The only thing that moves play towards the goalposts seems to be the instinct of self-preservation of the man with the ball. He runs as far as he can before he is maimed or killed by the other players.

— Vivien Batchelor

A trunk is a “boot,” a policeman is a “Bobby” and, most everyone knows, soccer is “football.”

When Storekeeper 2nd Class Dick Harnish arrived in England in 1944, he began to learn the differences between American and British English.

By then, the differences weren’t quite as jarring to the 19-year-old Springfield boy because of a stop in Ireland, where “I didn’t understand what they were saying at all.”

Now 88, one of Harnish’s lasting keepsakes of things lost in translation was the report of an Army-Navy American football game on Nov. 12, 1944, written by British journalist Vivien Batchelor.

It’s not so much that Batchelor bollixed the job.

She rightly reported that a much bigger Army team, whose players weighed an average of three stone more, beat Navy “20 to nil.”

And, in her own way, Batchelor gave Americans a fresh look at their own game, one reason American newspapers of the time quoted her article and Harnish keeps a typewritten copy with an album of snapshots, patches, his discharge papers and other war memorabilia.

“Sixty thousand Americans and their girls swarmed into the White City Stadium, Shepherd’s Bush, yesterday to see the U.S. Army vs. the U.S. Navy in what General Doolittle described during the interval as a “real, old-fashioned American football game,” Batchelor wrote.

“Girl cheerleaders form the services pranced in front of the crowd waving megaphones, inciting yells like “A-R-M-Y, Army,” or “N-A-V-Y, Navy.”

She then turned to the game, which we’ll quote here, in a nod to Batchelor, using British spellings.

“A free fight seemed to be going on in the centre of the stadium. Twenty-two enormous young men in crash helmets were locked in deadly struggle for an oval football.”

Her description of the uniforms is striking: “They wore spiked-cleated (is the word Americans use) shoes, strange ginger shorts which cling closely to the thighs and end abruptly just below the knee, and padded jerseys, red and white for the Navy, navy blue for the Army.”

Added Batchelor: “They needed those pads and the crash helmets.”

“The object of the game,” she observed, “seems to be to pass the ball to some unfortunate player, and then for everyone else to fall on him,” an object that led him to run “as far as he can before he is maimed or killed by the other players.”

Given that description, she found the program, with its list of all the players and their numbers “sinister.”

It listed not only “the names of the 11 (on the field) for each team, then 15 substitutes who stood on the sideline “swathed in blankets awaiting their call to battle” once their compatriots became “casualties.”

“Many of them did not have long to wait.”

She called injuries “casualties” and noted that the first one went to the Navy.

“First casualty went to Navy,” she wrote.

“Horrified, I watched a G.I scamper across the field with two buckets in his hands. But not, as I thought, to mop up blood. … The buckets held towels and water for the players still left alive.”

“Casualties are dealt with by a doctor who rushes out with a black bag,” she wrote, before adding a fashion note: Umpires (looked) “splendid in white plus fours and striped shirts.”

She called downs “tries” and explained that each team had four to advance the ball before kicking it away. Here, she avoided the American term punter, which in British slang it represents a man who uses the services of a prostitute.

She then offered her own take on play calling.

“Before each ‘try,’ the team which has the ball goes into huddle while the captain decides who shall be the victim to receive the ball and the subsequent assaults.”

Batchelor explained it was permissible to “assault your opponent any way at all except by ‘clipping’ the back of his legs. That, an American beside me solemnly explained, is liable to break them.”

“Favorite method of attack yesterday seemed to be 1) Springing like a tiger at the man’s throat, or, 2) Just shoving so that sheer weight bore him down.”

Batchelor also offered a comment more sympathetic than those usually offered in game coverage: “As the average weight of the Army was about 16 stone (224 pounds), one felt sorry for the Navy, whose top weight was a mere 13 stone (182 pounds).”

The highlight at halftime, which Batchelor called “interval,” was the appearance of “Ruby Newell, who has been voted the prettiest girl in the U.S. Women’s Forces …. Choice seemed popular, judging by the cheers.”

While riding the subway (“the Tube,” of course) home, she overheard other “jargon” of the game, along with her interpretations.

“‘He got smeared’ seemed to mean literally that the player was rolled into the earth. ‘Bullet pass’ also had a literal meaning. It meant that a ball was thrown at a man so hard that it knocked him out.”

Through the mayhem, she wrote, “the 60,000 Yankees had had a good time” — so good that Dick Harnish still enjoys reading about it 68 years later.