The Christmas Truce of 1914

This is one of my favorite Christmas stories. Actually, it's one of my favorite stories of any kind. And it really happened: The Christmas truce: When the guns fell silent: So extraordinary was the Christmas truce of 1914 that some no longer believe it could have happened. But as a new film recreates those days, Stanley Weintraub says it was no myth Independent 12/24/05.

On Christmas Eve 1914, when the First World War was still in its initial year, peace broke out in Flanders on a large part of the lines between German troops on the one side and French and British on the other. It wasn't everywhere along that front. But it happened over a large part of it. Weintraub writes:

Live-and-let-live accommodations occur in most wars. Chronicles since Troy record stops in fighting to bury the dead, to pray to the gods, to assuage a war-weariness, to offer signs of amity encouraging mutual respect. But none had happened on the scale or duration - or the potential for change - as when the shooting suddenly stopped on Christmas Eve 1914.

The difference then was in its potential to become more than a momentary respite. In retrospect, the interruption of the horror, to soldiers "the sausage machine", seems unreal, incredible in its intensity and extent, impossible to have happened without consequences for continuing the war. Like a dream, when it was over, troops wondered at it, then continued with the grim business at hand.

He describes part of how this brief peace broke out:

German troops in Flanders, accessible from home by land, received, along with their wooden gift boxes decorated with a wreath and a Flammenschwert - a flaming sword - tabletop-size Christmas trees with candles conveniently clamped to the branches. The law of unintended consequences activated itself. On Christmas Eve, as darkness came early, the Germans - at some hazard - placed trees atop trench parapets and lit the candles. Then they began singing carols, and though their language was unfamiliar to their enemies, the tunes were not. After a few trees were shot at, the British became more curious than belligerent, and crawled forward to watch and to listen. And soon they began to sing.

By Christmas morning, no man's land between the trenches was filled with fraternising soldiers, sharing rations, trading gifts, singing, and - more solemnly - burying the dead between the lines. (Earlier, the bodies had been too dangerous to retrieve.)

William Faulkner's 1954 novel A Fable built on this brief experience to imagine a complete halt to the war having occurred. And, like the ficitional generals in Faulkner's story, the senior officers on both sides rushed to correct this shocking interruption in the business of mass killing:

The high brass on both sides quickly determined that they could not let the situation develop. In the national interest, the war had to go on. Peace has always been more difficult to make than war, but it was materialising. Under threat of court martial, troops on both sides were ordered to separate and restart hostilities. Reluctantly, they drifted apart. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's order to II Corps from his cushy rear-area headquarters read: "On no account is intercourse to be allowed between opposing troops. To finish this war quickly we must keep up the fighting spirit."

Weintraub ends with an appropriate characterization of that experience, when soldiers on both sides momentarily declared peace against the wishes of the warlords and the war profiteers and the pompous politicians and the jingoistic newspaper editors:

A Christmas truce seems in our new century an impossible dream from a more simple, vanished world. Peace is indeed, even briefly, harder to make than war.