Homage to the real heroes

In Thiepval Wood, in the heart of the carnage, the world champions stood a three-minute walk from the Leipzig Redoubt: a stretch of ground that took two months of vicious fighting to cover, 91 years ago.

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Fifteen international rugby players were killed in action at the Somme and 27 England representatives in all perished in the Great War.

Pilgrimages to war graves have become a staple of modern sport.

Australia's cricketers stopped at Gallipoli en route to England for an Ashes tour, and the 2000 All Blacks paid their respects at the grave of New Zealand's first captain David Gallaher, who died in 1917 at the third battle of Ypres.

In this World Cup, the USA, who face England in Lens tomorrow, travel to Omaha Beach, the main American landing point on D-Day.

The incongruity of these celebrity visits is that today's athlete can claim only a fleeting kinship with men who left Corinthian activities behind to walk to their doom.

But they played the same games, then as now, and a benefit of these sombre expeditions is to return sport to its proper magnitude.

Besides, who could claim to comprehend the presence of more than 72,000 names on Sir Edwin Lutyens' heart-stopping memorial to the missing of the Somme?

On the 150ft edifice which dominates the battle fields, Brian Ashton's men could pick out the names of fallen England stalwarts.

Beneath their feet Thiepval's foundations rested on the deep tunnels and dug-outs of the German second trench line.

Ashton found four Lancashire fusiliers who shared his surname.

"My grandfather fought in this battle but made it home," he said.

The England coach laid a poppy wreath and called the visit "frightening, inspiring".

He also revealed that England had considered performing bonding exercises on battle fields before electing to train with the Royal Marines.

Wilkinson hobbled up the steps on crutches. Andy Farrell and Martin Corry searched for their surnames: the default curiosity-mechanism for new arrivals.

Josh Lewsey, a Sandhurst graduate, spotted two such inscriptions.

Lewis Moody held a baby for a tourist snap and other England players signed rugby balls.

Why not? They were the living, groping for the right response in what Kipling called the "Silent Cities of the Dead".

In the Anglo-French cemetery beyond, the most chilling of all wartime epitaphs caught the eye of Mathew Tait: "A Soldier of the Great War — Known unto God."

Guided by Paul Garlington, historian and teacher at Stonyhurst St Mary's Hall, where Ashton also taught, the squad stopped first at Mansel Copse, near Death Valley and Crucifix Corner, where Captain D L Martin built a Plasticine model to warn how exposed his men would be to a German machine gun position. The intelligence was ignored.

On July 1, 1916, the eighth and ninth battalions of the Devonshire Regiment walked through the metal air.

Three days later, they buried 161 of their men in a section of the front line visited by England's players.

In stone, their memorial reads: "The Devonshires held this trench, the Devonshires hold it still."

England hold the Webb Ellis Trophy. Will they still, by October 20? For one afternoon it hardly mattered.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who do such an exemplary job of tending these sites, provided the statistics: 185 capped rugby players dead in two world wars, both captains and 10 players killed from the England and Scotland teams who met in March 1914.

Rugby, sport, took its share of the 19,000 dead and 41,000 wounded or missing from the first day of the Somme: a conflagration so vast that 70 per cent of the Newfoundlanders who advanced were cut down in 30 minutes.

In a despatch in 1916, the war correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs wrote: "A hundred years hence men of our blood will come here with reverence as to sacred soil."

Ninety-one years later, those visitors arrived from the simulated warfare of World Cup rugby. Then they drove north in an air-conditioned bus to play a match in which — pray God — nobody will die.