The Last Match

 

There are moments in history when the universe tilts just a little sideways, when ordinary men find themselves standing at the crossroads of destiny and doom. June 6th, 1938, was one of those moments, though the twenty thousand souls packed into the Velodrome Municipale in Reims couldn’t have known it then. They came for football, after all. They came to watch boys kick a leather ball around a patch of grass. They didn’t come to witness the first chapter of a story that would end six years later in the cold, dark waters of the Indian Ocean.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, isn’t it? That’s the thing about stories—they have a way of bleeding backward through time, staining everything that came before with the knowledge of what’s coming next.

The Netherlands East Indies team—Indonesia, as it would someday call itself, though that name was still sleeping in the womb of the future—stepped onto that French pitch like men walking to their own execution. Oh, they didn’t know it then. How could they? Frans Meeng, all twenty-eight years of him, probably felt nothing but pride as he adjusted his orange jersey and looked out at that sea of faces. The kid from Palembang had made it to the World Cup, by God. The first Asian team to play in the tournament proper. They were making history.

History has teeth, though. Always does.

The Dutch national anthem played, and maybe—just maybe—if you’d been watching close enough, you might have seen something flicker across Frans Meeng’s face as he sang along. A shadow. A premonition. The kind of chill that makes you check the locks on your doors twice before bed, even though you can’t quite say why.

Twenty thousand people roared their approval, but we’d know better. We’d recognize that sound for what it really was: the hungry breathing of something vast and patient, something that feeds on dreams and spits out nightmares.

The game itself? Christ, what a massacre. Hungary carved them up like Thanksgiving turkey—six goals to nothing. The Sumatra Post would call it “an honorable defeat,” the way small-town newspapers always try to put lipstick on roadkill. But Frans Meeng knew better. You could see it in the way he carried himself afterward, the way a man carries himself when he’s just gotten his first real look at the thing living in his basement.

“The ball was too soft,” one of his teammates would complain later, the way people always complain about the little things when the big things are too terrible to name. “In the Indies, we play with a hard ball.”

Sure they do. And in Mill Creek, they just have bad luck with kids going missing every twenty-seven years.

The friendly match against the Netherlands three weeks later was even worse—nine goals to two. But something strange happened that day in Amsterdam. The Dutch fans didn’t jeer or mock. They cheered. They welcomed these beaten men like heroes returning from war.

Maybe they sensed it too. Maybe some part of them understood that these boys from the Indies were carrying something heavier than defeat in their hearts. Maybe they could smell the approaching darkness the way animals smell an earthquake coming.

Frans Meeng went home to his wife Emilie and tried to get back to normal life. Normal life. As if there was any such thing for a man who’d stared into the abyss of his own limitations and seen something staring back.

When their daughter Jeanne was born in February of 1940, Frans must have held that tiny, perfect thing and thought he could protect her from whatever was coming. That’s what fathers do, isn’t it? They stand between their families and the dark, fooling themselves into believing they’re bigger than the night.

But the night always wins in the end.

The war came calling, as wars do, and Frans Meeng traded his football boots for a medic’s kit. He joined the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, probably telling himself he was doing his duty, serving his flag, protecting what mattered.

The Japanese had other ideas.

Picture him in those final moments, if you can bear it. September 18th, 1944. The transport ship Junyo Maru cutting through the Indian Ocean like a steel coffin, carrying its cargo of broken men toward whatever fresh hell awaited them. Frans Meeng, thirty-four years old now, probably thinking about Emilie, about little Jeanne who would be four this year, about whether she’d remember her papa’s face.

The British submarine HMS Tradewind was waiting in the dark water like something out of a fever dream. The captain didn’t know he was about to murder 5,400 souls. Didn’t know that among them was a footballer who’d once stood on a pitch in France and dared to dream of glory.

The torpedoes hit with the sound of God’s own thunder, and the Junyo Maru went down like a stone dropped in a well. Frans Meeng went with her, along with 1,381 other prisoners of war and some 4,000 forced laborers whose names weren’t even worth recording in the official tallies.

The water was cold. It’s always cold when the universe decides to remind you just how small you really are.

Today, if you look hard enough, you can find Frans Meeng’s name on Transfermarkt, listed as an Indonesian footballer. One international cap. One crushing defeat. One man’s small, brave attempt to matter in a world that specializes in grinding such attempts into dust.

The rest of his teammates from that 1938 squad? Gone. Vanished into the hungry mouth of history like they never existed at all. Only Frans Meeng’s story survived, and only because his ending was so perfectly, horribly complete.

Sometimes I think about those twenty thousand people in Reims, cheering as the Netherlands East Indies took the field for the first and last time. I wonder if any of them ever learned what became of those boys in orange jerseys. I wonder if they’d have cheered quite so loudly if they’d known they were watching dead men playing football.

But that’s the thing about the dark—it’s patient. It can wait. It knows that every story, no matter how bright it starts, ends the same way.

In the deep, cold water. In the silence that comes after the last whistle blows.

In the place where even heroes go to disappear.