After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  The 1913 All Blacks did do some work to spread the rugby gospel. As they sailed west for home across the wide Pacific, they could not resist stopping off at Suva, Fiji, to stretch their legs in a pick-up game ‘against a side of countrymen, working on the building of the Grand Pacific Hotel. This match – deemed “not of first class status” – was won 67 to 3.’12 This was real missionary work, playing labourers on an island where rugby was otherwise the exclusive preserve of colonial administrators and constabulary against crews from visiting warships. Hallelujah.

  Back in the States, Aussie import Danny Carroll proved resilient in every way, both in rugby defeat and fighting prowess. He resumed his rugby at Stanford until its final season of 1917 when he joined the US Army, as America threw its industrial might and manpower behind the Allied effort on 6 April. But it was not until 1918 that the USA could muster troops in sufficient numbers to bolster the beleaguered Allies. Carroll won the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for extraordinary heroism in action while serving with 364th Infantry Regiment, in the 91st Division, American Expeditionary Force (AEF) – the unit numbers alone show the vast size of this army and explain the series of desperate German onslaughts from March onwards, intended to end the war before it could reach the front.

  His rugby captain on that November day in 1913 was Stanford’s Frank ‘Deke’ Gard, who had also been skipper when Carroll played for the opposing Australians the year before. Born in Ohio, but a Los Angeleno since 1908 when his family moved west to grow oranges, he graduated in chemistry the year after playing the All Blacks. When war arrived, Gard enlisted at Glendora, California, in June 1917; he received honourable mention for his rapid progress in training at the Presidio, San Francisco, and made lieutenant in the 362nd Infantry Regiment, in the same division as Carroll. Recruited from eight western states, it was nicknamed the ‘Wild West Division’. Appropriately enough, Lieutenant Gard was a real straight-shooter: he hit ten bulls-eyes in eighty seconds, all the more impressive for reloading between each shot.

  The 362nd sailed from New York to Liverpool aboard the Empress of Russia on 6 July 1918 in the largest convoy to cross the Atlantic. The inexperienced doughboys trained for several more weeks in France and then marched to the front; Deke and Danny were once again battling side by side, this time against German opposition. Also initially in their division, with the 342nd was Lieutenant Ralph Noble, the Stanford and USA back, who had joined up in May 1917 and was posted overseas on Boxing Day 1917. From the infantry, the flying winger transferred to be an aerial observer with a French squadron; he was shot down in May 1918, dying of his injuries in a Red Cross hospital behind German lines. The grateful French awarded him a posthumous Croix de Guerre, citing him as an ‘Officer remarkable for his skill, initiative and devotion in the performance of his duties, humbly demonstrating the superb qualities of his race’.

  News of America’s impact in the war travelled behind German lines and reached some unusual rugby touchlines. On 30 July, Frank Vans Agnew noted in his diary at Heidelberg, where he was a prisoner:

  Rugby in evening from 4.15 to 6pm, acted as touch judge. War news really most inspiring. Germans on the retreat from Marne, for second time, after three years fruitless fighting. Americans doing quite splendidly.13

  When Frank travelled from America in 1914 to enlist, he was 46 – which may explain why he was touch judging. A former veterinary surgeon, farrier in Roosevelt’s Roughriders, mines assayer in Canada and Kazakhstan, and orange grower in Florida, he was posted to the front in May 1915. By 1917 he had transferred to the Tank Corps, winning an MC at Messines. He was wounded and captured in November. South African Frank Mellish was less impressed by the ‘American invasion’: ‘We tired veterans adopted a sullen attitude at their every success. We felt we had borne the brunt of the show and deserved the spoils of victory – were there to be any.’

  On 26 September 1918, General Pershing’s First Army took the place of the French Second Army and began a series of attacks on the Germans dug into the wide valley of the River Meuse. The Battle of the Argonne Forest was the largest so far fought by the US Army, involving 1.2 million soldiers. The key objective was the Sedan–Mezières railway, the principal supply line for the German forces. The 91st Division went into bivouac in the Forêt de Hesse, with orders to attack on 26 September at 0230 hours. As the artillery barrage lifted, the infantry rushed ahead and took the deserted enemy frontline trenches at Bois-de-Cheppy. When the first waves penetrated the shattered wood, through wire entanglements and over shell-scarred ground, Lieutenant Carroll was wounded in the arm.

  The next day when his regiment moved towards Gesnes, as there was no aerial reconnaissance, Deke Gard was tasked with identifying enemy gunnery positions. Heavy fire was encountered but eventually silenced, and the Americans advanced steadily. Carroll led his platoon through the Bois under torrid shelling and machine-gun fire. Leading an attack near La Neuve Grange farm on the 28th he was wounded a second time, earning the Purple Heart. Gard was killed the next day by a sniper’s bullet. The village of Véry was captured after strong resistance; headquarters were established but there was only brief respite from the fighting to bury Deke Gard eight days later.14 He now rests at Meuse-Argonne Cemetery, its 14,246 graves the largest number of American military dead in Europe.

  The offensive continued until the Armistice and took 117,000 US casualties, 40 per cent of their wartime total. On 11 November Danny Carroll’s war was over, but not his rugby: there would be yet more twists to his international playing career. Despite living in America since 1912 and serving with the US Army, he was co-opted by the land of his Australian birth into the AIF rugby team to play for the King’s Cup in England in 1919, of which more later.

  The American forces staged their own sports tournament in France and invited their allies in typically expansive and energetic style; they ‘hit upon the idea of holding a big victory athletic festival and of giving some practical demonstration of their friendship for France’. Or in Henri Garcia’s words, ‘une garden-party monstre’. Australian Lieutenant Goddard quipped, ‘the American reputation for “hustle” was considerably enhanced’. When French contractors downed tools on an ‘immense stadium of ferro-concrete’, US Army engineers stepped into the breach and completed the new 25,000-seater Pershing Stadium at Joinville-le-Pont near Paris. The Inter-Allied Games was partly a useful distraction for two million American troops in Europe, part prototype sporting ‘Marshall Plan’ to cheer up an exhausted France – complete with ‘free ice cream and other dainties’ – and part demonstration of a new sporting imperialism. A victory party for the heroic ‘winners’ of the Great War:

  The Yankee, more than any other man, loves to best someone at something, and he puts into his game the same fighting spirit, the same unconquerable zeal that he displayed at Belleau woods, at St Mihiel, in the Argonne and along the Meuse.15

  Eighteen combatant nations took part in this ‘military Olympics’, although eleven sent their apologies as they were keen to be off home, or their troops were still busy fighting; Britain probably felt it was not quite gentlemanly and pleaded a prior engagement for most of its sportsmen. As it was America’s ball, they could decide what games would be played: they chose to stage sports they had a good chance of winning and – surprise – they did. But they were magnanimous in victory:

  America’s notable success in winning first and second places in so many varied events was due of course in no small degree to the preponderance of entries and to the consistent preliminary training. It is no mean tribute to the sportsmanlike spirit of the competing nations that they fared gaily into the competitions against this handicap.16

  The 554-page committee report covers everything from catering to advertising and its prose is endearing proof that America just does not do irony:

  … there was nothing about the Games to suggest the champs de bataille. The Sports were the standard events usually held in great meets and in no way reflected the gigantic contests fought on the bat
tlefields of the Western Front. The only exceptions were the rifle and pistol competitions and the hand-grenade-throwing contest …

  Nothing of the battlefield there, then. That well-known ‘standard event’ of bayoneting was only rejected as ‘there could be no satisfactory manner of judging such a competition’; the committee deliberations must have been grisly. In the end, the only world record set in the games was indeed in the grenade-toss (pity the officials who measured this event) by the American Thompson, who threw 245ft 11in. The doughboys may have been late to arrive, but with them on our side it’s no wonder we won the war.

  Rugby was included as an event, although perhaps because they were still smarting at the memory of pre-war Berkeley, the Americans made it low profile, with just three games played, not at the Pershing Stadium but at Colombes. (For the baseball, by contrast, 58,963 balls and 12,646 bats were imported). France, Romania and the USA team assembled by Captain Bert Stolz competed at rugby for (bizarrely) the Lou Tsung Tsing silver cup, donated by China. The Romanians were thrashed by both France and USA in the space of four days.

  In the decider on 29 June in front of 5,000 spectators, ‘against the science and experience of the French, the Americans pitted their youth, perfect physical condition and an extreme eagerness to win’. Some of the gridiron-style ‘eagerness’ resulted in violence on both sides, ‘probably the best anyone could do without a knife or a revolver’, according to the Philadelphia-born French rugby internationalist and Federation president, Allan Muhr (a wartime volunteer ambulance driver like Hemingway).17 France won 8–3, proving again that age and cunning beats youth and fitness every time. The French sports writers ‘paid tribute to the athletic prowess and enthusiasm of the Americans which enabled them, with but a short period of intensive training, to match more experienced opponents’.

  Danny Carroll was not yet done. His war game over, he returned to Stanford and more rugby, finally graduating in 1920 at a mature 32. He was then asked to return to a war-torn Belgium to coach (and play for) the USA rugby squad at the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games. His pedigree and experience were vital, as American rugby had all but ceased in wartime and many players were new to the game. On his team were former Lieutenant George Winthrop Fish (another ambulance driver), Corporal James Fitzpatrick and Private John O’Neill, now all demobbed, who had all played in the Inter-Allied Games in Paris. The German-American Randolph ‘Rudi’ Scholz had not made it to the fight – thankfully, for his parents were from Bavarian Burgstadt – although he would get a second chance against different opposition at Okinawa in 1945. Rudi made his rugby debut at 17 for Santa Clara in 1913, faced the All Blacks six weeks after first picking up a rugby ball, and played his last game in 1979 for the Bald Eagles Rugby Club of San Francisco against the Belfast side Instonians, at the age of 83.18

  At Antwerp on 5 September 1920, the Inter-Allied defeat of 1919 was avenged and USA ran out surprise 8–0 winners over France. Weather was a factor in upsetting the form, as it often can in rugby, infamously at Murrayfield. Scholz later recalled:

  At a council of war we decided that because the ground was wet and slippery and the ball likewise, we would make it a forward game. The French tried a backfield game, and they lost although they were fast. Our forwards outweighed the French easily … we dribbled to their five yard line and when the French first five fumbled, Hunter picked it up and fell over the line. Converted. Final score 8–0.19

  Carroll had his second Olympic gold medal. He was the only Australian to carry away gold from Antwerp, this time under a star-spangled banner.

  The victors then did their lap of honour through France in September and played four matches, carrying all before them until their return to Paris. In Lyons, they defeated a side selected from the French southeast, 26–0; a southern team was defeated 14–3 in Toulouse, and a southwest team 6–3 at Bordeaux. Carroll’s fourth and final Test was in October, in a return fixture with the France national side at Colombes. This again proved a luckier ground for the French who triumphed 14–5 – small consolation for their silver second in Antwerp’s Olympic Stadium. It is unlikely that diplomacy played a part in this defeat.

  USA, with Carroll as coach and Scholz playing, returned to Paris to repeat their winning feat in the 1924 Olympics. It did not start well. At Boulogne, immigration officials refused them entry and the players had to force their way off the ship onto dry land. The French had made the game a matter of national pride, and the Parisian press whipped up fierce anti-American sentiment, branding them ‘streetfighters and saloon brawlers’. When Paris authorities cancelled previously arranged warm-ups against local clubs and restricted training to scrubland near their hotel, the American players scaled the fences at the Stade de Colombes. ‘They were looking for a punching bag … we were told to go to Paris and take our beatings like gentlemen,’ wrote one. This, however, is not the American way, and a squad dominated by gridiron giants drafted in for the purpose, were bone-juddering and uncompromising. Having again crushed poor Romania 37–0, they unexpectedly upset the odds (5–1 against from the local bookies) to vanquish the hot home favourites 17–3, with six players getting onto the score-sheet.

  Not for the first (or last) time, French spectators let their side down in the final. A partisan crowd of 40,000 at Colombes booed and hissed the Americans after the star French winger, Adolphe Jauréguy, had been flattened by a tackle and taken bleeding from the field; they then rained abuse, bottles and rocks onto the players throughout the rest of the match. A riotous mob (a popular Paris tradition since long before 1789) forced the Americans to escape the field under the protection of the opposition players and armed police; Gideon Nelson, one of the reserves, was pole-axed by the crowd on the touchline. In one last act of sacrilege, the US national anthem was jeered during the medal presentation.

  Rugby as an Olympic sport was then cancelled due to a lack of interest from its prime exponents, other than the French, whose unseemly crowd behaviour sounded the death knell for the event. This left the USA – to the confounding of many a pub-quizzer – as unlikely reigning Olympic champions at rugby, at least until Rio 2016. Will the sleeping giant reawaken? That will be another story.

  Notes

  1 University of California Yearbook, 1912.

  2 University of California Yearbook, 1912.

  3 Washington Post, 10 October 1905.

  4 Roberta J. Parks, ‘From Football to Rugby and Back, 1906–19’, Journal of Sport History, Vol. II, No. 2 (1984).

  5 San Francisco Bulletin, 11 February 1906.

  6 12 February 1906.

  7 San Francisco Chronicle, 14 February 1906.

  8 Daily Princetonian, 18 January 1910.

  9 The Olympic database gives his birth year as 1892, making him the youngest ever internationalist at 16 years 286 days. A birth certificate held by the ARU dated 1887 is more convincing.

  10 San Francisco Post, 16 November 1913.

  11 The first-ever All Black visit to Samoa in July 2015 is a stride forward.

  12 Swan, History of New Zealand Rugby.

  13 Frank Vans Agnew (ed. Jamie Vans), Veteran Volunteer: Memoir of the Trenches, Tanks and Captivity 1914–19 (Pen & Sword, 2014).

  14 T. Ben Meldrum, History of the 362nd Infantry Regiment (A.L. Scoville Press, 1920).

  15 The Inter-Allied Games Paris, 22nd June to 6th July 1919, Report by G. Wythe & J.M. Hanson (Paris, 1919).

  16 The Inter-Allied Games Paris.

  17 Muhr moved to France in the early 1900s, played in their first 1906 Test against the All Blacks, and scored their first try against England. A Jew, he died of starvation in a concentration camp near Hamburg in 1944.

  18 See Mark Ryan, For the Glory: Two Olympics, Two Wars, Two Heroes (J.R. Books, 2009).

  19 The Redwood, University of Santa Clara, October 1920.

  9

  England

  The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test

  That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best

&n
bsp; Exactly a year and a day after Grand Slam Saturday at Colombes, another rugby match took place in France, on 14 April 1915. By now the old pre-war world had vanished, never to return; so too had hundreds of thousands of men who had died since August 1914, including 57,253 Empire soldiers. On that Wednesday, the French Army, strung along a wide front with their homeland at stake, made progress at Berry-au-Bac on the Aisne north of Reims, but failed in their desperate attacks at Maizeray 160 kilometres away, to the east of infamous Verdun; the British, meanwhile, played rugby. The game was played behind the lines at Pont de Nieppe, near song-famed Armentières on the Franco-Belgian border. This was in the relatively short but infinitely bloody sector of the 730-kilometre Western Front held by the British, around the Ypres Salient and to the south.

  Two British divisions played that day: the 4th Division of Regulars against the 48th (South Midland) Division of Territorials. The 4th had originally been kept back from the Expeditionary Force to defend against the invasion threat, betraying Kitchener’s low confidence in the Territorial Force, specifically created for home defence. No invasion materialised and the division was now taking the fight to the Germans in Flanders fields. Out of deference to the exhausted men who had just come out of the frontline trenches, they played a shortened match of twenty-five minutes each way. The scratch XVs had to depart from their nocturnal routine of hates and bombardment, punctuated by the stand-to at dawn and dusk, and return to what passed as normality in wartime: the night-fighters now played games in daylight. Rugby helped as a reminder of past years of sanity; its full-on physicality was an absorbing distraction for the frayed nerves of men under fire for days on end.