One of the most inspiring factual Christmas stories in modern history is,
perhaps, that of the Christmas Truce of 1914. I know that it has been told many
times before by journalists, novelists, screenwriters and others, but I feel
that, as a parable, it bears repeating, more because of the implications of its
meaning than as a mere anecdote, although it remains a singularly moving and
colorful story as such. And if there was ever a holiday season in which it deserved
re-telling, it is surely this Christmas, on the one hundredth anniversary of
this extraordinary event.
World War I, known back then as the Great War, was one of the most
intimately horrific wars in history. Still fought in extremely close quarters
and, at the peak of battle, still a war about hand to hand combat and grim, bloody,
“justified” murder, it was also the first war that introduced the technology to
permit even more effective mass slaughter: tanks capable of breaking through
firing lines and overrunning barriers and men, machineguns that could fire
between 400 and 600 rounds a minute and out-match a hundred riflemen, mustard
and chlorine gasses that choked the air and blinded, suffocated and
incapacitated soldiers on the opposite side...in short, the things nightmares
are made of, and all up close and personal.
Losses in the Great War were tragic and, for their generation,
devastating. By the end of the conflict ten million combatants on both sides had
died and another six million civilians had perished with them. Tens of millions
of others would be wounded, mutilated or incapacitated for life.
This new technology necessitated keeping a low profile during battle,
which, in turn, meant getting below ground level. It was because of this that
World War I became, essentially, a trench war—to such an extent that, by the
end of the war, the trenches built by both sides, laid end to end, could have
easily stretched once around the circumference of the earth. Trenches were usually built in threes and roughly
parallel to each other on either side. The front-line trench was typically
fifty yards from the enemy and was backed up by support trenches a couple of
hundred yards back and a reserve trench several hundred yards farther back
still, holding relief troops and equipment. They were purposely serpentine,
snaking their way through the countryside in order to discourage direct frontal
attack and to provide different angles from which to fire on the enemy. In
between, no-man’s-land, a bleak strip of shell-cratered land strewn with barbed
wire and other obstacles and surveilled by machine-gunners on either side.
But the intimate nature of this arrangement meant that the men hunkered
down in those trenches for weeks and months on end became “neighbors” with
those who populated the enemy trenches across from theirs. And clearly, like
nearly all other wars, the Great War wasn’t about any enmity among the
individuals involved in the fighting, but about politicians doing the bidding
of ambitious imperial leaders who set their sights on each other’s holdings and
used propaganda to dupe common citizens into believing that it was their
patriotic duty to fight and die for “king and country” and for a set of imposed
“ideals” that served to invent “an enemy people” who only yesterday had been a neighbor,
a fellow European, a brother or a sister.
It is worth recalling, nevertheless, that this was a time in which common
individuals were starting to come into their own. It was the time of growing
anarchism and Marxism, of movements toward increasing democratization, of
unions and guilds to protect the rights of those whose toil and skills were
augmenting the wealth of the powerful on both sides who were conducting this war
for reasons of their own while adducing matters of patriotism and the glory of “just
war”.
As such, there was no little concern among leaders on both sides regarding
the “morale” of the troops in the trenches. And indeed those concerns, for
anyone hoping to conduct a prolonged and widespread conflict in such conditions,
were warranted. Nearly a half-year into the war, the two sides had reached a
deadlock after British and French troops blocked initial advances by the soldiers
of Kaiser Wilhelm. This was where the grueling trench war intensified, but
ended up often being a waiting game in which no one could advance and no one
could retreat and everyone had to become accustomed to periods of sitting out
their days in cold, wet, filthy earthworks, randomly broken by the adrenalin of
firefights or over-the-top hand-to-hand battles.
Odd though it may seem, by the latter months of 1914, verbal contact and
even a certain amount of fraternization wasn’t unheard-of between opposing
trenches, particularly between German and British troops, though there were
occasionally such cases reported between the French and the Germans as well, to
such an extent that a young French officer named Charles de Gaulle is said to
have termed “lamentable” the attitude of a number of his troops who would have
been perfectly content to let the enemy be. Incredibly enough, informal
ceasefires were sometimes called just before nightfall to allow one side or the
other to receive food or other supplies. And there were even reports of “visits”
during lulls in the fighting by members of one army to the opposing army’s
trenches, in a sort of courtesy-call etiquette respected by riflemen on both sides
of the war.
As this sort of thing progressed, superior officers began being alarmed
by reports of the practice and started sending down rigorous orders forbidding
troops from any sort of fraternizing with the enemy. But that didn’t stop what
amounted to a Christmas miracle’s taking place over the course of several days
from Christmas Eve through Boxing Day (December 26th), 1914.
It all began with some of the German soldiers placing reminders of the Christian
holiday up on the edges of their trenches—a candle here, a makeshift Tannenbaum there, and suddenly the rims
of their excavations were beginning to look a lot like Christmas. It’s easy to
speculate that some of the troops in the opposite trenches might have suspected
a trick to get them to break cover. But then, the Germans began singing
Christmas carols in their language. And soon, the British soldiers started
answering them in English. Someone shouted, “Frohe
Weihnachten!” And someone shouted
back, “Merry Christmas!”
Finally, a few brave souls climbed up out of their trenches, negotiated
the barbed wire and obstacles and met each other halfway in no-man’s-land,
which was now converted into Every Man’s Land. Others came. They shook hands,
smiled, shared and exchanged what they had—cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, whatever
liquor they had in their flasks, chocolate, small deserts from their battlefield
rations. And they traded souvenirs, buttons from their coats, caps, scarves,
whatever might serve as a gift.
They took advantage of these rare moments of peace and shared Christmas
sentiments to gather and bury the bodies of their most recent dead and they
held joint Christmas services to honor the day. Even the artillery fell silent
as soldiers from both sides of the rolls of concertina wire greeted each other,
not as enemies, but as fellow human beings and as brothers with this same tradition,
with families, and with memories of previous years of peace in common.
A reflection of how touching these moments were, is the account of one
British trooper who wrote, “I wouldn't have missed that unique and weird
Christmas Day for anything. I spotted a German officer, some sort of lieutenant
I should think, and being a bit of a collector, I intimated to him that I had
taken a fancy to some of his buttons...I brought out my wire clippers and, with
a few deft snips, removed a couple of his buttons and put them in my pocket. I
then gave him two of mine in exchange....I saw one of my machine gunners, who
was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long
hair of a docile Boche, who was
patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the
back of his neck.”
In the end, literally tens of thousands of opposing troops took part in
the informal Christmas Truce of 1914, before their superior officers desperately
imposed drastic measures to put an immediate stop to such an appalling display
of...brotherhood. For a moment, men
pushed into battle with other men just like them for unquestionable reasons
neither understood and on the basis of fabricated logic and false
justifications invented by their handlers, took their lives and their wills
back and, responding to the higher orders of their own shared religious and
social traditions, decided for a few days to no longer be enemies.
Imbued as they were with as much civic as religious doctrine, however,
the brief silencing of the guns to celebrate Christmas would inevitably end,
since they were, unfortunately, already past being free enough to believe in
the power of one, by which individuals of like mind retain the power and the
human duty to say “no” to their self-imposed authorities. Their upbringing,
their schooled sense of patriotism, their feelings of contrived loyalty to
anyone but their fellow man, led them back into war, and before they were
through, millions more would die.
For a few days in December of 1914, however, the power of the Christmas spirit outweighed the power of warring empires and erstwhile enemies gave each other
the gift of peace in the name of a common and loving human tradition.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND PEACE ON EARTH!
