After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  He joined the 259e Régiment and died, as so many compatriots did, on his own French soil. His French Army was no expeditionary force like its British imperial allies: it was defending his homeland and the liberté his country held so dear. Dressed still in veste of bright blue and scarlet pantalons, they were mown down in tens of thousands in the first month: on the single day of 22 August, 27,000 Frenchmen were killed. Maysso met his fate on the second day of the Battle of the Marne, in desperate defence of Paris, on 6 September 1914. He was the first rugby internationalist to fall, a few days before Scots Simson and Huggan. His Toulouse captain, lock Paul Mounicq, who had played with Forgues in that infamous Scotland game, retrieved his body; three days later a Toulousain party accorded him a proper burial facing Toulouse, and fashioned a rouge-et-noir tie from their red leather tobacco pouches and black notebook covers. Maysso wore his team colours even in death.

  Aviron Bayonne took two grievous early blows: on successive days in September: first Emmanuel Iguiñiz (or Iguinitz), then François Poeydebasque, fell on the killing fields of the Aisne at Craonne. This village on the plateau de Californie would be bitterly enshrined in the ‘Chanson de Craonne’ of the French mutineers after the disastrous Nivelle offensive of 1917.5 Gaston Lane had been well qualified to praise their play for Harry Roe’s team: a Racing Club centre, who began his international career against the All Blacks, he was the first Frenchman to ten caps (with Marcel Communeau) and also wrote for the French magazines Sporting and L’Equipe. He was next to die on the 23rd with his 346e Régiment. Three bleus in four days; another week and it was four, as singleton cap Joé Anduran perished on 2 October. From November, the French infantry were issued with new uniforms in a bleu d’horizon which looked remarkably similar to the pre-war French national team’s rugby shirts. The coincidence had more to do with the stopping of aniline dye imports from German BASF, but was nonetheless an ill omen for rugby.

  It is impossible that with so many French casualties from August onward that they did not include many hundreds of rugby men. Young and fit like their British confrères they were first in line for the fight, although, like their German foe, more were conscripts than volunteers. One who did volunteer, and may have been the first French rugby player to die in the war, was Robert Bergeyre, of the Sporting Club de Vaugirard (SCV), founded appropriately enough for a rugby team, in the 15e arrondissement of Paris in 1897. In 1911–12, SCV were third ranked to Racing and Stade in the top tier of Paris clubs. In 1913, winger Bergeyre, who had joined SCV from his school, the Lycée Michelet, volunteered for army service. With his clubmate Maurice Allemant, he joined 103e Régiment d’Infanterie, a unit that actively espoused rugby for its fitness training. This was by no means a universal view, as military officialdom favoured the discipline of la gymnasie, or individual gymnastics, over team sports.

  Robert’s regimental team reached the final of the Paris military cup at Colombes; he was one of five soldiers in the XV selected to represent Paris against a London team in March 1914. Corporal Bergeyre had just turned 20 when he was killed on 22 August at Ethe in Belgium; his regiment lost 60 per cent of its effective strength on a day of unimaginable carnage. Almost four years to the day after his death, a new multi-sport ground was opened at the Buttes-Chaumont, Paris, which could accommodate 15,000 spectators in moveable stands. It bore the name of the first club player to fall in the ‘field of honour’: Robert Bergeyre. In 1920 it hosted the French football cup final and – in 1924 – Olympic matches, before being demolished in 1926.

  Bergeyre’s SCV club survived the war through a series of alliances, one with SCUF, which was named les deux Sportings (S2). In the absence of senior players at the front, club rugby remained full of hope for the future with a Coupe de l’Espérance in place of the national championship, contested by youth players who had not yet been drafted. This fulfilled the same function of fitness and preparation for military life as the public-schools games in Britain, but also helped sustain the clubs through the lean years. Although familiar names like Toulouse, Racing and Stade Français appeared in the finals, so did FC Grenoble and Stade Nantais. In 1919, Stadoceste Tarbais and Aviron Bayonnais contested the final, sign of a youth development policy that would pay off after the war.

  Rugby behind the lines was not always well received and rugby players not at the front were thought by some to be unpatriotic. At a quarter-final between Perpignan and Toulouse, there were catcalls of ‘cowards and thieves’ from the crowd. Stung by the abuse, Dr Paul Voivenel, who had been with Maysso and Mounicq on the Marne and was now a military flyer, wrote an enraged letter to the press, countersigned by Mounicq and ‘champions de France’ from the two teams:

  In sport we recognise only one goal: training for the defence of our country. All the rest is ‘gravy’. There is sport to the east and north. The only opposition is the Boche. The only whistle is from bullets.6

  Harry Roe’s military service in this war remains a mystery, although he sensibly fled the Nazi occupation of France in 1940 and served in the Home Guard in Wales. Another Welshman, Rowland Griffiths, of Newport and the 1908 Anglo-Welsh team, coached Perpignan in 1912 and 1913. But another trainer for a French club, Major Edward Marie Felix Momber, born in Biarritz of an English father and French mother in 1888, served with the British Royal Engineers, winning the DSO and MC. The Army List of 1911 shows him ‘Qualified as 1st Class Interpreter in a Modern Language’, always useful when you are coaching Biarritz Olympique, as he was in 1912, and where he is commemorated on a plaque at the stadium under the name ‘Monbert’. More unusually, he has two mine craters correctly named after him at Vimy and Railway Wood, near Ypres: it is no surprise to find that he is unique in this honour.

  Momber, an absurdly talented swimmer, fencer, rider and rower, represented Hampshire, the Army and United Services at rugby, as well as his military colleges at Woolwich and Chatham. In 1914 he returned to fight from Hong Kong, where he was stationed. In November 1915, with the low cunning that becomes necessary in wartime, he won his MC near Givenchy:

  … when, by firing a small charge, he induced the enemy to occupy the crater in considerable force. Two large charges were then at once fired, by which about fifty of the enemy are believed to have been killed, and much damage was done to the German parapet and galleries.

  At Vimy Ridge in 1916 he was awarded the DSO (and his first crater) for ‘conspicuous gallantry and skill in connection with mining operations’. He was blown up, wounded and deafened by a trench mortar bomb; on his return from hospital, he became OC of 177 Tunnelling Company in February 1917 and commanded it through a time of desperate underground warfare beneath the Bellwaard Ridge. This is Birdsong territory. Momber prepared and fired the Wijtschaete mines on the Messines Ridge, which launched one of the most decisive actions of the war. A few days later he was admitted to No. 2 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station with severe hand and head injuries, dying on 20 June 1917. He has another rare distinction for a British officer in that he is named on the ‘Monument aux Morts Pour La France’ at Biarritz.

  The intensity of Verdun and the Somme left little time for military sport (and precious few men to play it). It seems no coincidence that within a week of the close of the Battle of the Somme, on 26 November 1916, a match was held between Stade Français and a ‘British’ military team, made up of Home Nations’ and Dominion players: the French won 8–6. After the near catastrophe of the widespread mutinies of 1917, Marshal Pétain and the French military realised the value to morale of recreation and sport (as well as better food, fewer punishments and more time out of the line). The presence of British and Dominion military teams whetted a renewed French appetite for competition, and a desire to prove themselves as a sporting people. France played nine ‘official’ international games (as endorsed by USFSA) between April 1917 and the Inter-Allied Games organised by the US Army in June 1919. In Rugby Federation (FFR) records, fifty-six players are recognized as ‘internationals de guerre’ – they were not accorded the status of full
international caps, as USFSA officialdom protected its patch against military encroachment.

  The original American in Paris, Allan Muhr of Racing Club, now reappeared as a key driving force. This ‘slave to his passion for rugby’ had been capped in the first ever French game against the All Blacks in 1906 and was now a bilingual US Army officer; through him, as early as 1916, French soldiers played American volunteer ambulance men. In January 1917, he set up a team called ‘Lutétia’ (after the Latin name for Paris) combining the best players from Paris clubs ‘to make beautiful sport and win the interest of the public’.7 It was also designed to attract young men who would come of draft age in 1918 and 1919. The side was built around Maurice Boyau, the pre-war France flanker from Stade Bordelais. The career soldier (whose name means ‘trench’ – incroyable) was now flying with Escadrille N77, known as ‘les Sportifs’; the flamboyant aviator painted a dragon writhing across the fuselage of his Nieuport aircraft.

  Boyau’s Lutétia beat an Anzac side 9–6 in front of 5,000 at the Parc des Princes. In March 1917, nine days after he notched his first aerial victim (the first of thirty-five, of which twenty-one were balloons – much harder than it sounds), Lutétia played a double-header at the Parc: its reserves (draft years 1918–1920) against an ‘Australian Hospital No. 1’ team, and its 1st XV against Aviron Bayonnais. He earned a dramatic Médaille Militaire when he was forced to land behind enemy lines with engine problems after shooting down a heavily defended balloon. As German troops raced to take him prisoner he made hasty repairs and took off again, bullets flying around him as they arrived seconds too late. Boyau was killed on 16 August 1918, as the fifth most successful French ace. He had also won the Légion d’Honneur. The sportsmen of France subscribed to buy him a diamond and platinum cross. It was never presented.

  Most significantly for Boyau and military rugby in France, for the first time in its history, the French Army fielded a representative team, to play the New Zealand Army Corps on 8 April 1917 for a ‘Coupe de Somme’. Although eight capped internationals were included, the French team was hastily assembled. An emergency letter was sent to twenty-three generals the week before, requesting immediate release of players; at 5.30 p.m. on the eve of the match, Alfred Eluère, of Nantes and now a capitaine in the 64e Régiment d’Infantérie, was still in his trench at the Chemin des Dames, where the French had returned after the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. As well as the prospect of rugby, there were other reasons to be cheerful:

  The news of the declaration of war against Germany by the USA has just come to hand and the tricolour was fluttering in every street in Paris and in every town and village behind the battle zone.8

  The opposition, with seven All Blacks, prepared with the thoroughness familiar since the days of the Originals. For three months since Christmas, they had kept a rigorous daily regime: PT, followed by bayonet and bombing practice in the morning; rugby training and games in the afternoon; extra rations and sleep and evening gym sessions in a local school. On the day of the match, the USFSA decision to give free entry, helped by sponsorship from Le Journal, attracted a vast crowd of 40,000 to the Vincennes velodrome. Despite a crushing home defeat by 40–0, the event was deemed a huge success:

  In the middle of war, sport was victorious before an audience so large that it was impossible to count the number. All sportsmen should thank the thirty champions who carried off the match with energy. The crowd, this great Paris crowd, hailed the splendid efforts, and … New Zealand made a point of demonstrating what sports in general, and rugby in particular, were worth as training in human energy … Let us hope that the hard sporting lesson given by the New Zealanders has borne fruit and that the fine rugby played has been an example to the young players … that the thousands of non-believers filling the stands have been able to discover the beauty of our noble oval ball game.9

  The journey back to Paris was a triumphal procession. Women rushed to kiss the New Zealanders, they were banqueted, invited to clubs, had theatre seats reserved. Le Journal presented them with a bronze statue by sculptor Georges Chauvel, designed while he was in the trenches. There was more:

  Each of the ‘athletes and heroes’ received a beautiful medallion in frosted silver on which is the famous figure in relief of La Marseillaise from the Arc de Triomphe. They were also given tinder boxes of solid gold or gold and silver. They had the time of their lives.10

  War brought them back to earth: New Zealand Army Corps flanker Reg Taylor, who had scored on his All Black debut against Australia in 1913, was killed on 20 June at Messines with his Wellington Regiment. In the same battle, fellow All Blacks Baird, Sellars and McNeece all died.

  In 1918, in a winter lull not yet broken by the whirlwind German offensive of March that would threaten Paris for the first time since 1914, it was decided to repeat the exercise on Sunday 17 February. The USFSA took this second challenge much more seriously: it organised trials, training and a warm-up match against a Royal Artillery team with five capped England players, which the French won 15–14. The team of soldiers and airmen which paraded at the Parc des Princes was almost fully international and included Fernand and Jules Forgues, Lasserre and Domercq from Bayonne, Conilh de Beyssac from SBUC,11 Nicolaï, Struxiano, Strohl and Thierry, whom we shall see again, the dazzling winger Adolphe Jauréguy and Géo André, Olympic athlete and fighter pilot.

  New Zealand, captained by George Murray, fielded seven All Blacks including Alec Macdonald, an Original and captain of the 1913 USA tour, Charlie Brown, Arthur Wilson and a Sergeant James Ryan in the centre. This last trio would play another French military team a year later, in the peace of which they all dreamt. Allan Muhr refereed eccentrically: he whistled for half-time after only thirty minutes, so extended the second period to forty-five. This time the result was a close 5–3. The USFSA offered a spring tour, which the New Zealanders were pleased to accept ‘on condition that military events did not stand in the way’.12 Once again, the Kaiser had different plans: an artillery bombardment began at 0440 on 21 March over an area of 240 square kilometres, the biggest of the entire war. Over 1.1 million shells were fired in five hours onto British troops in the Somme sector. It was springtime for Ludendorff and Germany; rugby took a long break.

  From another spring four years before, Marcel Burgun, the fly half with eleven caps who had faced England in that last Test at Colombes, was long dead, shot down in 1916 whilst earning a posthumous Croix de Guerre; he had joined the Aviation Militaire to avenge his brother. His half-back partner, Jean Larribau from Biarritz, was by now a pile of bleached bones at Verdun and would be named on the Biarritz Monument Aux Morts alongside his coach, Momber. Hooker Iguiñiz was killed within five months of his French debut. Tank commander de Beyssac died of his wounds in an ambulance on the way to Compiègne in June 1918. Paul Fauré, of Tarbes, invalided by a leg wound, died of influenza at home in Aureilhan, Pyrénées, in September.

  As German morale and resistance crumbled as their advance was halted and then decisively driven back, release from the front became easier. A Paris team beat the Australians 9–6 at the new Stade Bergeyre on 20 October. New Zealand’s soldiers played in Paris on 27 October, and Tarbes and Bordeaux in early November. Playing before a capacity crowd at the Parc, the New Zealanders had no Māori players, so a young corporal in the uniform of the Māori Pioneer Battalion led the haka. At the Armistice, sport replaced fighting, but kept a similar tempo, with many more games against British and Dominion teams.

  French rugby emerged from war considerably stronger than in 1914. The military had embraced the sport and frequent encounters with British and Dominion sides had improved the French game. Many of its veterans were dead, and it would start to rebuild with new blood. The notoriously tough sixties forward Walter Spanghero once said: ‘Un match qui ne fait pas mal est un match raté.’ Or ‘A game which doesn’t hurt is a bad game.’ On that logic, this had been a very good game for rugby.

  Notes

  1 A shield is awarded for the French
championship, now the Bouclier Brennus.

  2 My thanks here to Brynmôr Evans.

  3 Bayonne’s Stade Jean Dauger is on the rue Harry Owen Roe.

  4 Le Monde Illustré, April 1913.

  5 ‘C’est à Craonne sur le plateau Qu’on doit laisser sa peau Car nous sommes tous condamnés C’est nous les sacrifiés.’ (‘In Craonne on the plateau We’re leaving our hides. We’ve all been sentenced to die We are the sacrifice.’)

  6 Le Cri Catalan, 16 January 1915 (author’s translation).

  7 L’Auto, 18 January 1917.

  8 The Dominion, April 1917. Malcolm Ross, official NZ war correspondent on a salary of £1,000 and expenses, was derided for his relentlessly upbeat reports. As was Beach Thomas of the Daily Mail in The Wipers Times.

  9 Sporting, 11 April 1917.

  10 The Dominion, April 1917.

  11 See The Final Whistle.

  12 Tous les Sports, 22 March 1918.

  13

  No Side

  When this lousy war is over, no more soldiering for me

  When I get my civvy clothes on, oh how happy I

  shall be.

  Friday 8 November 1918. ‘Somewhere in France’:

  Night has fallen, the weather is awful. Although a drizzle is falling it is unable to dispel a thick fog. Finally, the sentries can see a halo of light and hear a few notes of the trumpet call ‘Cease Fire’. A few seconds later a convoy of cars moving very fast appears on the road, their headlights ablaze. On the bonnet of the first car, a large white flag looms from the darkness. Standing on the running-board, the bugler keeps on blowing his call. Someone motions the cars to stop. A 25-year-old captain comes forward: he is Captain L’Huillier of the 171e Régiment d’Infanterie. He identifies the bearers of the flag of truce and gets into the first car. Corporal Sellier takes the place of the German bugler and sounds the ‘Attention’, the call of four years of fighting and suffering.1