It was the first year of a war that was supposed to be
over in a matter of weeks. And surely long over by Christmas—with victorious
armies whooping it up in [Paris] [Berlin] [Saint Petersburg] [Vienna] [Belgrade],
depending on which side was doing the talking.
Four and a half months into the war, and there had
already been the unbelievable (but entirely foreseeable) slaughter resulting
from frontal infantry charges against massed machine guns. Armies on all
fronts, but particularly across Northern France, had dug into the earth in
unsettled misery while their commanders considered how they might continue
doing the same thing again and again, but expect different results.
At this point, December 1914, the British Army was still
largely a force of volunteers (Britain didn’t implement conscription until
1916), so the men on the Western Front were basically civilians in ill-fitting
and filthy uniforms. The French, Germans and Belgians—well, they all had a long-standing
compulsory service and reserve system, but they still had masses of men who’d
been called back to service from regular jobs.
Tens of thousands of men literally entrenched along a
front hundreds of miles long, dug into the ground that alternated between
sloshy and frozen mud, many in forward lines that were 50 to 100 meters apart
from one another. (Their commanders were kilometers behind the lines, ensconced
in châteaux and well provisioned.) The holidays approaching as some distant,
unreachable dream, whatever the tradition.
On Christmas Eve the front was blanketed in snow, which
made the men on both sides even more homesick, if also colder. There’s
something about the notion of snow for Christmas that just turns people into
jelly.
And that’s when something extraordinary occurred,
completely spontaneously and what we today would call “grass-roots”. Christmas
Eve is when Germans traditionally have their big Christmas celebration with a festive
meal and der Weinachtsmann delivering
gifts. So not so surprising that many Germans along the line began to sing
Christmas carols. But they also put up Christmas trees, with improvised decorations
and—much riskier—lanterns or candles to illuminate them in the night.
Well, men from across No Man’s Land joined in on some of
the carols, and popped their heads hesitantly up to view the Christmas trees.
In some sectors there was firing, but in others the singing and illuminations
led to shouted conversations, and eventually to men climbing out from the trenches to
exchange cigarettes and chocolate, cookies and charcuterie. This happened
between the Germans and Belgians, Brits and Frenchmen—not everywhere, but
little pockets of conviviality.
It continued the following morning—the singing was backed
up by unit bands, soldiers shared photos of family and friends, there may have been a
few football matches.
And both sides collected their dead, who’d lain on the
field for days or weeks, for burial.
Well, as you can imagine, those commanders off in their
châteaux, replete with cognac and Christmas pudding, turned apoplectic when
they heard of trucelike shenanigans in the trenches. In truth—you can’t really
fight a war if your poor bloody infantry are fraternizing with their PBI
counterparts on the other side and comparing notes about who’s got the most
idiotic officers.
Word came down hard and swift that any further failure to
blast the hell out of the enemy would be severely punished, and things settled
back into gruesome misery…for nearly four more years. In December 1915, orders
were in place preventing any reoccurrence; so it’s evident that the generals
actually could learn from battlefield events. Just not that whole bit about
flinging whole divisions of infantry against entrenched machine guns.
But for one brief, magical period of a few hours on
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, companies and battalions laid aside their
weapons and celebrated with one another like families gathered together.
