About football and World War I

[baleanoptera]

Sometimes you think you have read so much about war and memorials that you have developed a numbness, and then along comes a little paragraph that hits you hard and makes you realise that this is not so:

"In the first months of the war football was used as an incentive to enlistenment; the war, it was claimed, offered the chance to play ‘the greatest game of all.’ By the end of 1914 an estimated 500,000 men had enlisted at football matches. By the following spring, professional football had been banned: matches, it was feared, were so popular that ( a reversal of the initial strategy) they deterred men from enlisting.
 At the front the enthusiasm for the game continued unabated. Whether a match actually took place in No Man’s Land between German and English troops on Christmas day 1914 is doubtful; even if it did not, it is entirely appropriate that the day’s events should have generated the myth of a football match as the embodiment of fraternization.
The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill’s kicking a ball into No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.) Lawrence’s admonition – that tragedy ought to be a great big kick at misery – could not have been fulfilled more literally."

- Geoff Dyer: The Missing of the Somme.

Comments

[applegnat.livejournal.com]

My heart. Do I have your permission to link this in a post at my LJ? I want to think a bit more about it, too, so if I come up with something suitably expressive of my feelings about this I will. But great big thanks for sharing it.

[baleanoptera.livejournal.com]

Please do. I have no real profound words I either. I just read the passage and had to put the book away for a while. But it felt like something that should be shared.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

I have been told about this incident some time in the past (school? uni?) . Thank you so much for posting about it!

[baleanoptera.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just strange, awful and somehow touching at the same time? I really liked roopkatha's reply below that by allowing the game/contest and the war to slide into each other and become the same thing it just adds a whole new, and for me frightening, level to it.

[roopkatha.livejournal.com]

This is absolutely devastating. And strangely wonderful. Orwell once said serious sport was war minus the shooting (http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/spirit/english/e_spirit), that\'s where its intensity, its barely restrained violence comes from. And Huizinga proved in Homo Ludens that war and games are always always about recuperating lost honour. Football derbies are reflections of those truths. But when war and its simulacrum come so close together, infact collide, the hyperreal becomes surreal. And brings madness with it. I don\'t know if what I am saying makes sense, but thank you for posting this.

Oh, I read Nevill and thought of Gary Neville immediately. He would do something of the sort, too.

[baleanoptera.livejournal.com]

Actually you are making a world of sense. And especially this sentence: But when war and its simulacrum come so close together, infact collide, the hyperreal becomes surreal. pinpoints exactly what I have been trying to articulate in my head. So thank you so much for the reply.

[sunnyskywalker]

Wow. That is... wow.

This really reminds me of that book The War of the Fists, though, about the massive fistfight battles they used to have in Venice. It was on that line between a sport and regular gang wars. (It was stickfights, but that got outlawed because so many people died.)

[baleanoptera.livejournal.com]

I remember you mentioning that book, and I have been trying to find it.
And yes, there is a certain added surreality when games and war mingle and show how much alike they really are. It's scary really.


Speaking of books - this quote is from "The Missing of the Somme", which is a book about remembering WWI. It's excellent. Very haunting and thought provoking.