Great Uncle Fred? My Dad and I have had an argument. He says that the greatest cricketer ever was Ian Botham; I say the greatest cricketer ever was Freddie Flintoff. Who would you say was the greatest cricketer ever (and please don’t say Sachin Tendulkar or Shane Warne or someone from the olden days)? (Jack, Autumn 2007)

It was September 1916 and the 19-year-old soldier, standing in a trench dug in France, was waiting his turn. The enemy were on the attack. It was deadly dull but you had to keep concentrating or you could pay with your life. The soldier had noticed that he did not find it as hard as the other men to keep calm and ready through the danger and the boredom. He did his best with quiet words to help the others keep their minds on the here and now; it was so easy to dream - of home, of your sweetheart, of food.... Nothing happens, shells exploding far away, nothing happens. Then, suddenly - the burst of a shell, closer than before, the noise, the force, so much happening in one moment, so much colour and change, the soldier checks his being in that moment - he is unharmed but wedged into a wall of mud - and what’s this? a fragment of shell or is it a rock flying towards him, he can’t move his body, it’s wedged, the fragment is flying, at his head, he sees it just in time, no time to think, no time to move from the corner of trench into which he has been wedged by the blast, he reaches for his rifle which has escaped his grasp, grabs it by the barrel, swings it with all his might and hits the rock - yes, it was a rock, he saw it as he hit it - out of the trench. It would have hit him on the forehead. It would have killed him. He gave it no more mind. He wriggled out of his wedged position. He moved among the other men. Some were dead. Many more were wounded. He did what he could. They must not, they could not, despair. The enemy were moving their way. Clouds were gathering overhead. Would the weather divert the opposition’s progress? They must expect no such thing. He went among the men dispensing encouragement. Some responded best to a joke, some to harsh words, some to a mother-like gentleness. He did his best to speak in the most appropriate fashion to each man, individuals despite the uniforms, their individuality emphasised by the prevailing conditions. The orderlies dealt with the dead and the wounded. The other men regrouped. An unexpected order had come through: confuse the enemy with sporadic charges along the entire line. This sector was one of those chosen to charge. The men prepared to go over the top. The soldier saw in their eyes the expectation that they were about to die. He looked back at each of them with the determination that this need not be the case. They readied. The order to go was given. They climbed and ran, forward through the impossibly clogged and uneven ground. Shells fell nearby. They were approaching the enemy lines but no one had yet shot at them. They were 50 yards away when, all of a sudden, the machine-gun burst into life. In an instant three men to the soldier’s right lay dead, like nettles cut by a sickle. A moment later he extracted his grenade from his belt and threw it so it flew like a swallow into the precise space from where he had seen the machine-gun fire burst. A 50-yard throw, perfect. There was an explosion and there was death. The men kept on advancing. Other men, excited by his grenade, threw their own grenades but with less accuracy and little effect. One bounced into a trench, failed to explode and was thrown straight back at them. The soldier saw it flying to the group of three comrades to his left and, knowing that it had a greater chance of exploding if it crashed to the ground, he flung himself into the air to catch it as it flew. Plucking the grenade out of its deadly flight-path, the soldier tumbled to the ground, cradling the grenade. Then, without thinking any more about it, he threw it high, high, high over the top of the enemy trenches and heard it explode, devastatingly, among the supplies. He and the men kept on advancing, and then... And then the shell fell among them. There was no chance. There was nothing left. Atoms. Dead, obliterated, in a fraction of a second. And so died Oberleutnant Uwe Gehlen, of the 73rd Hanoverian Fusilier Regiment; had he ever played the game, of which he had never actually heard, Oberleutnant Gehlen would have been the finest cricketer who ever lived. Of those who have played the game, the finest cricketer who ever lived was, perhaps, Sir Garfield Sobers. And I happen to think that Flintoff was better than Botham. So there.

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