Good morning, it's Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2024. On this date 110 years ago, humanity emerged from the trenches, providing a brief respite to the unimaginable carnage of World War I.
The "Christmas Truce," it came to be called, although that's something of a misnomer. No general or statesman called for a cease-fire. The high commands on both sides in the Great War, as World War I was then known, explicitly rejected the idea, which had been proffered as a congressional resolution in Washington, D.C., and by the pope in Rome.
The lull in the fighting bubbled up organically from the ranks of British, French, Belgian, and German soldiers arrayed on opposite sides of "no man's land" along a 27-mile trench line in Flanders. It occurred spontaneously, all along the western front.
"Dearest Mother, I think I have seen today one of the most extraordinary sights anyone has ever seen," Capt. A.D. Chater of the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders wrote in a letter home. "About 10 o'clock this morning. I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German, waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trench and came towards ours."
It was Dec. 25, 1914. The enemy soldiers were carrying no rifles, only the blessings of the holiday.
"So one of our men went to meet them and in about two minutes," the British captain continued, "the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas."
This was the second day of the Christmas Truce, which I first wrote about 10 years ago on Christmas Eve.
The First World War began in August 1914. The horror of a war fought with modern weapons but ancient tactics became immediately apparent. At the Battle of Marne in September, French casualties were 250,000. In the Battle of Ypres the following month, the German side suffered 135,000 dead or badly wounded. British war historian John Keegan estimates that by Christmas of 1914, French dead numbered 306,000. Of that number, 45,000 young men had not lived to see their 20th birthday. Nearly a quarter of a million Germans had also been killed, along with British and Belgian losses of approximately 30,000 each.
As in that conflict's precursor – the Civil War fought in America five decades earlier – political leaders on each side initially assumed the fighting would be over in weeks. But by the onset of winter in 1914 (as in 1861), it had dawned on the generals that the slaughter could go on for years.
Contributing to the troops' misery was life in the trenches, with its disease, rain, mud, and the sight of their own unburied dead lying beyond the barbed wire – a fate each man feared for himself. Those who lived through it never forgot it. Years later, Ernest Hemingway described a wounded officer trapped in the wire who begged his own soldiers to shoot him. This grisly example was a rebuke to the bromide that the Lord doesn't give us more than we can handle. Plenty of men were given more than they could handle in those trenches. But it didn't mean they couldn't imagine something better. And for a few precious hours, beginning 110 years ago today, they acted on those aspirations.
Scholarship about the "Christmas Truce" is scarce. For years, the event was dismissed as a myth. But it was quite real, with numerous first-hand testimonies from soldiers and officers on both sides. Those who have studied it invariably discover that in most instances the initial overtures came from the German side, on Christmas Eve, 1914.
This makes sense. For one thing, the Germans were then perceived to be winning the war. Also, the French and Belgians were fighting on their own soil and therefore less inclined to extend charity across the battle lines to an invader. Moreover, thousands of the German troops had worked in London before the war and spoke fluent English. Finally, Christmas Eve, not Christmas morning, was the pinnacle of the holiday season for Germans so it was among their ranks that attention first turned to the holiday.
It began with the Germans placing lighted candles on their parapets up and down the line. The weather that had been rainy and dreary earlier in the month had turned cold and clear. Frost was on the ground, lending an unlikely ambience to the scene. In some places, the fields were moonlit. Sound carried in that cold night air, and one of the sounds was the Kaiser's troops singing Christmas carols.
The British soldiers typically did not understand the words being sung, but they knew many of the tunes. And when "Stille Nacht" was sung from the other side of no man's land, many of the Brits responded by singing the same song, "Silent Night," which they called "Holy Night," in English. (Sometimes the two songs are sung as one, which is especially fitting today.)
The individual stories seem like something out of literature, or Hollywood. And they have been brought to the screen, too, as long ago as 1969 (in a Richard Attenborough film, "Oh! What a Lovely War") and, thanks to Twin Cities theater director Peter Rothstein, to stages over North America, including Broadway. Garth Brooks wrote a haunting song about it called "Belleau Wood." All these depictions carry the same message, which is that the humanity these men shared outweighed any grievances between their governments that justified killing one another. The Christmas Truce was more real to these men than the politics that led to war.
My favorite illustration of this tragic truth came from an embedded volunteer who accompanied Crown Prince Wilhelm and the German 5th Army to the front. He was famed Berlin Imperial Opera tenor Walter Kirchhoff. Although he had performed at Covent Garden the year before, the Allied troops on that part of the western front were French. They'd never heard Kirchhoff before, but when they listened to him sing German carols, they lauded him with cries of "Encore!"
At another place on the front, men on both sides of the line joined in singing "O Come All Ye Faithful," a hymn they all knew because it was typically sung in Latin at that time (and still is). The next day, signs appeared, usually on the German side first, promising not to shoot. Greetings were shouted out from the trenches across no man's land, and then some brave soul would just say, "I'm going for it" – or words to that effect – and they would emerge from their holes in the ground.
The meetings were different in each place. Usually after handshakes, someone would produce a camera, and there would be exchanges of beer and chocolate – and, of course, cigarettes and cigars. "It may have been tobacco's finest hour," David Brown of The Washington Post wrote 20 years ago.
"Extraordinary" is the word most often employed by those who were there. One of the most unexpected things was that commissioned officers typically followed the lead of enlisted men, even in the highly regimented German army. In some cases, junior officers were at the vanguard of the truce. One example was Kurt Zemisch, a bilingual lieutenant with the 134th Saxons who left behind a diary found decades later by his son.
"I have ordered my troops that, if at all avoidable, no shot shall be fired from our side either today on Christmas Eve or on the two pursuant Christmas holidays," he wrote. "We placed even more candles than before on our kilometer-long trench, as well as Christmas trees. It was the purest illumination – the British expressed their joy through whistles and clapping. Like most people, I spent the whole night awake."
Pvt. Albert Moren of the Second Queens Regiment remembered Christmas Eve near the French village of La Chapelle d'Armentières this way:
"It was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere; and about 7 or 8 in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights – I don't know what they were. And then they sang ‘Silent Night' – ‘Stille Nacht.' I shall never forget it, it was one of the highlights of my life."
At several places a soccer ball was produced, and the two sides played a friendly game of football on the frozen ground. After one such match between "Fritz" and "Tommy," one of the "Tommies," Sgt. Bob Lovell of the 3rd London Rifles, enthused in a letter home: "Even as I write, I can scarcely credit what I have seen and done. It has indeed been a wonderful day."
One British soldier who survived the war tried to give meaning to those magical days in a 1930 speech in Parliament. "The fact is that we did it," Murdoch M. Wood said, "and I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired."
