War Game written and illustrated by Michael Foreman. (New York: Arcade, 1994).

This is the story of four soccer-playing English boys, who caught up in the furor of August 1914, and encouraged by its World Cup atmosphere, join the army and find themselves fighting on the Western Front. They experience the filth and misery of benches, until on Christmas Day 1914, a spontaneous truce breaks out between the British and the Germans -complete with a friendly soccer game. Too soon the war commences again -- complete with a kick-off-- and both sides (teams?) are slaughtered in No-Man's-Land.

Foreman combines simple watercolor illustrations with reproductions of period recruiting posters, broadsides, advertisements, etc., for an effect of underlying authenticity. And it's a good thing, too, because without that photographic proof cynical Americans might be inclined to read over the story of the boys' capricious enlistment, and the repeated sportsmanship metaphors and assume that such innocence and naivete cannot be real, that it's only a story.

This mature and well-balanced book by Michael Foreman could only have been written (or, at least, written so well) by an Englishman. The English remember the "Great War." Even though the United States suffered twice as many men killed in World War I (in only 6 or 7 months of fighting) as were killed in the Vietnam War (over 8 years), we Americans generally don't make deep emotional connections with WWI as we do with the Vietnam War. But Foreman's poignant story shows that the British loss of innocence occurred much earlier in this century and provided lessons that we can all learn from.

The British idea of sportsmanship (that had grown during the Victorian era to achieve near-religious status during the Edwardian) flowed over into all aspects of life -- even war. In a prophetic poem popular before the Great War, Sir Henry Newbolt wrote:

The River of death has brimmed its banks,
      And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
      "Play up! play up! and play the game!"

"'Play the game!' That's what life is about. Decency, fortitude, grit, civilization, Christianity, commerce, all blend into one -- the game!" (Eksteins 122) Perhaps that's why Captain W.P. Nevill (like Freddie in the story) kicked a football as he lead his company over-the-top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (Fussell 27). Captain Nevill was one of the 60,000 British killed, wounded and missing on the first day of a battle that was to last over four months: from July 1 into November. For perspective, recall again the war that shocked America, the Vietnam War where 57,000 American men were killed between 1965 and 1973.

Foreman knows his historical facts. That spontaneous truce of Christmas 1914 -- the fraternization, the German Christmas trees in the trenches, the German barber giving haircuts in No-Man's-Land --it's all true. Eksteins states that the same "sporting spirit is credited with producing the truce, and of course the [accompanying] suggestion is that were all men to play the game properly, there would be no war" 123). British sportsmanship was so contagious it even enveloped the Germans.

Foreman's book opens with an old Punch cartoon: The Greater Game . . . 'there's only one field today where you can get honour."' And then follows his dedication to his uncles killed in the "Great War" --four of them, aged 18, 20, 20, and 24 (the last dying of his wounds on Christmas day 1918, a month after the Armistice). Does all this seem like a contradiction? The book purports to show that the fantasy of sport must not be confused with war; that play is one thing and war is entirely another; that war is no game. And yet the boys in the story go on feeling that they are "playing" for England, "kicking-off)' their attack, and finally (as Will did) imagining in their last moments that they are going to that great soccer game in the sky.

I wondered at this: what is Foreman trying to teach children already calloused by the A-Team, Superfriends, X-Men and all the rest? I believe that Foreman, like many Britons, while being wiser for their experience, still admire (and rightly so) that sportsman-like duty, the duty to "play the game" when called upon that sustained them through two world wars. Martin Stephen has compiled the best newer anthology of Great War verse, Never Such Innocence -- and the more I read in it, the more I feel that the title (taken from a poem by Philip Larkin) is both a promise and a lament.

So what is this book? It's a history lesson in the sobering, sentimental oddities of the First World War. And what is it trying to say? Where's the wake-up call? Through sparse, tight narrative, Foreman offers a parable of good intentions ground up in the machinery of modern war. We wish that youth and sport could mix with sacrifice and honor to somehow become death-defying -- we really want it. It should be true, but it's a selfdestructive contradiction. And that's why I find so haunting the true contradiction of Foreman's title: War Game.