as Hearts were starting to become one of the best teams in Scotland (thanks to a pioneering manager in John McCartney), Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 and Britain joined the war shortly after. With the British public morally opposed to conscription, recruitment was done through appeals to a Brit’s sense of patriotic duty.
And who better to make that appeal to than physically fit, (mostly) unmarried men who play sports for a living?
Part of the recruitment drive was the formation of Pals battalions, where friends and neighbors could join the same battalion and fight alongside one another. “Footballers” battalions were established when local politician and businessman Sir George McCrae successfully recruited 16 players from Heart of Midlothian and 500 fans to join “McCrae’s battalion” during the opening months of the war.
Naturally, military marches and training throughout the week led to tired legs in practices and matches. Hearts had opened the 1914-15 season with eight straight victories, but their form began to decline in the winter. Hearts were the Davids to the mighty Goliaths of Celtic F.C., but in this version of the story, David goes off to fight a bigger war. Celtic passed what remained of the Hearts team and eventually won the Scottish league title on the back of Celtic’s nearly full-strength roster. As the Edinburgh Evening News wrote at the time, “Between them the two leading Glasgow clubs [including Celtic] have not sent a single prominent player to the Army.” To an avid sports fan, it sounds like one of the most under-reported sports injustices.
Soccer continued in Scotland as the battalion, officially known as the 16th Royal Scots, went to the trenches in France. Beaujon gives a detailed account of the Battle of the Somme and the battalion’s participation in it: Of the 814 men in the battalion when the battle began, 636 were killed, missing, or wounded. The battalion was eventually disbanded in May 1918.
But the book isn’t merely a narrow view of World War I focused on one battalion. For those (like myself) who have a shameful lack of knowledge about the Great War, the book serves as a good primer.
World War I was like so many others we’ve heard of. Locals, politicians, and military leadership expected a quick war, and that “the boys” would be home by Christmas (and no matter when a war begins, people always expect “the boys” to be home by Christmas), yet the war dragged on for years.
The causes of the war seemed justified at the time and yet silly and avoidable in hindsight. Beaujon simplifies the complex causes of the war in a 137-word run-on sentence:
As for the war’s end, history classes always left that largely a mystery to me. Whereas World War II ended after Americans and Brits banded together on D-Day and we nuked two Japanese cities, World War I’s end was relatively less simple or dramatic. As Beaujon describes British military folly after folly, I kept wondering how the good guys eventually pulled out a victory. There’s no simple explanation, but a combination of American support, military technology, and Germany’s flagging political will for war brought peace.
The book warrants only a couple minor complaints. Maps would have helped the reader understand the battlefields of France. Devoted soccer fans may find themselves in the middle of long chapters about the war wishing for an update on Hearts and life in Edinburgh. But overall, the book is a worthy read for any devoted soccer fan or student of World War I history.
