By Michael F. Duggan
110 years ago tonight, British soldiers manning their trenches in Belgium and northern France noticed lights along and behind the German lines. It appeared that the enemy was planning a Christmas Eve attack, and some of the British units went to a posture of “stand to” as a light snow fell.
It soon became apparent that the lights were from ad hoc Christmas trees that the Germans had put up in their own trenches. Germans and Brits exchanged carols and eventually some of the bolder men on both sides stuck their heads above the parapets. Eventually large numbers of men from both sides emerged and ventured into No Man’s Land to exchange greetings, tobacco, and drink, and to bury the dead.
The British General Headquarters (GHQ) and German Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) made sure that the event was never repeated, but it is telling that if it had been up to the men in the trenches, the war would have ended that day. It was still early in the war and many of the men who participated in the truce would not survive the war. That entire generation is gone now, but one can imagine them yet, the men of 1914, in a Yuletide Valhalla in the narrow, blighted strip between the lines.
In Jay Winter’s 1996 documentary, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, critic and historian, Paul Fussell, observes that the Christmas Truce of 1914, was perhaps the “last twitch of the 19th century”–a final public moment when the assumption was that people, even one’s enemies, were essentially good. Of course the English and Germans of 1914 were culturally similar, and it is difficult to imagine this kind of spontaneous event happening, say, in the South Pacific during WWII.
The 1969 film, Oh! What a Lovely War, has a scene that captures this event in miniature. It was also the subject of Stanley Weintraub’s book, Silent Night (2001), and the movies, Joyeux Noel (2005), and Christmas 1914 (2014). There was also a bittersweet children’s book published in 1993, titled War Game, about the truce including a soccer match played in No Man’s Land between British soldiers and some of the Germans they faced.
Whenever I find myself getting too hardbitten in my realism about human nature and the world, I remember this true (if somewhat mythologized) story of Christmas on the Western Front. In these troubled times, it is good to remember historical episodes like this one. But we should also not forget the five months that preceded it, and the nearly four years of hell that followed.