WE pray never to find out, yet this week we wondered how many of sport's contemporary celebrities might volunteer to serve their country, unbidden, as they did a century ago.

The horror and futility of war is brought chillingly home when one considers World War I sport casualties. The Olympic champions and international competitors culled across the sporting landscape underlines the obscenity of a wasted generation.

Hearts won eight successive matches early in the 1914 season, but on November 26 every member of the team joined up. Seven never returned. Three died on the first day of the Somme. Paddy Crossan convinced a German surgeon to save his leg only to succumb to poison gas.

Bradford City's Donald Bell, who enlisted two days after his wedding, stormed a German machine-gun post and posthumously gained the Victoria Cross, claimed as the only one awarded to a professional footballer. The PFA purchased it for a reported £252,000.

However, Bell was beaten by a month to the supreme award by Celtic's William Angus. He had signed professional forms in 1911 but never made the first team. Angus dragged a fellow Carluke native, James Martin, from under the muzzles of German guns and across no-man's land to be hauled to safety by HLI comrades. Angus tried to draw enemy fire and lost an eye and part of his left foot. The CO who recommended him for the VC, wrote: "No braver deed was done in the history of the British Army."

Angus became president of Carluke Rovers, living for a further 44 years. His VC is on display at Edinburgh Castle.

Others were less fortunate. Jimmy Speirs, formerly of Rangers and Clyde, captained Bradford to 1911 FA Cup victory, scoring the only goal. He enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders and won the MM before dying at Passchendaele.

Former Rangers player Walter Tull trained as an officer in Ayrshire. In contravention of regulations forbidding "any negro or person of colour" to become an officer, he was commissioned in 1917, the first black British army officer. He was mentioned in dispatches and shot in no-man's land. His body was never found.

Seven former Celtic players gave their lives, three from Rangers. Hardly a club in Britain went unscathed.

Thirty Scotland rugby internationalists died, including their captain, "Darkie" Bedell-Sivright, who led the British Isles touring team. He was also Scottish amateur boxing champion before graduating as a surgeon. He died at Gallipoli.

Wales lost 13 capped players and England 26, including their captain, Ronnie Poulton. He died a year after scoring four tries against France.

The 34 England county cricketers who died included Warwickshire all-rounder Percy Jeeves. PG Woodhouse, a great admirer, immortalised him as Bertie Wooster's manservant.

The Tour de France began the day Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, triggering the outbreak of war. Of the 145 riders who started the 1914 race, 14 were killed, along with 34 previous Tour finishers and three former champions. Francois Faber, 1909 winner, died without seeing his four-day-old daughter. His body was never found, but many sports casualties lie in the endless rows of white crosses across Flanders.

Four-times Wimbledon singles champion Tony Wilding died at Neuve Chapelle; Gerard Anderson, who broke the world record for 440-yards hurdles in 1912, was killed in action 100 years ago last Sunday; swimmer Cecil Healy, who won Olympic gold, silver, and bronze for Australia, died at the Somme; Frenchman Jean Bouin won one of three successive international cross-country titles in Edinburgh in 1912, and took Olympic silver at 5000m that year in Stockholm. He and Britain's bronze medallist there, George Hutson, both died in France; Hans Braun won two silvers and a bronze for Germany in two Olympics. A fighter pilot, he died a month before the armistice. A street in Munich is named after him.

Jimmy Duffy was brought up in Edinburgh and twice was Scotland's leading finisher in the international cross-country championships. He immigrated and was fifth in the 1912 Olympic marathon for Canada before winning the 1914 Boston marathon. Two days after the first anniversary of that victory he died charging a German machine gun nest.

Among 51 British Olympians to die in WWI was Scotland's first Olympic champion, Wyndham Halswelle. He won 400 metres gold in the only Olympic walkover in history, provoking a diplomatic incident with the USA. Halswelle won 400m silver (his only defeat at the distance) and 800m bronze at the 1906 interim Olympics in Athens, first time the BOA officially sent a team.

To this day he is the only GB athlete to win an Olympic medal of each colour without recourse to relays. His Scottish 440 yards record (48.4) survived the attentions of 1924 Olympic champion Eric Liddell, and was surpassed only in 1958. And the Scottish 300 yards record he set in 1908 was beaten in 1961 by a Glasgow University student, now Sir Menzies Campbell.

His medals are now in the possession of his great nephew, Wyndham Halswell (the final 'e' was dropped as it was an affectation of the athlete's father, noted the water-colourist Keeley). Though his great uncle is honoured in the scottishathletics Hall of Fame, Halswell confirms there was no attempt to commemorate him this year, other than his name being read out at Cotleigh Church, in Devon, as it is annually. "I always wondered why my name was mentioned on Remembrance Sunday when I was a child," he said.

Wyndham was a decorated Boer War veteran when he set an Olympic record of 48.4 in 1908. While recovering from wounds in France, in 1915, Halswelle wrote an account of trench warfare. I discovered it in the HLI regimental magazine at their Sauchiehall Street museum:

"I called on the men to get over the parapet. There is great difficulty in getting out of a trench, especially for small men laden with a pack, rifle, and perhaps 50 rounds in the pouch, and a bandolier of 50 rounds hung around them, and perhaps four feet of slippery clay perpendicular wall with sandbags on the top.

"I got about three men hit actually on top of the parapet. I made a dash at the parapet and fell back. The Jocks then heaved me up and I jumped into a ditch - an old trench filled with liquid mud - which took me some time to get out of."

His men gained 15 yards, a distance which, as an athlete, Halswelle would have covered in under two seconds. They were ordered to retreat within hours. He had lost 79 men. Halswelle was killed within days by a sniper.

His body is interred near Armentieres, with no mention of athletics feats on his headstone.

Like so many of his generation, Captain Halswelle disappeared almost without trace.