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This article appeared in yesterday's Times online:
'On St Andrew’s Day, 1915 Logie Leggatt sent a letter home from a trench in France recalling a former battle. “This time three years ago, I was the keenest man alive,” he wrote. “One of my team is killed now, but all the rest of us are in some front or other. We may not be great shakes at soldiering, but we were the finest Wall XI that has been seen for 40 years . . . What am I fighting for? Not for England with its follies and conceits, simply for about 100 friends and a few acres of elms and turf by a river, for red-brick buildings and a grey chapel, and above all for the most tremendous tradition I shall ever know.”
That night he dined with three former team-mates where they drank a toast “with greater gratitude than we can express” to Beata Maria de Etona and recalled their triumph beside a 200-year-old wall three years earlier, when Leggatt’s Collegers trounced the Oppidans by nine shies to nil. It could have been more, but Leggatt had a rare goal, worth a further nine points, annulled when an opponent claimed to have touched the ball in flight. No goals have since been scored in the big St Andrew’s Day match of the Eton wall game.
“The umpire reversed his decision on the word of a player,” Leggatt wrote stoically, “on the grounds that a gentleman could not, and would not, lie.” The umpire’s decision is always final. As was the German sniper’s bullet that killed 2nd Lt Leggatt on July 31, 1917, at Pilckem Ridge, 200 muddy miles from home. He died wearing his 12ft purple-and-white College Wall scarf.'
I am having an informative exchange with another poster on this article who challenged me when I said that if he had been a Subaltern in 1915, I was surprised that, given the attrition rate of young officers in the Great War, he was still a Subaltern 2 years later. He countered by posting the CWGC website entry for said officer which definitely states that he was 2nd Lt when he was killed. Could the oracles of ARRSE do some checking for me? I realise that The 'Thunderer' in recent years has been in a downward spiral towards the red tops and I wondered if the bit about 1915 was accurate.
I stress that I have no connection with the officer or his family and am merely curious as to the accuracy of the article.
'On St Andrew’s Day, 1915 Logie Leggatt sent a letter home from a trench in France recalling a former battle. “This time three years ago, I was the keenest man alive,” he wrote. “One of my team is killed now, but all the rest of us are in some front or other. We may not be great shakes at soldiering, but we were the finest Wall XI that has been seen for 40 years . . . What am I fighting for? Not for England with its follies and conceits, simply for about 100 friends and a few acres of elms and turf by a river, for red-brick buildings and a grey chapel, and above all for the most tremendous tradition I shall ever know.”
That night he dined with three former team-mates where they drank a toast “with greater gratitude than we can express” to Beata Maria de Etona and recalled their triumph beside a 200-year-old wall three years earlier, when Leggatt’s Collegers trounced the Oppidans by nine shies to nil. It could have been more, but Leggatt had a rare goal, worth a further nine points, annulled when an opponent claimed to have touched the ball in flight. No goals have since been scored in the big St Andrew’s Day match of the Eton wall game.
“The umpire reversed his decision on the word of a player,” Leggatt wrote stoically, “on the grounds that a gentleman could not, and would not, lie.” The umpire’s decision is always final. As was the German sniper’s bullet that killed 2nd Lt Leggatt on July 31, 1917, at Pilckem Ridge, 200 muddy miles from home. He died wearing his 12ft purple-and-white College Wall scarf.'
I am having an informative exchange with another poster on this article who challenged me when I said that if he had been a Subaltern in 1915, I was surprised that, given the attrition rate of young officers in the Great War, he was still a Subaltern 2 years later. He countered by posting the CWGC website entry for said officer which definitely states that he was 2nd Lt when he was killed. Could the oracles of ARRSE do some checking for me? I realise that The 'Thunderer' in recent years has been in a downward spiral towards the red tops and I wondered if the bit about 1915 was accurate.
I stress that I have no connection with the officer or his family and am merely curious as to the accuracy of the article.
