PRIVATE WALTER MONTAGUE CHICK
EAST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT
6TH OCTOBER 1916 AGE 20
BURIED: ETAPLES MILITARY CEMETERY, FRANCE
This was a very common feeling after the First World War, after all, according to the British Victory Medal, it had been 'The Great War for Civilization', and according to the next-of-kin memorial plaque your relation had 'died for Freedom and Honour' . In the British narrative, right had triumphed over might, culture over 'kultur', justice over tyranny in the war to end all wars. Now, therefore, it was up to those who lived on to see that the world became the better place for which the dead had died.
It's interesting to see the way Walter Chick's parents expressed this. 'Playing the game' is thought to be such a public school expression that it's unexpected coming from a family where Walter Chick, at the age of fourteen, had been a tailor's apprentice. But it was not a public-school expression. Around this time an American, Henry Grantland Rice (1880-1954), encapsulated the idea in a verse that it is still quoted today:
For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But how you played the game.
Walter Chick disembarked in France on 17 April 1915. Within a month he had been hospitalised with tonsillitis and by July was back in England with pleurisy. It was 1 September 1916 before he returned to France with the 1st Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment. On the 30th he was hospitalised with a gun-shot wound that penetrated his chest. He died on 6 October.