An Irishman’s Diary: Kicking footballs at Germans at the Battle of Loos

Another English Premiership season has begun and with it another nine months of football matches being described in military metaphors.

The “first salvoes” have already been “fired”. Managers will soon be taking “flak”. And throughout the season, balls will travel like “bullets”, except, probably, in the case of the “Gunners”, whose paradoxical reluctance to shoot will see them trying to walk the ball into the net, as usual.

But as Arsenal and the rest “resume hostilities” in the 2015/16 season, I’m reminded of the impending centenary of an event in which, unusually, the metaphor was the other way round.

That too involved a London team – an actual soccer team in peacetime – who, when they went to war as the London Irish Rifles, brought their sport and several footballs along intending to deploy them at the Battle of Loos, aka “the Great Push”.

Their madcap plan is not to be confused with the famous Christmas truce game of 1914, in which both sides participated. This time, the idea was to shock the Germans by dribbling several footballs at them, in full knowledge that the shots coming back would not be of the leather variety.

Unsurprisingly, the footballers’ superiors took a dim view of the plan. On the eve of battle, further confusing the metaphor, all but one of the balls were shot or stabbed fatally by officers worried they would be a dangerous distraction.

One survived, in the possession of 18-year-old Frank Edwards, who had deflated it to avoid detection. As he prepared to go over the top on the morning of September 25th, 1915, he reinflated the ball manually.

It should be noted that mere bullets and shells were not the only problems he had to worry about. The Battle of Loos also featured the first British use of poison gas, which, in unpredictable wind conditions, proved as big a threat to their own lines as to the Germans.

Deflated

According to a regimental historian, SF Major, the gas was already blowing back into the British trenches by the time of the attack, and “many men, slow in adjusting their masks, fell choking to the floor”. It was then that an astonished major witnessed Edwards “calmly using valuable breath to blow up a football”.

After that, the event unfolded not unlike an Arsenal move, with Edwards lobbing the ball ahead of him like a goalkeeper, then passing to a 17-year-old called Dalby, with troops named Micky Mileham and Bill Taylor also involved.

There being no net to aim at, the football was eventually kicked into the Germans’ barbed wire where, according to no less a witness than the Donegal-born writer Patrick MacGill, it ended up deflated and “hanging by its whang”.

In fact, in his novel The Great Push, MacGill claimed to have seen an unnamed "boy" with a ball before the attack and to have had a brief chat with him about the plan.

Their conversation sounds a little stiff now, with McGill asking about the chances of victory in the game and his youthful comrade replying: “The playing will tell”. But if Edwards was capable of picking a pass while under artillery fire, it would be harsh to criticise the standard of his dialogue.

Whether the one-sided football match was the insane bravado of youth, or a useful coping mechanism in the face of terror, is debatable. What is beyond dispute is that the Great Push was a disaster, with 60,000 British casualties, twice as many as the Germans.

Edwards was one. His dribble across no man’s land didn’t last long – “20 yards” apparently. Then he was shot in the thigh and might have died had a fellow footballer not applied a tourniquet. In the event, he survived and lived until 1964.

MacGill was wounded too, a month later, and his coping strategy included writing the aforementioned account of the battle, published in 1916.

The “navvy poet” had already made a name in literary circles, before shocking socialist friends by enlisting for the war on Redmondite grounds. But after Loos, he was transferred to a propaganda unit, perhaps partly to stop him writing about the war on his own terms. He too reached old age.

As for the football, it also survived its wounds. It now resides at the regimental museum in Twickenham, except for occasional outings. These have included a return trip to Loos in 2011 when it posed for a portrait by the Anglo-Irish photographer Mike St Maur Sheil as part of his epic series revisiting the battlefields a century on. @FrankmcnallyIT