The Grand Match of War: Military Football and André Lhote’s Rugbymen

“Sport calls for endurance and sangfroid, the military virtues”, announced Agathon (Henri Massis) on the eve of the First World War, “and it keeps youth in a warlike frame of mind.” Once the French Bill for increasing military conscription was passed, physical education, rugby and association football became imperative to military training. As Georges Rozet surmized, French men were dutifully building their strength through rugby—albeit recognizing that the greatest test awaiting them was “The Grand Match of War”. No sooner was war announced than Rozet declared they would be put to the test by defying “these Prussian bastards”. Yet given the conception of war as an international football match with good soldiers aligned with good sportsmen, football events substantially increased being played not only between French army teams but also between them and the Allied armed forces: British soldiers alongside the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). Constantly the Union of French Athletic Sports Societies (USFSA) commission encouraged ANZAC soldiers to play with and against French soldiers in informal and official test matches. Progressively the French army granted free sports periods when rugby and soccer could be played, especially in Inter-Allied matches on fields alongside the military camps. On 10 November 1915, the magazine Sporting reported that after concluding these matches with a cup of tea, “the English and French bade each other farewell, adding ‘see you soon’ as a sign that a further match was to come. Back at the camp […] not a word was spoken. Nearby cannons roared.”

Once General Pétain became Head of the French army command for northern and eastern France, from 1917 these games were boosted and facilitated the setting up of a competitive French military team. The Ministry of War ordered 5,000 soccer and rugby balls, military sports congresses were organized, sports grounds established and ‘war clubs’ initiated to organize Inter-Allies tournaments culminating in the rugby match between Lucrétia and the ANZAC team at the Parc des Princes velodrome on 21 January 1917 watched by a crowd of 5,000. “With France still in a state of war”, concluded Waquet and Vincent, “military rugby asserted itself over rugby in clubs and federal rugby.” Strongly supportive of this “military rugby”, André Lhote was, like Jacques Rivière and Alain Fournier, an ardent proponent and partisan of Cubism as a ‘modern classicism’, unpolluted by alien cultures, able to regenerate French values of reason, courage and vitalism. Drafted into the army on the outbreak of war and stationed in his native Bordeaux, Lhote adapted the Cubistic experimentation undertaken by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay to a series of Cubist paintings depicting rugbymen as the new heroes of French masculinity and virility during the First World War. Unlike the light against which Delaunay’s rugby balls are glimpsed taking flight, like asteroids, the rugby balls in Lhote’s paintings are juxtaposed against vivid blue skies tinged with the smoke of shelling and smouldering ruins while black clouds loom over violet skies—ominous signifiers of the noxious explosions and chemical warfare captured at Verdun by Félix Vallotton, amongst other avant-garde artists, in which rugby would have been played alongside the battle fields. As Lhote explained in Totalisme, he had sought to commemorate those who played rugby on the battlefields as those who were risking their lives for their country.