...on the British national character...

Philip Gibbs

While the Highlanders went forward with their pipes, two brigades of the Londoners, on their right, were advancing in the direction of the long, double slag heap, southwest of Loos, called the Double Crassier. Some of them were blowing mouth-organs, playing the music-hall song of "Hullo, hullo, it's a different girl again!" and the "Robert E. Lee," until one after another a musician fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel burst over them, and here and there shells plowed up the earth where they were trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French still stayed in their trenches-their own attack was postponed until midday-and they cheered the London men, as they went forward, with cries of, " Vivent les Englais!" "A mort-les Boches!" It was they who saw one man kicking a football in advance of the others 

"He is mad!" they said. "The poor boy is a lunatic!" 

"He is not mad," said a French officer who had lived in England. "It is a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the British sport."

 It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he held it for fourteen hundred yards-the best-kicked goal in history.

From:  Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1920), p.169.