Football Days / Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball

by William H. Edwards

CHAPTER XI

JOHNNY POE'S OWN STORY

Johnny Poe was a member of the Black Watch, that famous Scotch Regiment whose battles had followed the English flag. On the graves of the Black Watch heroes the sun never sets. Johnny Poe's death came on September 25th, 1915, in the Battle of Loos. Nelson Poe has given me the following information regarding Johnny's death. It comes direct from Private W. Faulkner, a comrade who was in the charge when Johnny fell.

In the morning during the attack we went out on a party carrying bombs. Poe and myself were in this party. We had gone about half way across an open field when Poe was hit in the stomach. He was then five yards in front of me and I saw him fall. As he fell he said, 'Never mind me. Go ahead with our boxes.' On our return for more bombs we found him lying dead. Shortly after he was buried at a place between the British and German lines. I have seen his grave which is about a hundred yards to the left of 'Lone Tree' on the left of Loos. 'Lone Tree' is the only landmark near. The grave is marked with his name and regiment.

Just what Johnny Poe's heroic finish on the battle field meant to us here at home is the common knowledge of all football men and indeed of all sportsmen. There is ample evidence, moreover, that it attracted the attention of the four corners of the earth. Life in London or Paris was not all roses to the Americans compelled to remain there at the height of the war.

Paul Mac Whelan, a Yale man and football writer, had occasion to be in London shortly after the news of Poe's death in battle was received there. Talking with Whelan after his return he impressed upon me the place that Poe had made for himself in the hearts of at least one of the fighting countries.

"You know," said he, "that at about that time Americans were not very popular. There seemed to be a feeling everywhere that we should have been on the firing line. This feeling developed the fashion of polite jeering to a point that made life abroad uncomfortable until Johnny Poe fell fighting in the ranks of the Black Watch on the plains of Flanders. In the dull monotony of the casualty list his name at first slipped by with scant mention. It was the publication in the United States of the story of his fighting career which stimulated newspaper interest not merely in England, but throughout the British Empire. To Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa—into the farthest corners of the earth—went the tale of the death of a great American fighter.

"I met one man, a lawyer, on his way to do some peace work, and he told me that he thought Poe had no right to be in the ranks of a foreign army. Probably most of the pacifists would have returned the same verdict regardless of Poe's love for the cause of the Allies. Yet among the thousands of Americans in Europe in the month following Poe's death, there was complete unity of opinion that the old Princeton football star had done more for his country than all the pacifists put together.