War Football.

There can't be a shadow of doubt that some of the American football battles in France, waged by men at the top of condition and aglow with victory over the world's enemy, were the hardest-fought pigskin combats in which Americans had had ever been pitted against one another. They were tremendous, Homeric, and the sport gained incalculably, Stubbes, who seems to have been a cantankerous old person, said in his "Anatomie of Abuses" (1583) that football was a "devilishe pastime," causing "brawling, murther, homicide, and great effusion of blood." Sir Thomas Elyot (1531), had called it "nothyng but beastely fury and extreme violence." But the only casualty in the scores of games played in France and in the Rhine country by the twice-heroes of the American Expeditionary Forces was a broken arm. The explanation is that the code framed by Walter Camp, Parke H. Davis, and their associates of the Rules Committee was respected in spirit and letter by the American soldiers. They always heeded the injunction that "the football player who intentionally violates a rule is guilty of unfair play and unsportsmanlike tactics" and "brings discredit to the good name of the game." --New York Times.