On July 29, 1944, in a battle for a village south of Florence so small it cannot be found on most maps, W.N. Carson, who had temporarily risen to the rank of major, ran into a spot of bother.
Shrapnel penetrated his thigh and ankle, his lung and liver. Carson was a tough bugger, "supremely fit" his contemporaries said, and he recovered well enough to be transported to the port city of Bari, where he was loaded onto a hospital ship bound for the more docile surrounds of New Zealand.
On board, his body rejected treatment for the jaundice he had contracted. A significant piece of metal was still lodged in his liver and was impeding the fight against infection. One by one his organs shut down and, on October 8, he died at sea.
Carson is buried, along with 138 countrymen, at Heliopolis Military Cemetery in Cairo, Egypt.
In the 1940s, as it was in the 1910s, New Zealand's most valuable export commodity was its fit young men. They were sent away on ships to places most hadn't heard of to fight wars they played no part in creating.
Many of our best and brightest never came back.
The near-perfect man
"Bill Carson was near perfect as any man I have known," said Hugh Duncan, a former selector and chairman of the Auckland Cricket Association.
This lofty statement was produced for a tribute to Carson in the book W.N. Carson Footballer & Cricketer. It is a fittingly dry title for a small book penned by the godfather of sports almanacs, Arthur Carman. It is heavy on facts and figures, light on colour and only succeeds in painting the outlines of a man who lost his best sporting years, and ultimately his life, to war.
It is for that reason that David Olliver is still fighting to have Carson inducted into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame.
Olliver, a former senior Marlborough rugby rep who also played two seasons for Blackheath in London, has nominated Carson to the Hall, whose patrons recently enshrined Olympic rowing gold medallist Rob Waddell, but to no avail.
Carson's case was also promoted by his cousin, John Carson Pilling, who died six years ago. Olliver, who was friends with Pilling, wants to see Carson get his due before he too shuffles off this mortal coil.
Carson falls short in the numbers game, Olliver admits, but numbers make up only a fraction of his story.
The numbers that trip Carson up are these: he played 22 first-class cricket matches for New Zealand, but no tests; he played three matches for the All Blacks, but no tests. And while he is just one of seven double All Blacks – those who have represented their country at senior level in the national winter and summer codes – just two, Jeff Wilson and Eric Tindill, have made the Hall.
Rugby journalist and historian Lindsay Knight, in his brief biography of Carson for the NZ Rugby Museum, said his selection for the All Blacks was not universally celebrated, particularly in Wellington.
His exploits in cricket gathered more column inches, but he mostly disappointed for New Zealand, averaging less than 20 with the bat on the 1937 tour to England.
On these facts alone, Olliver's argument and Carson's case, requires persuasion.
"If you look at it coldly, not playing a test in either rugby or cricket is held against him," Olliver says. "But it's rough justice if you look at it another way. He played rugby for New Zealand. He played cricket for New Zealand. We'll never know just how good he could have been because he went to war, fought like a hero and died from his wounds.
"The only double All Black to be decorated for bravery is of course Bill Carson. ls this relevant? I would like to think so."
And therein lies the problem.
Bill Carson was buried at Heliopolis Military Cemetery.
Former sports journalist Ron Palenski, chief executive of the Hall of Fame, said historical context of sporting achievement is considered by the selection panel, but speculation on future achievement is not.
"You can't," Palenski says, "because if you use the [war] argument in the case of Bill Carson, you'd have to use it with everyone.
"Who knows how many potential future All Blacks, for example, were killed in action."
It is trite to speculate on the arc Carson's post-war sporting career might have taken, though his service record does provide clues.
Carson was by all accounts an outstanding soldier. He was a leader. He was brave and forthright and would have surely brought those qualities back with him to the rugby fields and cricket ovals of his homeland.
He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Cross for his actions at the Mareth Line, Tunisia, when taking on and defeating two well-equipped Italian battalions.
His gallantry caught the eye of Major-General Howard Kippenberger, one of New Zealand's most decorated soldiers. 'Kip' would write the foreword to Carman's book and included details of his roles in Crete and North Africa.
"During… six anxious days [in Crete] I used him and his little party as a personal reserve," Kippenberger wrote, "to stem gaps in the line and make counter-attacks, and once to make a most daring and successful sally into the enemy line.
"Throughout he was untiring, cheerful and dauntless. On the sixth day he had four [of 20] men left. I [saw] the little party resting, lying round an olive tree, when we made the desperate last hope counter-attack to retake Galatas. As soon as he saw what was happening he and his faithful followers got up and went with the infantry."
On the battlegrounds of North Africa, too, he found Carson "at hand during critical times".
When Kippenberger stood on a landmine near Cassino (he would lose both feet), Carson visited him in hospital and they talked for hours about the war, and of the particular type of friendship forged in war.
"It was a bitter blow to hear of his death not long afterwards," wrote Kippenberger.
Tthese were more binary days for sport: winter was rugby; summer was cricket. The Plunket Shield meant something. Provincial rugby was tribal and important.
Carson might have been a contentious All Black selection in 1938 but continuing excellent form as a flanker for Auckland had made his selection for the proposed tour to South Africa in 1940 a near certainty.
As a hard-hitting left-handed batsman and aggressive medium pacer, cricket was where he made his name. That was due to his remarkable exploits upon breaking into the Auckland team, which was no easy task for a provincial kid in those days.
The son of the Gisborne harbourmaster, Carson scored heavily for Gisborne High School and made the senior Poverty Bay side aged 15, but didn't progress beyond Auckland trials (there were no Northern or Central Districts associations in those days).
After matriculating, Carson left for the Auckland and the Eden Cricket Club.
In just his second first-class match fame struck, scoring 290 against Otago at Carisbrook. Coming in after his side had lost two cheap wickets, Carson shared a world-record partnership of 445 with Paul Whitelaw in just 268 minutes.
"Carson and Whitelaw were idolised after that," said cricket historian Don Neely. "And that world record [for the third wicket] stood for a long time."
Carson, in keeping with the times, played a straight bat to suggestions of brilliance, offering little more than "I just had my eye in" and "was seeing them a bit better than usual".
Others weren't quite so reticent. The New Zealand Observer included this unrestrained analysis of the 1936-37 season: "Cricket in Auckland this past season will be remembered if for nothing else, for the meteoric rise of a batsman who if he fulfils the promise he has already shown, will be New Zealand's greatest batsman."
Carson would return to club cricket with a bang, scoring 257 not out for Eden, before notching another first-class century (190) before the season's end. It was by any standards a tour de force campaign with the bat.
It wasn't, however, the dawning of New Zealand's greatest batsman, as the Observer had suggested. A difficult tour to England and subsequent events in Europe would put paid to that.
"It would be mere pretence to state that the New Zealand cricketers who visited England in 1937 fulfilled expectations," wrote Wilfrid Brookes in his damning summary of the tour. "The standard of play in many matches was, frankly, disappointing."
The editor of cricket bible Wisden, Brookes didn't spare any feelings when assessing Carson's tour.
"Much had been expected of Carson… but this hard-hitting left-hander singularly failed. He scored 85 in his first game and hit 86 against Northamptonshire but otherwise did little of note."
It is true. Carson averaged 19 for the tour, an anaemic return, though he did bowl tidily and showed versatility and a safe pair of hands in the field.
Carson's struggles with the bat, according to Sir Pelham Warner in The Cricketer, were down to a habit of playing through the line too early on slow pitches, which resulted in numerous soft dismissals.
It should be remembered that Carson was young – he turned 21 in England – and the play-travel-play nature of the tours meant there was precious little opportunities to work through flaws in the nets. Still, for a player who enjoyed such immediate success for Auckland, it must have been a chastening experience.
Carson returned to New Zealand, continued to score runs for Eden and Auckland and threw himself into his rugby for the famous Ponsonby club.
He made Auckland, then the All Blacks, playing three minor matches on the 1938 tour to Australia. Like his entrée into the national cricket side, things did not pan out as planned, as injury meant he was unavailable for most of the matches.
Still, he had achieved something few had done: he was a double All Black.
There has been much sand through the hourglass since Carson roamed the sports fields of Gisborne and Auckland. He will not win any new fans. As Neely pointed out, there are precious few New Zealanders left "who would have ever seen him bat".
But Neely said he believed Merv Wallace, considered one of the greatest technical minds of batting and a player also robbed of his best years by the war, when he told him that Carson was a "great" player.
If luck's dial had spun in a different direction, who knows what would have become of Carson. The physical demands of the winter code might have precluded him making it to the top again. The All Blacks resumed tests in September 1946 by which time Carson would have been 30.
It is easier to imagine him being an integral part of the famous '49ers, the cricketers who toured England with such distinction under Walter Hadlee and who included a pair of superb left-handers, Martin Donnelly and Bert Sutcliffe.
Might Carson have atoned for his struggles 12 years previously and formed a fearsome southpaw triumvirate?
Several of New Zealand's returned servicemen resumed their sporting careers with great success.
Carson never got the chance.
Pre-war he shone so briefly and brightly on the domestic sports scene that international success, if not immediate, seemed inevitable.
