France preparing to pay respects to the fallen heroes from Hearts

Sénéchal is a farmer, grey, wizened and, like his fellow hundred or so villagers, astonished at what has taken place since the Contalmaison cairn was erected next to the church this time last year. “People now stop here,” he said, eyebrows lifting in delight. “They never stopped here before. Sometimes I go past the cairn and there have been scarves or souvenirs from football clubs left there. This has given our village new life.”

His is a strange, uplifting tale steeped in the tragedy of the thousands who perished on the killing fields of the Somme, which has Contalmaison at its centre, and the number of Heart of Midlothian players who were among their number.

Hearts fans have long known about a special connection with the Great War. Year after year, the club programme in early November had reproduced the story of the players who died, only with each passing year reality faded and the myth grew. Indeed, the real story nearly died altogether.

When war broke out in 1914, professional footballers continued to be professional footballers, despite a groundswell of moral outrage over the feeling that they should be fighting for King and country. On November 25, however, 11 Hearts players enlisted for a new Edinburgh battalion. Two more followed the next day. After word had got out that they had signed up, it took only six more days for an entire battalion to be formed. The 16th Royal Scots would be known variously as “The Sportsmen’s Battalion”, “The Football Battalion” or, more widely, “McCrae’s Battalion” after Sir George McCrae, the inspirational Scot who assembled them and led them to war.

Three years ago Jim Paris, a retired policeman, set out for the Western Front with a group of fellow Hearts fans to find where the footballers had fallen. On discovering, to their astonishment, no memorial or record, they resolved to take action. Their first and best move was to contact Jack Alexander, an historian who, it turned out, was much farther ahead on the same project.

Alexander is a faded Hearts fan, but when he did have a season ticket in the 1970s he sat next to a survivor of McCrae’s and forged a relationship that merely sharpened his appetite for the story of the famous battalion. Alexander would tell Paris and his friends that McCrae’s became far more than a battalion of Hearts players and fans, that Hibernian players and fans followed the lead, joined by seven players from Raith Rovers and six from Falkirk.

The Evening News would record later that season, when Celtic pipped Hearts for the championship, that “the two leading Glasgow clubs have sent not a single prominent player to the Army. There is only one football champion in Scotland and its colours are maroon and khaki.”

But McCrae’s Battalion would attain an identity for its inclusion of athletes from all sports. “This was something elite,” Alexander said. “The feeling in Scotland at the time, very naively, was: if McCrae’s are going out, the Germans haven’t got long to live. That is part of the tragedy because the people at home and the battalion itself didn’t understand the sheer killing power of the war. They saw a group of athletes, brave men, well led, that the Germans wouldn’t be able to stand up against. But it wasn’t anything to do with bravery or athleticism or leadership, it was men versus machineguns.”

Alexander’s research took him to 25 McCrae’s Battalion survivors, more than 1,000 families of the dead and culminated two years ago in the publishing of a remarkable book, McCrae’s Battalion. Among its many treasures is the exchange of letters between the players and John McCartney, their manager at Tynecastle, who would send them comfort parcels. On February 10, 1916, for instance, Pat Crossan, the exceptionally fast and notoriously handsome right back, wrote: “I think that instead of fighting we should take the Fritzes on at football. I am certain we would do it on them.”

The fate of the bulk of McCartney’s team, however, is wrapped up in one paragraph describing July 1, 1916, the first, terrible day of the Allied advance, when McCrae’s Battalion moved in on the tiny fortification of Contalmaison: “By now the German field guns had joined in. Teddy McGuire (inside forward) was struck in the arm by flying shrapnel. As he fell, a machinegun round grazed his head. Ernie Ellis (midfield) and Jimmy Hawthorn (midfield, retired) went down in front of the wire. Jimmy Hazeldean (youth team) took a bullet in the thigh. Annan Ness (full back) saw Duncan Currie (left back) hit in the right shoulder. He also noticed Harry Wattie (forward) fall. Crossan (right back) was racing forward . . . when a shell exploded in front of them. There was nothing left but a crater and some khaki.”

Alexander’s emotional attachment to these men would not stop at publication. In his research, he had discovered plans from 1919 for a memorial to be built to McCrae’s Battalion in Contalmaison that were unfulfilled because of a lack of funds and compassion from the city of Edinburgh. Together with Paris’s group, the mission gathered pace and in the summer of last year a trio of Edinburgh stonemasons were dispatched to Contalmaison with a lorry of Elgin sandstone.

The cairn now stands, stark and strangely beautiful. It has four plaques, one dedicated solely to the strong Hearts connection. And it has given the story a further chapter.

Parties from Scotland make the pilgrimage to Contalmaison every year and the small village is overjoyed by the connection. Plans are being made for an annual football match, a French team from the Somme versus an Edinburgh team wearing the Hearts kit of 1914 with the players’ names on their backs.

And the story is spreading. On the visitors’ buses that tour the Somme, football fans from around Europe have been known to alight at Contalmaison. Sénéchal does not know how many because he spends his days in the fields, but he occasionally sees their scarves at the foot of the cairn.

FC Basle, for example. Last year, Basle played Hearts in the Uefa Cup and the story was exchanged. When Basle later played Lille, 36 of their fans travelled especially to Contalmaison. One of them, Matthias Steiner, had read McCrae’s Battalion and this is his eloquent explanation: “I told my boys what terrible contribution these boys had to pay for the honour of their country and we laid some flowers and a Basle silk scarf to honour the boys.

“Football, as far as it is connected with fairness and respect toward the guest team, is a perfect tool for better understanding among nations. I don’t know whether other continental football fans visit the cairn. But whoever does must recognise how important it is.”

FOOTBALL’S ONLY VICTORIA CROSS

DONALD BELL was the first English professional footballer to enlist in 1914 and the only player to be awarded the Victoria Cross.

Bell played for Bradford Park Avenue and gained the VC for his bravery in attacking and destroying a German gunpost on July 5, 1916. Five days later he was killed during a similar act of bravery, defending the village of Contalmaison that McCrae’s Battalion had attempted to capture ten days previously. The ground where he died is known as Bell’s Redoubt.

Taken from timesonline.co.uk