FRENCH NOTES:In the first of a series of Monday columns, MATT WILLIAMSrecalls the poignant death of an 18-year-old relative who became one of the countless casualties of the first World War

MICK RYAN was an athletic and elusive fullback with a powerful left boot. He regularly dropped goals with that deadly left from 40 metres. He was fast. He won invitational open age races running in both the 100 and 200 metres. Physically he was stocky, 5ft 10in with dark brown hair and piecing blue eyes. He was an extrovert by nature and by all accounts a bit of a larrikin with a ready smile and cheeky sense of humour.

Mick was killed under a barrage of German bullets on the Somme in 1918. He was 18 years old. The Armistice was just five weeks away. Mick Ryan is my great uncle. As is the Irish way, he was christened Joseph Michael, but to all he was and remains Uncle Mick.

The Joseph part proved a hard nut to crack when I was searching for his grave on the Somme. The key was to trace the Ryan’s adopted home of Trangie in western New South Wales. If they were looking to upgrade from Limerick, they got it very wrong.

The cemetery near Albert in northern France is kept in immaculate condition. About 200 graves in perfect rows of white stones. At each grave there was a majestic rose in late bloom. The battle that killed Mick was on this spot. The Australians were attempting to retake the town. The dead were buried where they fell. It is a killing ground.

The French tricolour and the Australian flag were flying over a marble altar engraved with the words “Lest we forget”. I am not a man who cries often. I have only shed tears a few times in my adult life. I remember tears at the deaths of my father and my brother. At Mick’s grave, a man who had been dead 50 years before I was born, I wept like a child. I am not really sure why.

The waste of life; the stupidity of Mick lying about his age and signing up for war at 16-years-old; the pain of his family left behind; the frustration of never really knowing him or his full story, or maybe the regret that my grandfather, Mick’s brother, carried his entire life for letting him go to war. Perhaps it was that I know how joyful life can be and understand that Mick was robbed of his future.

Mick’s father John was born and bred in Limerick. Family legend has it that he played for Shannon although I can find no evidence of this. What I have found is that his family knew great hunger in both Ireland and western New South Wales. There was little formal education, little money and little food. His four sons and four daughters were good sportsmen, hard-working and resourceful. Those that lived made great success of their lives. They were church-going, avid Irish republicans.

Why would the child from a deeply republican family join the first World War? A war the Irish saw as a British war? Mick’s choice was not political or ideological. It was the choice of an adolescent looking to escape the drudgery of rural Australia.

Mick thought it would be a short, romantic, glorious adventure from which he would return to tell the tale. It was a sojourn out of the grind of an uneducated working life.

My grandfather, Jack, was a shearer, miner and a fencer before making his money as a bookmaker. The soul-crushing manual labour of his youth tilted his politics to the left. He neither smoked nor drank. In early life he sent his money home to support his sisters and mother. He supported any family member who fell on hard financial times. He had a hatred of banks and governments. He would fit in well today.

Jack learnt to fight by minding the money of his fellow shearers on Friday nights before they went into the local town to drink their wages. Jack would hold part of their money for them so they did not spend it all. When they returned, well jarred, to get the balance to continue drinking he would refuse. That’s when the fight started. He never lost a fight and the scars on his knuckles reminded me to never try to take him on.

In the early 20th century, travelling troops of boxers would arrive in country towns and challenge the locals for a prize. One such troop contained the legendary Australian boxer Les D’Arcy. D’Arcy was a former blacksmith and the child of Irish parents. He was the hero of Irish Australia at the time.

Jack put his name and money down to fight D’Arcy, who heard on the ‘bush telegraph’ that Jack was fighting for money for his family, who were in a tough place. To the absolute horror of the promoter, D’Arcy nursed Jack through three rounds so he could win the substantial prize money. In the last seconds D’Arcy let go one real punch that connected perfectly with Jack’s chin.

It should have sent Jack to the floor. But D’Arcy held my grandfather upright in a clinch until the final bell and whispered in his ear: “Jack, don’t come back for a rematch”. Jack said he could always remember the promoter yelling at D’Arcy and Les simply winking at Jack as he smiled.

Jack played rugby with a passion. In 1919, one year after Mick died, Trangie won the Far Western New South Wales rugby competition. Jack told me it was one of the saddest days of his life to win without Mick at fullback. Before he died he gave me his winning medal. It is attached to the end of his watch chain. If my house was on fire I would brave the flames to save that medal.

As I write this I am living in France and coaching Narbonne and I have been thinking of Mick. Thinking of his family who received the telegram, which simply said “killed in action”. The body was never going to be returned. There was no chance to visit, to talk, to rationalise the death. The Australian War Memorial online service has digitised all servicemen’s correspondence from WWI. I have read my great grandfather’s letters pleading for information about his son. Ninety three years later it is still hard to read. The pain of the father is clear and present.

I attended the Remembrance Day ceremony in Narbonne last Friday – the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month – to mark the ceasefire. The carved words on the memorial reads “Narbonne a ses enfants”. Narbonne has her children. My family feels we don’t have ours. Mick seems lost to the last three generations and no matter how hard we try we can’t get him back. He is alone in France.

In the 1890s, Ireland held no future for Mick and his family. They fled to a primitive, hot and flint-hard rural Australia, only for Mick to sacrifice his young life in France. Like Mick, I am Irish Australian. Yet my Australia is a sanctuary, a land of abundance. For more than a decade Ireland has provided me with wonderful opportunities and experiences.

Coaching professional sport in France is not a job, it is a pleasure. The three lands that are Mick’s story have become intricately woven into my own journey but our experiences of those lands could not be more different.

This weekend I watched the children of both Ireland and France play a game of rugby. It is a game I love, but still only a game. Somehow the matches this week did not seem as important to me as other Heineken Cup days.