The sounds of their German enemy, the bloodthirsty Hun, singing familiar Christmas carols and clinking festive glasses of beer, drifted across no mans land and into British trenches and fighting positions in northern France and the stinking mud of Flanders fields on Christmas Eve and into the following day a century ago.
What followed – a temporary truce in certain sectors of the front line where the opposing forces met to exchange gifts and pleasantries and according to some accounts even stage impromptu soccer games – has become a revered legend demonstrating to many that the differences between the ordinary combatants were only as deep as the thread of the uniforms they wore.
Earlier this month juniour teams from some of Europe’s biggest clubs, including Liverpool, Chelsea and Anderlecht, played a series of games to mark the anniversary and tour battlefield sites and cemeteries.
There’s no recorded examples of Australian troops playing our game in no man’s land against Turks or Germans. There’s a few reasons for this: the most obvious being the lack of knowledge of our great game among the troops in the opposing trenches.
There’s also a grimmer reality. Australian troops had yet to see extended action in December 1914. It is worth remembering that there were no other occasions following the 1914 “Christmas Truces” in which Allied and German troops met in the middle to fraternise and play games; even a year later the war had become so brutal and casualty lists so long that the concept of “goodwill among all men” had died, like so many others, on the point of a bayonet. Even if the Germans did play Aussie Rules, by the time Australian troops arrived on the Western Front, the idea of a truce to play a game was simply nonsensical.
The next time troops from opposing sides contacted each other with a view to laying down arms and meeting as equals whether their officers liked it or not – and even in the initial 1914 truces commanders on both sides were aghast as what they saw as collaborating with the enemy – was in 1918 when rebllious German sailors in Kiel radioed their Russian counterparts to inform them German Soviets were being established and the Red fleet had nothing to fear from their German kameraden. To illustrate their seriousness, the “Red Germans” trained the guns of the ships they had commandeered on fellow German vessels captained by officers bent on continuing the fight.
Yet among the Australians themselves, there were many games of the southern code played in Europe and the Middle East during World War I. Peter Weir’s Gallipolli may be a fictionalisation of that campaign, but the kind of impromptu state of origin match he depicts being played in Egypt between Victorian and Western Australian troops during their training is regularly mentioned in soldier’s diaries.
“Official” games were also played too, in the UK, France and Belgium. Leading VFL club St Kilda even changed its colours to red, black and yellow to honour Belgium (and because the previous scheme matched the German imperial standard), where thousands of Australians would die in places so foreign to them they couldn’t even pronounce the names of the towns they were fighting to control … Ypres as it was called in French, and Ieper in Flemish, became “Wipers” to the soldiers.
But the biggest game of them all was the Pioneer Exhibition Game held on Saturday the 28th of October 1916, at Queen’s Club in West Kensington. There an Australian Training Units Team took on The Third Australian Divisional Team before a crowd estimated at 3000 including such eminences as the then Prince of Wales and the King of Portugal.
Both teams were almost entirely composed of top flight players from the states they were recruited from and the team sheets show representatives from some of the the most famous clubs in the game like Collingwood, South Fremantle, Essendon, East Perth and Williamstown.
The boys from the Third Division took the day by 16 points, scoring 6.16 (52) to the Training Unit’s 4.12 (36).
The occasion warranted a report in no less than the The Times of London (at that point not owned by an Australian) the following Monday and this excerpt demonstrates that the culture of the “outer” had made the journey on the troopships too:
The spectators were also treated to their first exhibition of Australian “barracking”. This barracking is a cheerful running commentary, absolutely without prejudice, on the players, the spectators, the referee, the line umpires, and lastly the game itself. On Saturday it was mostly concerned with references to the military history of the teams engaged. When a catch was missed, for instance, a shrill and penetrating voice inquired of the abashed player, “D’you think, it’s a bomb? It’s not, it’s a ball.” On one side there was a colonel playing among the backs and the captain of the other side was a chaplain, and a popular one, to judge by the cheery advice that he got from the privates on the line and in the stand.
The war affected the game in myriad other ways, from debate over whether leagues at home should be suspended for the duration of the conflict to the difficulty in securing enough fit men to field teams in those competitions. And obviously a great many talented players died in action, or of disease, or were so badly wounded as to never be able to to play again.
With the centeneries of so many World War One events, headed by the Anzac Day memorial next year, to come, this column will return again to the war that was meant to end all wars.
But for now of all the games I never got to see but would love to have attended, the Training Unit side taking on the Third Division in London in 1916 remains so distant in time and space, yet tantalisingly familiar.
Perhaps instead of a minute’s silence before the Anzac day round games next year, we should have a full minute of Australian “barracking”.
It would seem a better way to remember them.
