It wasn’t much of a cricket pitch, just a few yards of grass in Havrincourt Woods, but it was still the best on that stretch of the western front because it hadn’t been bombed or shelled. George Harbottle opened the batting there. “The only trouble was there was saplings all about the blooming place like fielders,” Harbottle remembered, “and my first off drive hit a sapling, so I didn’t get any runs off that. I think I got a four off the next one.” Then a thunderstorm broke. Everyone bolted for cover, belly down under the wooden wagons. They never did finish. “That night, we were told to put all that stuff away: we were off at dawn up the line.”

The match was the first Harbottle had played since before the war. He felt the lack. He liked to say he’d been born “in sound of bat and ball” because his house backed on to South Northumberland’s ground. He’d been supposed to play in a game for them the very day before war was declared, but the opposition never turned up. Instead, he wrote in his memoir, “several of us sat there in the sunshine, and discussed what our personal action should be if, as already seemed certain, war would be declared next day.” He decided to enlist, and did. He served first with the Northumberland Fusiliers and then the Machine Gun Corps.

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You hear a lot about the heroes. Men like Major Harold Thomas Forster, Distinguished Service Order and bar, Military Cross and bar, five times mentioned in dispatches, five first-class matches, 10 wickets at 21 each, nine of them in one game against the MCC. Forster won more decorations than any other first-class cricketer. Harbottle wasn’t a hero, or any more of one than the millions of other regular men who served in the first world war. He was a shipbroker from Gosforth, who couldn’t wait to get out of the army as soon as the war was over. Did he ever think of staying on after demobilisation? “Not on your life. It’s not up my street at all.”

There are only a few sports stories like Forster’s, but there are countless thousands like Harbottle’s. Which is why we don’t often stop to tell them. But a hundred years on, the experience of the war never seems so close as it does when you read or hear about the men doing the everyday living of it. You can admire Forster’s extraordinary story about charging the machine guns, but you can empathise with Harbottle’s about trying to snatch an hour for a cricket match between rain showers. There are dozens more like it in the Imperial War Museum’s archives, plain and honest, with no pomp or sanctimony. They’re ordinary people’s sport stories, like ours in many respects, utterly unlike them in many more.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest England cricketers Adil Rashid and Andrew Flintoff tour the first world war grave site near Ypres in 2009. Photograph: Julian Herbert/Getty Images

Harbottle was lucky, really. Cyril Dennys was with the Royal Garrison Artillery. At Amiens they were challenged to a match by a neighbouring unit of Australians. “They found a bit of unshelled ground within reach of their positions and ours. And we, or they, or both, got some equipment – bats and balls and bails and stumps – and we played cricket with them.” The game went into the second day. “What the Germans could have thought was going on, I can’t imagine,” Dennys remembered, “but it must’ve been reported” because “unfortunately, next morning,” the ground was heavily shelled.

Frederick Goodman had a good one. He was a sergeant in the Medical Corps. “I had a chap in my unit, a very fine chap indeed, but he was always giving everybody an awful lot of trouble.” Goodman put him on fatigue duty. The problem was that they’d arranged to play a game between the NCOs and regular men. The “very fine chap” was out for revenge. He came charging downfield. “I think it must have been prearranged so that he could do it – they didn’t attempt to get it from him,” Goodman said. “He ran the ball along the field and then he came down to the goal, I was keeping and of course he walloped the ball went into back of the net, and whacked Goodman through after it.”

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At least Goodman was allowed to play. Clifford Lane was with the Hertfordshire Regiment at Givenchy. There was a bit of open ground there where they would play football. Sometimes stray bullets would fly over the pitch, but they were just far enough from the front line that the bullets were spent. So they couldn’t kill you “unless they’d hit you in the right place.” But the bullets weren’t why the officers stopped them playing. It was because people kept getting injured in tackles. “Well we mustn’t get injured because we were wanted for attacks on the German trenches and that sort of thing. That was really a sort of a satire, really, wasn’t it? I mean, you mustn’t get injured playing football?”

Harbottle went back to South Northumberland cricket club, where he was a stalwart player and later president. He lived long enough to see the start of the Falklands war. When the fleet sailed out, he climbed Great Gable in the Lake District, to the high memorial of the Fell & Rock Climbing Club. Later, he wrote a poem about it. It’s called Again? “Among great gables boulders, on the cairn I must attend, are the names of those young climbers who too soon reached journey’s end, they were fell and rock club members in the 14-18 war, is our modern world so stupid that it still must ask for more?”