Amid Mud and Blood, Christmas Won Out

Christmas has always been hard on soldiers who are far away from home. But only once did they actually lay down their arms and stop a war for it.

That was Christmas Eve 1914.

It was the first months of World War I. The British and German troops facing each other in muddy Flanders were as close to home geographically as wartime enemies on someone else’s territory ever get. London was 60 miles away across the English Channel. The German border abutted on Belgium, which the Kaiser’s army had invaded. Yet the muck, and the crisscrossing waterlogged trenches and the barbed-wire entanglements separating the two armies, as well as the constant firing by machine guns and artillery, made the distance seem far, far greater.

A Royal Engineer, Andrew Todd, wrote to the Edinburgh Scotsman newspaper that soldiers were “only 60 yard apart” at some places on the front lines. To make it feel more like Christmas, governments on both sides had prepared small Christmas gift boxes for each soldier, with snacks and tobacco. The German troops, accessible from home by land, also received small Christmas trees with candles attached.

The law of unanticipated consequences went to work. On Christmas Eve, the Germans set trees on 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 listen. And after a while, they began to sing.

By Christmas morning, the “no man’s land” between the trenches was filled with fraternizing soldiers, sharing rations and gifts, singing and (more solemnly) burying the dead between the lines. Soon they were even playing soccer, mostly with improvised balls.

According to the official war diary of the 133rd Saxon Regiment, “Tommy and Fritz” kicked about a real football supplied by a Scot. “This developed into a regulation football match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter.... Das Spiel endete 3:2 fur Fritz” (“The game ended 3-2 for Fritz”).

But the high commands on both sides felt they could not let this continue. In the national interest, the war had to go on. War is easier to make than peace. Under threat of court martial, troops on both sides were to ordered to separate and to restart hostilities. Reluctantly, they drifted apart.

As Gen. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien ordered the British 2nd Corps from his cushy rear-area headquarters: “On no account is intercourse to be allowed between opposing troops. To finish this war quickly, we must keep up the fighting spirit.”

In most sectors, prearranged signals ordered men back or confirmed the close of the truce.

“We parted,” Pvt. Percy Jones of the Westminster Brigade wrote in his diary, “with much hand-shaking and mutual goodwill.”

Rifleman George Eade of the 3rd London Rifles reported a German soldier saying to him, “Today we have peace. Tomorrow you fight for your country; I fight for mine. Good luck.”

By New Year’s Day the shooting had restarted. Attempts at other Christmas truces failed. Millions more would die before the final armistice in November 1918.

Today, governments continue their efforts to make Christmas for troops away from home as palatable as possible. The food is briefly festive, and efforts are made to put a bit of holiday spirit in the atmosphere.

But truces no longer seem likely. An English friend who was an army officer in Italy in 1943 recalled the Germans ringing bells on Christmas Eve from a church high up on a hill nearby.

“Can we stop shooting?” he asked a higher-up. “Not on your life!” he was told. Peace and goodwill are difficult to generate toward the other side when one is educated, pragmatically, to hate his enemy.

It becomes even more difficult when the cultural divide is vast. There could have been no shared Christmases with the Japanese in the Pacific war between 1941 and 1945.

Nor can it be easy now to share values, or festivities, with zealous Islamic combatants at Christmas in Iraq or Afghanistan.

A Christmas truce seems an impossible dream, almost a myth, from a more simple, vanished world. Peace is harder to make than war.