Book Rating (1)
Narrator Rating (1)

A Bigger Field Awaits Us: The Scottish Football Team That Fought the Great War

Unabridged Audio Book

Download On Audiobooks.com
Stream On Audiobooks.com

Download or Stream instantly more than 55,000 audiobooks.
Listen to "A Bigger Field Awaits Us: The Scottish Football Team That Fought the Great War" on your iOS and Android device.

Don't have an iOS or Android device, then listen in your browse on any PC or Mac computer.

Author:

Narrator:

Length:

Publisher:

Date:

Dave Gillies

8 Hours 8 Minutes

Tantor Media

November 2018

Audio Book Summary

Each November, about a hundred people with paper poppies pinned to their coats gather around a memorial in Edinburgh. They're there to commemorate the more than a dozen members of the local football team, Heart of Midlothian-almost every member of its starting lineup and many of its backup players-who went to war. When they enlisted in November 1914, the Edinburgh Evening News ran pages of splendid photos of the Hearts players in McCrae's Battalion. After the war, surviving soldiers, many of them wounded, gassed, and suffering from what was then called 'shell shock,' returned home to a public that had only the weakest grasp of what had happened. Perhaps the pointlessness of so much suffering and death was too awful to contemplate. All of Edinburgh threw a parade for the men of McCrae's Battalion when they marched off to war, but no one wanted to be reminded that their commanders later traded their lives and health for a few yards of French mud.

A Bigger Field Awaits Us tells the little-known but poignant story of a group of Scottish athletes and their fans who went to war together-and the stories of the few who made it home.

Similar Audio Books

Reviews

  • Crompton B.

    An interesting narrative of the so-called PAL companies that allowed friends to enlist and serve together in the British Army during World War One. Was especially taken with the painting of the patriotic frenzy in Edinburgh in the early stages of the conflict and how the grinding down of that fervor took place on the Western Front as seen through the eyes of the footballers who went off to fight. If I have any other comment, it is that after July 1, 1916 and The Somme, lose contact with the Hearts' members for some time and a bit long on overall Allied strategy and tactics before we rejoin them in the latter stages of the war and on into an interesting and entertaining epilog.

    Book Rating