The great AIF victories in World War I were won on the tough playing fields of Australia

As the match between the touring New Zealand rugby team and New South Wales at the Sydney Sports Ground was nearing its end on August 5, 1914, an attendant at the scoreboard posted the frightening message under the scoreline ‘War Declared’.

Two weeks later, the final match of a three-Test series was played in front of a crowd of just 5000 at 1:30pm – the early start allowing the tourists to depart Sydney on a ship for New Zealand, which was leaving before nightfall.

The All Blacks had lost a Test to the Wallabies the year before and had been in a vengeful mood in 1914. They won all three matches, scoring 11 tries and 52 points, while conceding only seven – a try and a dropped goal in the third Test.

They had been so dominant that they played five halves of Test rugby, just over 200 minutes, before conceding their first points.

But now the New Zealanders wanted to get back home as soon as possible to sign up to serve in what they expected to be a great war overseas.

On that last weekend of organised sport in Sydney in 1914, 16,000 people witnessed the rugby league match between South Sydney and Newtown at the Agricultural Show Ground – 11,000 more than at the rugby Test. The numbers reflected the level of popularity in Sydney of the two rugby codes.

As part of their determination to win Sydney back to rugby union though, Australian and New Zealand officials met during the All Blacks tour and agreed that there would be annual but alternate tours by the All Blacks and the Wallabies to either country.

The Wallabies were scheduled to tour New Zealand in 1915. The All Blacks would tour Australia in 1916, and so on.

About the same time as this inspired and far-sighted agreement was being signed, the newspapers were carrying stories that “desultory fighting between British and German warships has taken place in the North Sea” and “King Albert has rejected a German request for troops to be allowed to March through Holland.”

World War I was slowly and inevitably clanking into action.

Australian rugby officials now turned their attention away from on-field matters, determined to get behind the war effort. Their view was that the best policy for the game and the nation was for rugby in Australia to be closed down for the duration of the war as an encouragement to young, able-bodied men to enlist.

War fever was rampant in every sector of Australian life, in fact. The Sydney Mail, a journal that provided an extensive coverage of all the rugby Tests for its mainly country readers, did not even cover the third Test. The journal instead brought out a special ‘War Edition’, devoted entirely and exhaustively to every aspect of the coming Great War.

The Australian rugby officials succeeded in their ambition for the game to be a lifeblood of support in the war effort.

The Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, reported when peace was finally achieved that in 1914 the NSWRU “had 4000 players, whom 3872 had enlisted, and 382 of them died on active service.”

According to The Land, “rugby went out of service in 1914 when 97 per cent of the men engaged went on active service in the greatest game of all.”

Dr Herbert Moran, the influential captain of the Wallabies in 1908, from a hospital ship off Gallipoli, backed this effort by the rugby officials by telling his fellow Australians, “You must all come over if you want to win this war … It is the only game worth playing at present, and they are in our 25. If we lose we are out of the competition forever, and when we win we shall despise those who looked over the fence when our line was in danger.”

(Photo by Mark Dadswell/Getty Images)

There is something extraordinary and perhaps quite chilling in the way thousands of wonderful, vibrant young men were prepared to treat war as “the great game”.

In a fascinating sociological study, ‘Sport in Britain: A Social History,’ Gareth Williams provides a telling insight into the mindset of these players and their attitude to the war effort. The annual Mobbs Memorial match between East Midlands and the Barbarians, he notes, was inaugurated in 1921 to commemorate Edgar Mobbs of Northampton and England. Mobbs used to lead his men across the barbed wire and into no man’s land by punting a ball towards the enemy lines and following up hard after it.

It was magnificent, perhaps, but it was not war. Mobbs’ “preposterous act of bravado” (Paul Fussell’s phrase) led to him being killed at Passchendaele.

Sean Fagan, in a powerful article for the Sydney Morning Herald (‘Rugby answered the Empire’s call in World War I‘), records the way Sydney’s The Arrow reflected on the dreadful toll the Great War was taking on the rugby-playing community:

“the only bright spot in all this, apart from the fact that the Allies have the Germans hard on the defence, is that the response by rugby footballers has shown that their game is as fine a preparation for war as anything in the line of sport the world has invented…

“The response has come from all grades of players, from the juniors to the first graders of ordinary powers to the representative men, and to the men who have retired from play for many years. It is a great thing to dwell upon in this hour of the world’s carnage.”

(Photo by Dave Rowland/Getty Images)

According to the All Blacks’ website, “In total, 13 All Blacks and 150 first class players paid the ultimate sacrifice in the war.”

One of those All Blacks, Albert Downing, was killed at Gallipoli in August 1915, five months after the first troops landed on that godforsaken peninsular. Downing played on the side of the scrum in the last Test of the 1914 series.

Bobby Black, who played as a five-eighth in the first Test in 1914, became the youngest ever All Black to die, at the age of 23, when he was killed on the Somme in 1916.

Ten Wallabies were killed in World War I: Blair Swannell, Ted Larkin, Harold George, Fred Thompson, Arthur Verge, George Pugh, Herbert Jones, Clarence Wallach, Bryan Hughes and William Tasker.

Swannell, Larkin, George, Fred Thompson and Verge were killed at Gallipoli between 25 April 1915, when Swannell and Larkin were shot by Turkish snipers, and 8 September 1915, when Verge died of dysentery after being evacuated from the peninsula.

Harold George, a prop, and Fred Thompson, a number eight, both played for the Wallabies in that last Test in 1914.

In World War II, at least 139 Wallabies served, including 14 of the 15 players in the last Test against New Zealand on August 13, 1938, which the All Blacks won 14-6.

Six players from this 1938 Australian Test side lost their lives during World War II: Michael Clifford (9 October 1942), Edwin Hayes (12 January 1942), Eric Hutchinson (27 January 1942), Winston Ide (12 September 1944), Russell Kelly (25 December 1943), Fred Kerr (23 April 1941), Clifford Lang (4 March 1942), Kenelm Ramsay (1 March 1942).

[latest_videos_strip category=”rugby” name=”Rugby”]

When writing up this material about sacrifice, adventurism and war, the intention is never to glorify war. “War is hell,” General William Tecumseh Sherman declared during the US Civil War.

Rugby might be a war game, but it is a game. And that is the truth that has to recognised and acknowledged on occasions like today, Anzac Day.

But it is important to acknowledge, as well, that the rugby game can develop the character of players in a way that gives them the spirit, the mental and the physical skills to be brave, unflinching, inventive and staunch under the stress and strain of real battle.

Peter Cosgrove, a great rugby man and the current Governor-General, makes the argument that rugby is a hard, body contact game that “prizes hardship, teamwork, courage, initiative, stamina and a never-say-die attitude”.

“The thing about rugby is that it prepares people to keep going under severe stress when things they have to do are extraordinarily hard,” Cosgrove said at the annual Army-Navy rugby match in 2012.

We have confirmation of these hard truths about rugby and other tough sports from Australia’s greatest civilian-soldier, Sir John Monash.

In his book, The Australian Victories in France in 1918, Monash insisted that the “instinct of sport and adventure” is part of the “great national tradition” for Australians and the major factor, along with “the advanced education system” in creating the character of the Australian soldier, “which made him what he was”.

Paul Kelly, in a masterful essay on Monash, quotes him at length writing about how this instinct for sport and adventure was paramount in creating the Australian soldier capable, with his mates, of routing the German military forces in several of the decisive last battles of the Great War:

In him there was a curious blend of a capacity for independent judgment with a readiness to submit to self-effacement in a common cause … Psychologically, he was easy to lead but difficult to drive. His bravery was founded upon his sense of duty to his unit, comradeship to his fellows, emulation to uphold his traditions and a combative spirit to avenge his hardships and sufferings upon the enemy … The Australian is accustomed to team-work … A soldier, a platoon, a whole battalion would soon sacrifice themselves than ‘let down’ a comrade or another unit.

(Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Last Friday night, there was an Anzac Ceremony before the Blues-Highlanders match to mark the beginning of the Super Rugby Anzac Round. The Ode was read in Maori by Lieutenant Commander Mark te Kari and in English by Wayne Shelford, an All Blacks skipper in the tradition of Dave Gallaher, the iconic All Blacks captain who was killed at Passchendaele. Then we heard the plangent playing of ‘The Last Post’.

There was a long silence, a time for pondering over Virgil’s profound take on life, “lacrimae rerum” (the tears of things).

During that silence, I thought about all this history of Australians and New Zealanders in rugby and on battlefields.

I thought, too, about my wife Judy’s grandfather, Robert Hunter Wade, a school teacher who was so saddened by learning of the death of many of his students that he enlisted, at age 40, had his varicose veins removed to be eligible to fight overseas and then was killed a month before the Armistice.

And her uncle Ernie Petersen, a golden young man, the hope of the family, shot down over the skies of Europe in World War II.