It Did Not Start At Christmas: The Story of the Christmas Truce
On Christmas of 1914, approximately 100,000 British and German soldiers paused their fighting for Christmas. They walked out into no-mans land, shook hands, sung carols, ate together, played soccer (or football as it is known everywhere outside of the US), and even, in one memorable moment, cut hair. For one day, the guns were silent across long large stretches of the front. Smaller truces took place where the French and Belgium faced the germans, with the Germans taking letters form Belgian troops to be delivered to families in occupied Belgium. A miracle, people would say later, looking back on the brief pause in the slaughter.
The truce did not start on Christmas Day.
Since the end of the Race to the Sea and the stagnation of the Western front into trench warfare, soldiers on all sides had informal truces up and down the line. They had times to come out and bury the dead. They agreed to not shoot at each other while they were exercising or doing other work. They often exchanged newspapers. Music played a role, with songs being sung across the fronts both to amuse and taunt their opponents. The truces were more prevalent on the British lines than the French, given that many Germans spoke English and that, well, the Germans were fighting in France not England. But truces existed there as well, much to the disgust of the officer class.
Charles de Gaulle, then a lieutenant and already an authoritarian little twit, lamented their existence. Other officers, such as the head of the French 10th army, wrote about soldiers unfortunate tendency to fraternize with the enemy. British commanders tried to stop the Christmas Truce as it was happening. After the Truce ended, officers in every army came down hard on fraternization. The German command issues orders calling fraternization treason. In 1915, the Brit and French ordered artillery barrages and raids during the holidays, all to discourage another truce. As the war wore on, these actions and the death toll reduced, though never entirely eliminated, fraternization.
The lesson of the Christmas Truce was not that it happened. The lesson was that it took so much effort to suppress. One of the nicer, but least understood aspects of humanity, is that we are generally a cooperative species. It is true that we tend to demonize others, but we also pretty easily fall into expanding our circles of “us”, and it takes a fair bit of work to convince people to commit murder for a long time on an industrial scale. It is right to mourn that it happens so often, but it is also right to remember that the truces on the front lines had to be harshly suppressed for the commanders to get their war. Resistance to the deliberate othering of people comes naturally to human beings. Overcoming that resistance is unnatural, hence the amount of effort required to do so.
That, I think, is the important story of the Christmas Truce.
If you celebrate, I hope you re having a wonderful Christmas.