In a modest and dignified ceremony late yesterday afternoon, watched by the entire squad, Brian Ashton, the England head coach, and Phil Vickery, the captain, laid a poppy wreath at the awe-inspiring memorial in Thiepval, northern France, that bears the names of the 72,000 soldiers missing from the Battle of the Somme.

The laying of the England team’s wreath was followed by another, laid by the Mayoress of Thiepval. And then the players were left to gaze at the staggering evidence on the memorial and contemplate the events that once took place here.

An event such as this can drive the pressures of an international sports event clean from the mind. And that can be no bad thing, even if the World Cup does start this evening.

Ashton had considered taking his squad to the battlefields here to work on unity and team bonding, but this brief visit, en route to relocating in Arras, near Lens, served a different purpose. “A sense of perspective,” was how he put it.

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The United States team, who England play in Lens tomorrow evening, had visited the American Second World War cemetery and memorial at Omaha Beach in Normandy on Monday. Last week, the Australia team visited their national memorial in Villers Bretonneux. Indeed, New Zealand are often wont to pay their respects to those who died on the battlefields in their annual autumn tours to the northern hemisphere.

Do not, though, confuse yesterday’s England trip with the PR or public frippery that is often immersed in the professional sport of today. Ashton is not that way inclined and this was his brainchild.

The point about the world wars is that you cannot fail to have a connection. For instance, Josh Lewsey found two Lewseys among those 72,000 names and believes that they may be related. Ashton had a grandfather who fought and survived the Somme but found four other Ashtons who were Lancashire Fusiliers and possibly a further link to the past.

In the two world wars, from the eight leading rugby nations alone, 185 capped international players lost their lives. That is connection enough for the purposes of the 30 rugby players in Thiepval yesterday.

But it is their stories of the dead that make the point. Jack King, for instance, who played his last game for England in the 1913 grand slam-winning team. He was a farmer from Yorkshire and the next year, when war broke out, he marched out of his farm in the middle of the harvest to sign up.

Among his team-mates in that grand slam team was Ronnie Poulter-Palmer, who would captain England to another grand slam the next year. Among his colleagues in the King’s Liverpool regiment that he joined was Andrew Slocock, who had himself been a particularly young England captain five years previously.

On August 9 in 1916, here on the Somme, King and Slocock died close to each other in trying to mount an attack on Guillemont, a German stronghold. Twenty-two days earlier, not far away in Delville Wood, Eric Milroy, who had captained Scotland against Poulter-Palmer’s team, had also died from wounds received in action. Poulter-Palmer’s war did not even get that far; he had been killed a year earlier in Belgium. Indeed, the casualty rate from that one England-Scotland match in 1914 tells the story in itself — of those two teams, six Scots and five Englishmen did not return from the war.

The England team were given something of a history lesson around Mansel Copse and then Thiepval, the chilling statistic of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme — the 57,470 British casualties, 19,240 of them dead — proving the crucial one.

The battle-plan map at Thiepval shows the 21 British attacks mounted on German lines that day. Of these, two were successful. Three minutes’ walk from the massive Edwin Lutyens memorial where the England players stood is the Leipzig Redoubt, which five British battalions captured on that first day. It took them a further two months to win the next three minutes’ walk of land.

It seems strangely incongruous in these days of professionalism for athletes, such as this England team, to be thus diverted. And so close to the start of the defence of their world title. But before we — the public, the media, the whole circus that will follow this global event — start to take it too seriously, it is reassuring to know that the players are prepared to set their minds beyond it, too.