Saturday’s meeting between Heart of Midlothian and Leyton Orient will be an afternoon of firsts. There will be a first opportunity for supporters to watch their team in pre-season action, and a first chance to catch a glimpse of some of the new summer signings to see what they bring to the table. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, the match represents the first time that Hearts and Orient have played against each other.

You see, Hearts and Orient share a connection that is greater than football. It is no coincidence that the London club have been invited to take part in Saturday’s friendly, set against the backdrop of Hearts’ 150th anniversary celebrations.

“It seems incredible that Hearts have never played Leyton Orient, or Clapton Orient as they were known up until 1946,” David Speed, a club historian and McCrae’s Battalion Trust member, explains. “They are the second oldest London club behind Fulham so it is remarkable that they haven’t played before.

“Saturday will be the first game between them, if that could be considered historic – and it will by me! – but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been connections between them. I’ve logged 29 players who have played for both clubs. That list includes Mark Bell, who played in Hearts’ Scottish Cup-winning team in 1901; Tommy Brown, who was a wartime internationalist; George Hilsdon, an English international striker who was a guest for both Hearts and Orient during the First World War; and Jackie Oakes, who was a great player. It extends through to the modern day too – Armand Gnanduillet is one of the more recent guys. So there have been connections between the clubs, but the overriding connection is between the two clubs and the Great War.”

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The actions of the Hearts players during the First World War will never be forgotten. The manner in which they volunteered for McCrae’s Battalion en masse, without a thought for their own safety, is a remarkable chapter in the club’s storied history and something that makes Hearts a special team. Were it not for their actions, in fact, then football might well have ground entirely to a halt throughout the UK – and there might not even be a Heart of Midlothian Football Club.

“A lot of football players did sign up for service in August 1914 when the Great War broke out but they were sporadic; it was here and there,” Speed says. “At Tynecastle, for example, George Sinclair and Neil Moreland were reservists with the territorials and they were called up immediately. Jimmy Speedie decided personally he wanted to join the army and he joined the Cameron Highlanders in October ’14. In fact, Jimmy Speedie was the first player killed in the war. He was in the original British Army and he died in Loos in 1915.

“There was a real sense among the general public that footballers weren’t doing enough. They were playing football on a Saturday afternoon in front of thousands but just over the Channel, 40 miles away, people were being killed. The British Army had a hard time initially in the war in Belgium and Northern France, and so there was a revulsion that football was going on and people were appalled.

“It came to a point where prime minister Asquith was going to be questioned on conscription and stopping football altogether, which would have been a disaster for Hearts. We had just built the 1914 stand and were £12,000 in debt so if football stopped and we had no income left for the rest of the war, chances are there might not have been a club. It was all getting a bit heavy and players were getting insulted in the street.

“George McCrae was forming a battalion in the 16th Royal Scots in Edinburgh, and he thought he could give impetus to that by getting the Hearts players to sign up en masse – and we was absolutely spot on. The Hearts players signed on 25th November 1914. Eleven of them signed up at Tynecastle and the next day another two, Paddy Crossan and Jimmy Boyd, signed up. You effectively had 13 Hearts players signed up.

“McCrae’s Battalion wasn’t strictly a pal’s battalion because you had rugby players and all that. But essentially, when the Hearts players signed up, it attracted footballers from in particular Falkirk, Dunfermline, Raith Rovers and all the junior clubs surrounding the city. McCrae was able to raise a battalion in less than a fortnight, and that was just phenomenal. There were just over 1,000, I think it was 1,100. So he was able to do that and in doing so, he stopped that debate in the House of Commons on stopping football.

“It’s maybe an overexaggeration to say Hearts saved the game but it certainly played a part in convincing the general public that footballers weren’t all bad. Hearts inspired people to follow suit.”

This is what makes the story of Hearts and McCrae’s Battalion truly special. It’s not that players from the club volunteered for service together – many other sporting clubs did the same, after all – but the Hearts players were pioneers. They were the first to do so and other clubs soon started following suit: including Saturday’s opponents.

Speed said: “A month later in December, at Fulham town hall down in London, a meeting was called to form the 17th Middlesex Regiment Footballers’ Battalion and that was similarly successful. But on the day, 10 Leyton Orient players signed up and others went away and thought about it. The battalion did fill out and, similarly to McCrae’s Battalion, it became well known. But the guys who inspired it, who actually put their name down on the day, were the 10 Leyton Orient players. They did refer to what had happened in Edinburgh with Hearts, and there were further synergies between the two clubs.

“During the Battle of the Somme, Hearts lost three men on the first day, and four in total, and Orient lost three over the course of the two-week-long battle. Subsequently more players and supporters signed up and the service record of Leyton Orient and Hearts was similar. When Hearts opened the War Memorial down at Haymarket, the secretary of state for Scotland – who was the highest ranking official in this part of the world at the time – opened the memorial and visited Clapton Orient’s ground too. That’s the main link between the clubs.”

The reaction from the public was telling. When players from Hearts and Orient signed up collectively, the fame of the two clubs reached new highs. Both sets of players volunteered towards the end of 1914, when the full horrors of 20th century war were apparent and any notions of ‘home by Christmas’ were thoroughly debunked, yet the players signed up anyway. They knew the risks they faced and the reality of the situation that awaited them – but still they signed up.

“Both clubs inspired the mass recruitment of professional footballers and both were held in high regard as a result,” Speed explains. “The actions of the players at both clubs extended the fame of Hearts and Leyton Orient to the highest it had ever been at that time, and possibly all time.

“In terms of the inspiration the players gave everybody else, there is one guy I want to mention here. Tom Gracie, who we signed from Liverpool in the 1913/14 season just before the war started, scored 30 goals in the 14/15 season when Hearts just got pipped by Celtic. He was the Lawrence Shankland of his time – a fabulous goal scorer, big burly guy. But when Tom Gracie came to Hearts, he contracted leukaemia but he still signed up for McCrae’s Battalion. He was so desperate to join his pals in the battalion that he didn’t tell anybody.

“In around April or May it did start to get him down a bit – and as we know, Hearts faded towards the end of the campaign – but Tom Gracie still kept it secret. He joined the battalion and went on the training to Ripon, but while he was there he caught a chill and went to the hospital. He got worse and was brought home to Stobhill in Glasgow, a military hospital, where he died.

“That was a shocking situation but what got to me was that his mum, who had just lost another son the week before, wrote to Hearts expressing her gratitude for bringing him to Tynecastle. She said this was the happiest time of his life, coming through to Edinburgh and joining the Hearts. I thought, ‘bloody hell, what a dignified woman’. That’s why this is a huge part of Hearts’ history that ought not to ever be forgotten – and it won’t be.”

Saturday represents a welcome opportunity to strengthen the bond between the two clubs. Around 1,000 Orient fans are expected to travel to the capital for the friendly, representatives from the London club will attend the march from the Haymarket War Memorial to Tynecastle prior to kick-off, and the O’s Bugle Band will join in the commemorations at Foundation Plaza.

The relationship between the two clubs has been overlooked for too long, despite attempts to formalise it in the not-so-distant past.

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“The two clubs regularly lay wreaths at each other’s memorials and Orient representatives attended the ceremony at Haymarket last November,” Speed tells me. “There was a growing relationship.

“When the old managing director David Southern was here, the Orient people came up and there was the intention to have a big game and a formal association between the two clubs by playing regularly in London and Edinburgh. That was the time of administration, Romanov’s final days and the formation of the Foundation and it fell out of focus because there was so much going on. In recent times we have looked to re-establish that connection.

“What happened during the war is an important milestone in Hearts’ history and it’s similar for Leyton Orient. While we are celebrating the 150th anniversary, why not have a commemoration? I understand that around 1,000 Leyton Orient fans are coming up here with special strips – they’re a bit like Airdrie kits, white with a V, very distinctive – and they will be joining the march before the game, and I’m sure they will be made very welcome. The Leyton Orient band are going to play outside before we all head in, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m the treasurer of McCrae’s Battalion’s Trust and we have tables inside the Gorgie Suite, and there are 250 Hearts fans and 250 Orient fans booked in. It will be a good night.”

Days like Saturday provide us all with a healthy dose of perspective. As much as we like to fret about results and players’ performances, all of that slides into obscurity when placed into the context of the First World War and the sacrifices made by those who seized the initiative and signed up for McCrae’s Battalion.

Speed added: “It's unimaginable today that players could get called up to fight in a war and seven of them get killed. Can you imagine how shocking that would be? It really took Hearts a long time to recover in a playing sense.

“Hearts have won the league, won cups, had great players doing amazing things – but this is unique to us. Not service because other clubs were involved in that but it was Hearts that led the way. It made us different. It’s an important milestone in our history and it is just as important to Leyton Orient as well. I don’t want to belittle the actions of other football clubs but leading the way and breaking the mould was very, very important – and should never be forgotten.”