What if they gave a war and nobody came? Exactly who first raised this question is disputed, but that does not detract from its validity.
It may have been prompted by a remarkable — perhaps even miraculous — event that occurred 100 years ago today. The battlefields in France were by then already a mess, although much of the mass slaughter that defined World War I still lay ahead. In some quarters it had been claimed that the war would be over by Christmas. But by the time the festive season rolled along, almost everyone involved had realized that they were in it for the long haul.
On Christmas Eve, though, something unusual was afoot in sectors along the western front, where British and German troops were entrenched within shouting distance. Letters written by British soldiers suggest they were taken by surprise when lights appeared on the opposite side, and then silhouettes of the kaiser’s troops as they emerged, some with their arms not raised but stretched out to indicate they bore goodwill rather than guns.
According to some accounts, it was the sound of the hymn Stille Nacht that alerted British soldiers to a change in mood across the battle lines. And they apparently responded with carols of their own, possibly including Silent Night. As the Germans tentatively walked into no-man’s land, some of them bearing symbols of an occasion revered by both sides, the British reciprocated.
“Enemies” thus met up in the snow, shook hands and exchanged greetings as well as cigarettes and sweets. This wasn’t a solitary event: Unexpected civility broke out in several places across the battlefront. In letters, soldiers even spoke of engaging their adversaries in impromptu football matches — although the veracity of reports about a particular encounter that the Germans won 3-2 has been questioned.
Both sides also took the opportunity to bury their dead. And once the festivities were over, they went back to killing each other. It stands to reason that at least in some cases the resumption of hostilities must have been fraught with misgivings. Recalling the Christmas truce in his memoirs, Otto Hahn, a German platoon commander who eventually went on to win the Nobel prize in chemistry for his contribution to discovering uranium fission, writes that when the orders to resume firing were given, “We asked our company commander where the enemy was, since we could not see any and therefore did not know where to shoot.”
There is some evidence that many junior officers either participated in the fraternization or tacitly encouraged it. The generals, though, were for the most part livid. How could you possibly conduct a war amid unauthorized outbreaks of camaraderie and reminders of a shared cultural heritage?
Orders were promptly dispatched decreeing that this sort of nonsense must never be repeated. And for the most part it wasn’t. It’s not hard to see why the masters of war were so perturbed by the prospect of participants in mortal combat realizing that their foes were not some kind of monsters but simply fellow human beings.
That is a perennial problem, of course, for all purveyors of hate — not just in the context of open warfare or terrorism, but even in respect of tensions over class, ethnicity, immigration, refugees and the like. The possibility of perceiving objects of hatred or fear as no different from oneself inevitably undermines the bases of conflict.
Some commentators on the centenary commemorations of the Christmas truce — including a football match in Aldershot between teams fielded by the English and German militaries — have argued that romanticizing the couple of days when all went quiet along sectors of the western front detracts from the catastrophic consequences of World War I for all concerned.
That’s a valid point. On the other hand, the brief respite from the exigencies of organized brutality is one of the only commendable takeaways from that utterly reprehensible exercise in industrial-scale slaughter. Another would be the poets, who gave voice to their apprehensions, often in trenchant verse from the trenches.
Perhaps foremost among them was Wilfred Owen, killed in the last days of the war, who in Strange Meeting envisaged a posthumous encounter with a foe who harbored the same idealistic dreams: “… Whatever hope is yours,/ Was my life also. I went hunting wild/ After the wildest beauty on earth…”
It would be imprudent and perhaps even perverse to deny the Christmas truce the status it deserves as a singular shining moment in four years darkness and despair. There’s something to be said, however, for the contention that it should not be allowed to overshadow ultimately more consequential instances of fraternization on the eastern front, where foot soldiers of the tsar were able to share with troops representing his German cousin the enticing revolutionary propaganda of the Bolsheviks.
It was working class revolts in Germany that ultimately persuaded the kaiser to abdicate and facilitated the end of the war, almost exactly a year after the second Russian revolution of 1917.
Among the Germans officers who bitterly resented the truce, and even more vehemently despised the popular actions that effectively spelt the end of the hostilities, was a certain Corporal Adolf Hitler.
Not surprisingly, on assuming power less than two decades later, working class solidarity was one of Hitler’s first targets. It is worth noting, meanwhile, that although the Great War, as it was initially known, was the deadliest conflict in history until that point, its monumental toll of 16 million consisted mostly of men in uniform. At least four times as many people were killed in World War II, and the majority were civilians. Ever since, it has been non-combatants who have borne the brunt of warfare.
And there have been no Christmas truces either. It’s salutary, for instance, to compare and contrast the spontaneous peaceful interlude in late December 1914 with the same time of year in 1972, when the Nixon administration demonstrated its exceptional lack of goodwill by going on an unprecedented bombing spree in Vietnam.
