On the centennial of the "Christmas Truce"

The night closed in early--the ghostly shadows that haunt the trenches came to keep us company as we stood to arms. Under a pale moon, one could just see the gravelike rise of ground which marked the German trenches 200 yards away. Fires in the English lines had died down, and only the squelch of the sodden boots in the slushy mud, the whispered orders of the officers and the NCOs, and the moan of the wind broke the silence of the night. The soldiers' Christmas Eve had come at last, and it was hardly the time or place to feel grateful for it.

By this date 100 years ago, the Great War had seized up. Only five months into the fighting, the early British optimism that the war would be "over by Christmas" drowned in the three feet of water that ran through their trenches. Soldiers sat in muck and cold, sometimes no more than 80 yards from an enemy they heard more often than saw. As the war stalled, illusions of it as a kind of glorious enterprise--"a big picnic without the objectlessness," a British officer wrote--began to fade.

On December 19, the 1st Rifle Brigade and the First Somerset Light Infantry rose up in the weak light of mid-afternoon and charged the enemy's wire. Each man carried on his back a straw mattress he was to use to scale the coil. Few made it as far as the barbed wire; amazed German troops cut them to pieces as they stumbled into No Man's Land.

It was a tactically foolish attack springing as much from cold-footed ennui and a vague feeling of powerlessness than from some officer's gambit for glory. After all, the British were trapped in squalid trenches, muddy and raw and reeking of sour humanity.

Memory in her shrine kept us in a trance of saddened silence. Back somewhere in England, the fires were burning in cosy rooms; in fancy I heard laughter and the thousand melodies of reunion on Christmas Eve. With overcoat thick with wet mud, hands cracked and sore with the frost, I leaned against the side of the trench, and, looking through my loophole, fixed weary eyes on the German trenches. Thoughts surged madly in my mind; but they had no sequence, no cohesion. Mostly they were of home ...

For their part, the Germans--in their 30-foot-deep, permanent and even comfortable trenches--seemed almost reluctant to kill. After five months the soldiers understood they often had more in common with men in the opposing trenches than their own captains.

Men on the lines had become familiar with each other; there had even been a few attempts at bartering. Tins of English beef had been traded for German helmet pins. Most of the time these deals, struck across the cold empty air between the lines, were never consummated. It was one thing to fraternize with the enemy, quite another to put yourself at his mercy.

Several outside agencies, including the U.S. Senate and the Vatican, tried to organize a truce for that first wartime Christmas, but diplomacy was rebuffed by the warring governments. This war was different from the internecine warfare that had ravaged Europe for centuries. It was a kind of final settling, a war to transform the world with unprecedented horrors rendering holidays absurd.

Both Allied and German high commands sent down alerts warning of enemy treachery and sneak attacks over Christmas and New Year's. The Germans thought the French and British too soulless to keep the season. To the French the Germans were pagan beasts; the British thought them Teutonic barbarians.

On Christmas Eve in Flanders a deeper chill descended, frost glinted in the clear moonlight. In the German trenches, soldiers busied themselves with makeshift Christmas trees they had smuggled into the lines. They lit candles on these trees and propped them on the parapet like--as one British witness described it--"the footlights of a theatre."

... my eyes caught a flare in the darkness. A light in the enemy's trenches was so rare at that hour that I passed a message down the line. I had hardly spoken when light after light sprang up along the German front. Then quite near our dugouts, so near as to make me start and clutch my rifle, I heard a voice. There was no mistaking that voice with its guttural ring. With ears strained, I listened, and then, all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: "English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!"

At first the British were suspicious. Some thought it a ruse and opened fire. But then the Germans began singing: Stille nacht, heilige nacht.

The British answered, though one soldier remembered their voices were not "so harmonious as the Germans." A German soldier played Handel's "Largo" on the violin. In the Argonne, a German concert singer gave an impromptu performance for the French, who climbed up in their trenches to applaud.

... we kept up a running conversation with the Germans, all the while our hands ready on our rifles. Blood and peace, enmity and fraternity--war's most amazing paradox. The night wore on to dawn ... made easier by songs from the German trenches, the pipings of piccolos and from our broad lines laughter and Christmas carols. Not a shot was fired, except for down on our right, where the French artillery were at work.

All along the line, the sporadic shooting stopped as spontaneous ad hoc truces went into effect. Soldiers called out greetings to each other. There were cries of "Hello, Tommy!" and "Hello, Fritz" and with the dawn men took tentative steps into the zone between the trenches. They shook hands, they lit each other's cigarettes, they exchanged gifts of German sausages and cigars, Maconochie's tinned stew and Wills tobacco. They shared family photos and London newspapers.

Both sides took advantage of the opportunity to bury their dead and improve their trenches. Some took snapshots with cameras they'd smuggled to the front. Some of these made it into British newspapers in January 1915. The newspapers ran letters from the soldiers who participated in the unofficial truce.

In some areas the truce lasted a couple of weeks, and it was kept everywhere until the end of Boxing Day. The consensus of the brass on both sides was that these kinds of demonstrations were not to occur again.

A version of this column originally appeared Dec. 24, 2000. The italicized sections are from a letter by Pvt. Frederick W. Heath that appeared in the North Mail of Newcastle, U.K., on Jan. 9, 1915. The letter was rediscovered and transcribed by volunteer Marion Robson of the British group Operation Plum Puddings, which aims to collate and preserve these letters. They can be found online at christmastruce. co.uk.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 12/18/2014

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