ABSTRACT
What the ideologues of sport saw as the true test came in August 1914. As the rulers of Europe plunged the world into four years of imperial slaughter, few were keener to rush to the front than those schooled in the sporting ideals of duty and subordination. Across Europe young men believed that they now had their chance to ‘play up, play up and play the game’. In France, L’Auto foamed at the mouth: ‘No more Kaiser! No more Agadir! No more bloodsuckers! No more nightmares! No more bastards!’2 ‘Germany has to be smashed,’ England rugby union captain Ronald Poulton-Palmer told his parents.3 In his poem ‘The Dead’, the poet Rupert Brooke, an old boy of Rugby School and keen rugger fan, captured the feelings of those for whom sport had been preparation for the ‘greater game’:
Nobleness walks in our ways again And we have come into our heritage.4
