Just what Johnny Poe’s heroic finish on the battle field meant to us here at home is the common knowledge of all football men and indeed of all sportsmen.  There is ample evidence, moreover, that it attracted the attention of the four corners of the earth.  Life in London or Paris was not all roses to the Americans compelled to remain there at the height of the war.

Paul Mac Whelan, a Yale man and football writer, had occasion to be in London shortly after the news of Poe’s death in battle was received there.  Talking with Whelan after his return he impressed upon me the place that Poe had made for himself in the hearts of at least one of the fighting countries.

“You know,” said he, “that at about that time Americans were not very popular.  There seemed to be a feeling everywhere that we should have been on the firing line.  This feeling developed the fashion of polite jeering to a point that made life abroad uncomfortable until Johnny Poe fell fighting in the ranks of the Black Watch on the plains of Flanders.  In the dull monotony of the casualty list his name at first slipped by with scant mention.  It was the publication in the United States of the story of his fighting career which stimulated newspaper interest not merely in England, but throughout the British Empire.  To Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa—­into the farthest corners of the earth—­went the tale of the death of a great American fighter.

“I met one man, a lawyer, on his way to do some peace work, and he told me that he thought Poe had no right to be in the ranks of a foreign army.  Probably most of the pacifists would have returned the same verdict regardless of Poe’s love for the cause of the Allies.  Yet among the thousands of Americans in Europe in the month following Poe’s death, there was complete unity of opinion that the old Princeton football star had done more for his country than all the pacifists put together.

“‘A toast to the memory of Poe,’ said one of the group of Americans in the Savoy, that famous gathering place of Yankees in London.  ’His death has made living a lot easier for his countrymen who have to be in France and England during the war.’”

“There is not an army on the continent in which Americans have not died, but no death in action, not even that of Victor Chapman the famous American aviator in France, gave such timely proof of American valor as that of Poe.  In London for a month after his death there was talk among Americans and in the university clubs about raising funds for some permanent memorial in London to Poe.  There are many memorials to Englishmen in America and it would seem that there is a place and a real reason for erecting a memorial in London to a fighting American who gave his life for a cause to England.”

I have always treasured, in my football collection, some anecdotes which Johnny Poe wrote several years ago while in Nevada.  In fact, from reading his stories, after his death, I got the inspiration that prompted me to write this book.