WHATEVER NEXT?
Men who a few short months before the slaughter
Had voted Socialist and internationalist,
And who had struck for higher wages
Against their respective employers,
Be they German or British Capital or sometimes both,
Were now once more united in common purpose,
And on a sort of shared common land,
For Fritz and Tommy met in No Man’s Land,
And briefly shared a deepened understanding
Of how nationhood had hoodwinked them,
And destroyed lives and mutual empathy;
Not for them the esoteric knowledge
Of British shell manufacturers paying
Royalties on enemy patents,
As Capital respected Capital;
Instead, Christmas trees and fags and beer,
Frost-breath football, schnapps and cigars
Silhouetted against a setting blood-red sun.
And who cares about the one remembered score line?
Who cares if Germany won the Flanders friendly?
For there is a deeper question to ask:
“What if they had played again the next day?”
And then the day after that as well,
And what if they had played mixed sides,
Just like their respective aristocracies and Capital,
Dispensing with birthplace
as the sole criterion for selection.
Whatever next?
What if the playing of the People’s Game
Had continued beyond that Christmas time?
What on earth would have ensued?
Well, I suggest to you that none of the following
Would have occurred in fact and in name:
The Battle of the Somme; Verdun; Passchendaele;
The Bolshevik Revolution; The Russian Civil War;
The Wall Street Crash; the Great Depression;
Stalin; Hitler; Fascism; World War Two;
Nuclear weapons; the Cold War;
Remembrance Day and the British Legion.
There might just have been a series of socialist revolutions,
A peaceful redrawing of the map and classes of Europe,
With an early end to European Empires and racial theories,
But with a new respect for the wonders of our planet.
Think about it.
And remember the People’s Game.
When War broke out, the British public cried
“We’ll be in Berlin by Christmas.” But
By Christmas hundreds of thousands had died,
As Mons, The Marne, Ypres and Messines cut
Down the youth of Europe, while Flanders’ flood
Drowned dying, dead and alive. Summer’s dream
Was swamped by winter’s mud, rats, death and blood
In No Man’s Land; a hell hole night mare scene
Of barbed wire, flares, shells, screams and shrapnel
(A choreographed commonality
That saw each side’s men attack, flail and fall
In ceaseless dance of death’s banality)
,
Until, at Christmas, nineteen fourteen, when
Hamburg, Berlin, London and Manchester
Said “No!” to the killing fields’ mad mayhem
Ordered by Kaiser, Flag, Map and Officer,
And met instead in friendship, walking tall
And slow, comrades in war’s adversities,
They embraced in No Man’s Land and Football
Harmonised nations’ animosities;
And what if the playing of the Peoples’ Game
Had continued beyond that Christmas time?
What on earth would have happened next?
Well, I suggest to you that none of the following
Would have occurred –
The Battle of the Somme; Verdun;
The Bolshevik Revolution; The Russian Civil War; Stalin; Hitler; Fascism; World War Two; nuclear weapons; the Cold War; Remembrance Day;
Think about it.
And play the Peoples’ Game this Christmas.