Christmas Truce 1914
"O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trotten deeper in the mud".(3)
World War I 1914 on the Western Front. It's the first year of war. On both sides
soldiers live in trenches - trenches, inch-high filled with freezing water. Fleas and
lice and attacking rats, a ceaseless, penetrating rain from above. "Poor soldiers never
die, they just fade away", as Woody Guthrie once sang. Rations for normal soldiers are
lousy, the troops - the German occupiers of Belgium and Northern France on one side,
and Belgian, British and French defenders on the other all share the same conditions:
cold, hunger, 'black feet', pneumonia, and officers that force them to suicidal attacks
across the fenced 'Nomansland' between the trenches.
Christmas Eve 1914 saw a strange phenomenon in many parts of the Western Front
(stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss border). It often started with the singing
of German Christmas carols. "More, more", shouted the deadly foe across Nomansland.
"Encore, encore!" or "Well, done, Fritzens!" Sometimes, British, more rarely, French or
Belgian, troops joined in the chorus from the other side. Suddenly lights flared up on
top of the trenches on the German side - like a string of pearls. Was it a cheap trick
of the "huns"? It was "like the footlights of a theatre" one British soldier wrote home.
"We not shoot, you not shoot!" shouted the Germans, or held up signs. And they meant
it. Not a single shot fell.
So started what later became renown as the Christmas Truce or Little Truce.
It was a big one though, the decision of many, many hundred thousand, mostly ordinary
rank and file, soldiers to rebel peacefully against war. Though it was a spontaneous,
unorganised act, it spread quickly. Various sectors of the Western Front saw the same
phenomenon. Soldiers getting up from behind their save trenches - cautiously, with
hands held up, to show they were unarmed.
When the other side, with whom they had exchanged deadly fire for so many months,
didn't shoot, they started moving ahead towards Nomansland. In some cases the impulse
came from German soldiers carrying little Christmas trees (a custom unknown in other
countries then) with lamps shining from them. When the first Christmas day dawned
soldiers on both sides of the divide came out of the trenches on a massive scale and
joined their fellow enemies in Nomansland. Their first duty was to bury the dead of
this senseless 'Stellungskrieg' (static warfare) (4) sometimes lying there unburied for
weeks.
In some cases befoed soldiers buried the bodies together and not all of the dead were
Christians. On the British side many Common Wealth Soldiers - as they were called -
fought for a British Empire that held their own countries occupied. Colourful ribbons
of dead Indish soldiers' turbans blew in the chilling wind. December 25th saw a cold,
clear day on the Western Front. After having buried their dead, the young men - enemies
- communicated, using hands and feet, exchanged what little food they had, pipes,
cigarettes, helmets, in some cases even played soccer.
Ypern saw a real soccer match between German Saxons and a Scottish Highlanders team.
That they had more in common with those sick, hungry, frustrated guys on the other side
of Nomansland than with their own commanders in safe, warm Qatar Headquarter (pardon,
just a slip of tongue) was a lesson they all had learned during those weeks and months
in the trenches. So, they made war on war. For their commanders and monarchs the
Christmas Truce was a nightmare of peace (emperors always think of peace as a nightmare
and that hasn't changed).
The reaction of their officers, the local commanders in the trenches, varied. Since
fearing open rebellion by their hungry and frustrated troops they often accepted
fraternisation for a day or two, hoping it would ease tensions. But often they were
simply overrun by the spontaneous development of events. In some cases they used the
opportunity for espionage. Sometimes officers threatened to shoot their own soldiers if
they tried to go across. In some cases they even did. But all in all the Christmas
Truce was an overwhelming success. Soldiers' fotographs published in the British press
are impressive proof of this strange armistice (in France, Belgium and Germany footage
and reports of the event were censured) (5).
Just a sentimental story? An act of chivalry? A Christmas carol? A Lili-Marlen- Story?
Far more than that. It was the start of a peaceful mutiny of ordinary soldiers against
war. It was a spontaneous campaign of thousands and thousands of 'Refuseniks', many of
them having realized instinctively that they were shooting at the wrong enemy.
They were 'cannon fodder' - those poor guys on both sides of the divide. Threatened
with diciplinary action, or even death, most soldiers returned to the trenches after
Christmas. But, the fact that at least in one region the truce held till late February -
a truce of ordinary soldiers fighting in a regular army, mind you - shows, they really
meant it. If the Christmas Truce of 1914 had lasted, if it had spread and ended the war
it would have saved the lives of 9 Million men, women and children, dying from January
1915 till the end of war in late 1918.
The end of World War I saw the end of four monarchies: Russia, German Kaiserreich,
Austria-Hungary and the Osman Empire. People were fed up with those antidemocratic
aristocratic warmongers.
"The ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame, and on each end of the
rifle we're the same" ('Christmas in the Trenches', a ballad by John McCutcheon).
In Germany World War I had been widely greeted with enthusiasm. Even the
Socialdemocrats joined in the patriotism and signed the Kaiser's war credits. Sound
judgement was reserved to the far left. Rosa Luxemburg, the German Socialist and ardent
pacifist murdered by right-wing soldiers in 1919, was sentenced in 1914 to one year in
prison for her pacifist call-ups. Passionately, she had warned German men, the real
enemy was not their French counterparts but the Kaiser who planned to misuse them as
cannon fodder.
No matter if you wore British khaki or German 'feldgrau', if you had the Prussian
'Pickelhaube' or the Tommy cap on your head, if your name was Jean or Fritz or John you
were on the wrong side of Nomansland, bound to shoot your brothers - fellow-workers, -
employees, fellow-farmers, fellow- students.
"I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who
want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will
have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls", wrote British artist Paul Nash
in a letter home to his wife (1917).
Every war has its winners. Big weapons' producers/sellers and other multinationals
always profit from war - no matter who the final victor. Governments profit from war -
using it as a smokescreen to distract from domestic problems, and its costs as a
pretext for economically dispossessing their own people. War is a game in which the
loser is known beforehand: ordinary people. Ordinary people in Israel, paying the price
for Sharon's wars against the Palestinians/Arabs (Israel being one of the biggest
military powers on earth while its economy is in tatters). Ordinary people in the U.S.
who pay for Bush's wars with drastic cutbacks in public spending, and with being the
object of hate all over the world. It's the "underclass" Allied soldier, dying in
Bagdad's trenches for a cause which he/she doesn't understand.
It's people all over this planet trodden down by imperialistic boots.
"I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and
cold. Let us sleep now..."
These are words from the trenches of WWI, written by Private Wilfred Owen, a British
soldier who fell only weeks before the end of war, in November 1918. On the other side
of the trench lay his German counterpart, Gefreiter Gerrit Engelke, known as "the first
genius of literature to emerge from the proletariat":
"On body-eating Somme I lay opposite to you...", he wrote, "but you didn't know! Enemy
to enemy. Human to human, body to body, warm and cramped."
Engelke died around the same time as Owen.
Today's high-tech soldiers will have to make a decision. Do they want to be but remote-
controlled robot Terminators - or humans with a clear sense of when it's time to lay
off the uniform?
Remember: If those Christmas Truce soldiers had been sticking to it, they could have
saved the lives of 9 Million people! And I'm sure, if they had known what lay ahead of
them they wouldn't have returned to the trenches, no matter what. How many lives can
today's soldiers save if they leave their "trenches"?
(1) You may read Solana's doctrine 'A Secure Europe in a Better World' under:
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/...2011%20.EN.pdf
(2) 'Der bewachte Kriegsschauplatz', Kurt Tucholsky's famous WWI essay
(3) Highly decorated British "hero" of World War I Siegfried Sassoon wrote these lines.
Because of his war criticism he was tested for psychological disorder
(4) For more on the horrors of the 'Stellungskrieg' on the Western Front read Erich
Maria Remarque's classic: 'All Quiet on the Western Front'
(5) Due to this censorship, the 'Christmas Truce' has remained widely unknown in Germany
(unlike Britain, where in the last 89 years many books were written on the subject). In
2003 'Der kleine Frieden im Großen Krieg' was published - the first book (to my
knowledge) on the German perspective. Its author, Michael Jürgs, was interviewed on CNN
- Christmas Eve 2003, primetime - on the subjec.