Upon the centenary of this country's declaration of war on Germany, it is appropriate to recall that sport suffered as grievously as any other sphere of society during the conflict

How little the innocence of a Swedish summer seemed to preface the sinister clouds of conflagration.

George Hutson, Thomas Gillespie, Laurie Anderson and Richard Yorke had all assembled at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm in anticipation of stirring some national pride, and scarcely 2½ years later all four of them were dead. Frederick Kitching, a standing long jumper at the 1908 Games in London, had also perished.

Upon Monday’s centenary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, it is apt to recall a quintet of young British Olympians who entered World War One imagining that it would all be over by Christmas and ended up never seeing another Christmas at all.

Of the 888,246 poppies that lie strewn at the foot of the Tower of London this morning, denoting each member of Britain’s military dead in The Great War, five are for them. They are the oft-forgotten figures who support the terrible truth of Field Marshal Lord Roberts’s proclamation in August 1914 that “this is not the time to play games, wholesome as they are in times of piping peace. We are engaged in a life-and-death struggle.”

For sport in Britain would suffer as grievously as any other sphere of society, with the loss of 34 first-class cricketers, 27 England rugby union internationals, and unknown hundreds among the 2,000 professional footballers who signed up to serve.

The quest to recruit sportsmen had gathered pace at the behest of Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Homes author, who argued: “If the cricketer had a straight eye, let him look along the barrel of a rifle.” As the fate of those five Olympians, deprived even of seeing out 1914, showed vividly, it would come at the most dreadful price.

Not that Hutson had the vaguest inkling. He was broadly recognised as the most promising distance runner of his generation, first coming to notice when he won a military cross-country race while stationed at the Curragh, for the 2nd Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, “beating all favourites”, according to his official death notice.

For three years in succession he was the English champion over a mile, reaching the zenith of his career at the Olympics in Stockholm, where he took the bronze medal in the 5,000 metres, behind Finland’s Hannes Kolehmainen and Jean Bouin, of France, both of whom shattered the world record. He would seize another bronze in the 3,000m, narrowly trailing team-mates Joe Cottrill and Cyril Porter as the British completed a sweep of the podium.

It was Hutson’s misfortune that a mere five weeks after Britain went to war, his unit became drawn into the First Battle of the Marne, marking the start of the trench-bound inertia that would characterise the entire conflict. It signalled “the end of the beginning”, to invoke Churchill’s line about El Alamein.

Despite the Allied victory that thwarted an apparently remorseless German advance towards Paris, whose governor-general had already ordered demolition charges to be placed beneath the Eiffel Tower, the slaughter was terrible, with half a million men killed or wounded in the space of eight days.

Hutson himself is understood to have died just as the Germans began their withdrawal north of the River Marne, near the Ardennes village of Vendresse. His remains were never recovered, and it was not for another eight months that his widow, back home in Roseland Cottages in bucolic Lewes, was even informed of his passing. He was 24 years old.

Scottish rower Gillespie had been almost an exact contemporary, going one better at the Stockholm Games by grasping a silver in the men’s eight. He had first unearthed his gift as an oarsman at Winchester, before refining his craft at New College, Oxford, with whom he twice won the Head of the River Race as a prelude to capturing a defining Olympic medal.

A little over two years later, he obtained a university commission to join the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, seeing action almost immediately as a lieutenant in the First Battle of the Aisne, the hideous stalemate of September 1914 that did much to lock the belligerents into a sequence of negligible gains and losses for the next four years.

Gillespie lay in the trenches at Missy-sur-Aisne, exposed to the bombardment of German heavy artillery for 17 days and nights. He was reported killed, aged 21, at La Bassée, a small town in the Pas-de-Calais region, as the opposing armies fought with mounting futility to envelop each other’s northern flanks in the grimly-titled ‘Race to the Sea’.

His brother, Alexander, was also lost in the war, but his letters from Flanders survive to this day, and a foreword from the then Bishop of Southwark attests explicitly to Thomas’s sporting prowess.

Depicting him as a “great, strong, fearless, affectionate fellow,” he offered an ode borrowed from Victorian poet Robert Browning: “Our manhood’s prime vigour! No spirit feels waste. Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, not a sinew unbraced.”

Athlete Anderson, four years Gillespie’s senior, was an Eton man, securing the school’s rare distinction of captaining the ‘Oppidans’ – the most academically distinguished pupils – at the same time as being voted president of ‘Pop’, otherwise known as head boy.

It had been intended that he should follow his older brother, Arthur, to Cambridge, but instead this consummate sprinter went to Oxford, promptly earning his blue for track and field before setting the first official world record for the 440-yard hurdles in 56.8 seconds. Inauspiciously for Anderson, the event was excised from the Olympic programme for Stockholm, but he was still a favourite to claim a medal in the high hurdles until falling in his semi-final.

As war engulfed western Europe, Anderson was swiftly embroiled with the Cheshire Regiment, and amid the carnage around Ypres suffered mortal wounds alongside George Bertram Pollock-Hodsoll, a footballer who had played for the Army team. There is some dispute over whether his injuries were immediately fatal, with battalion archives registering his death on Nov 7, while the Commonwealth War Graves Commission puts it four days later.

But news of his death rippled far and wide. Indeed, Anderson’s name was the first mentioned in a mournful dispatch in The New York Times headlined: “England losing athletes – many prominent in sporting circles die on battlefields.”

It is inscribed now on the Menin Gate in Ypres, which commemorates every one of those 54,000 officers whose final resting place will never be known and where buglers, without fail, sound the Last Post at eight each evening.

Kitching, while a figure of less public renown than Anderson, was the first British athlete to exhibit sustained proficiency in the javelin. From County Durham and originally a specialist in the standing jumps, he switched to the spear with immediate success, becoming the only Briton of his day to break the 120ft, 130ft and 140ft barriers, eventually establishing a personal best of 143ft 3in (43.66m).

He had arisen from a diametrically opposed background to Anderson, as a descendant of the Victorian industrialists, counting himself as one of seven grandsons of Alfred Kitching, builder of the Derwent locomotive.

Local folklore in his hometown of Darlington insists that he won at least a bronze in the standing long jump at the London Olympics in 1908, but published results list him as one of 17 entrants without a recorded distance.

The precise circumstances of his death after enlistment in World War One also continue to be uncertain. He is believed to have fallen in late 1914 in Dunkirk, where the Navy had arrived to help bolster the defence of Antwerp, but the CWGC is yet to identify a grave.

Yorke, a steeplechaser, was the one British Olympian slain in 1914 who had competed in both the 1908 and 1912 Games, having switched to the flat to enhance his chances in Stockholm.

It proved a forlorn ploy, as he was eliminated in the opening rounds of both the 800 and 1,500m, his last significant appearance before war. As a sergeant with the London Scottish Regiment he fought in Arras, where in December the French had asked for urgent British involvement to help push the German line further north.

Yorke lost his life three days before Christmas, at the culmination of the Battle of Givenchy. He is buried at the Arras Road cemetery near Roclincourt, where 263 bleached-white headstones are arrayed in perfect equilateral formation, marching towards the horizon across this flattest and most forsaken of landscapes.

Somewhere on Monday, in that extraordinary Tower of London display, there will be five poppies for Yorke and his fellow Olympians. They stand as suitably stark testimony to sport's lost generation.

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