The bleak, often desolate landscape, flat and unrelenting, flashed past the
window of the vehicle taking me on a journey into history and an examination
of the human spirit. The monotony of the countryside was broken by fleeting
glimpses of immaculate cemeteries and haunting memorials that punctuated the
otherwise barren terrain over which millions of men had marched to their
death in the supposed war to end all wars.
The drive from Calais to the battlefields of northern France and Belgium was
the start of an odyssey to pay tribute to a dozen men, chosen largely at
random from the world of sport, who had been cut down in their prime. The
trip took me from the Somme to Ypres and covered several hundred miles over
three days, through towns and villages which, 90 years on, still bear scars
of the hostilities but which also still treasure the link with Britain. They
are places with evocative names that beforehand to me had only registered on
a map or in a book, but are synonymous with slaughter and destruction on an
unimaginable scale: Bapaume, Arras, the Somme, Passchendaele, Ypres,
Messines Ridge, Polygon Wood, Shrewsbury Forest, Hellfire Corner, Thiepval
and the Menin Gate.
I was keen to discover the stories that lay behind the simple headstones of a
succession of men, from across the Commonwealth, who in their own vital way
left an indelible, if not fully appreciated, mark on their chosen sport, and
who were to do so again on the battlefield. Some were privates, others
officers; not all died a hero’s death. Several did, with the award of medals
for gallantry. Most, though, lost their lives, as did millions of others,
merely doing their duty.
It was to be an emotional journey; humbling, too. It was also uplifting in the
knowledge that the words chosen by Rudyard Kipling — “Their Name Liveth For
Evermore” — could not be more apt, be it as an inscription on one of the
vast, stark but imposing memorials to those with no known grave, or interred
under a gravestone that marked their final resting place in cemeteries of
utter serenity and beauty.
It was encouraging, too, to be able to reflect on the comments of the Rev Ray
Jones, the canon of St George’s Memorial Church in Ypres, who said that the
numbers of visitors, particularly schoolchildren, had probably trebled over
the past decade as a new generation, aware of the sacrifices being made by
our Armed Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt a need to reconnect with
their past and to remember.
Television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? and last week’s My
Family at War have helped to create an awareness and a desire to understand
where we have come from and the people who shaped us. It is a subject close
to my heart and one of the reasons why I originated the idea for the Help
for Heroes Rugby Challenge match at Twickenham in September, which to date
has raised more than £1.3 million to assist our wounded service personnel.
The contrast between the pictures of the horrific lunar landscapes pockmarked
by shell craters of 1914-18 and the cemeteries immaculately maintained by
the Commonwealth War Graves Commission could not be more vivid. The grass is
always manicured, the edges of graves straight and the serried ranks of
headstones hewn from white Portland stone stand not a millimetre out of
line, not unlike ranks of infantrymen on a parade ground.
At Chester Farm, near Ypres, I met Leslie Brown, a 56-year-old gardener, who,
despite his name, is Flemish. Four generations of his family, including now
his son, have tended the graves. Thomas, his grandfather, was a British
soldier who served on the front, where he met and married a local girl and
returned after 1918. “It is in our DNA,” he said.
In the village of Pozières is the first sign of war. In the front of an old
woman’s garden lies a mound of spent shells, hundreds of tonnes of which are
annually still given up by the earth, as are sometimes the remains of
bodies. Then into view came the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval, the
vast, imposing monolith designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, that carries the
names of 73,000 men.
Standing on the Somme it is not difficult to picture the flickering newsreel
images of the time, as young men in their droves answered their country’s
call. The Accrington Pals, the Grimsby Chums, a whole generation about to be
wiped out — not that they were to know that as they smiled for the cameras
and jostled to be first to enlist in 1914. No one wanted to miss out on the
great adventure that was supposed to be over by Christmas.
This was our first stop on an itinerary put together by Bartletts Battlefield
Journeys, a company that specialises in bespoke tours, and led by our guide
Mike Kelly, a former policeman and rugby and military history aficionado.
High up on one face of the memorial is the name of Percy Jeeves, a county
cricketer with Warwickshire before the Great War. A private in the Royal
Warwickshire Regiment, he was killed at the age of 28 on July 22, 1916. He
was immortalised when P. G. Wodehouse, who had been a great fan of the
cricketer, named Bertie Wooster’s manservant after him.
Several miles away lies the isolated Gordon Dump cemetery, the resting place
of Donald Simpson Bell, one of two professional footballers to have won a VC
in the First World War. An amateur with Crystal Palace and Newcastle United
before turning professional with Bradford Park Avenue in 1912, he was the
first footballer to enlist in 1914. Lieutenant Bell won his VC by attacking
with grenades a machinegun position at Horseshoe Trench in the Somme on July
5, 1916. Five days later, trying to counter a German advance, he was killed
outside the village of Contalmaison. The spot where he was initially buried
is known as Bell’s Redoubt and carries a memorial to him.
