1914
IT STARTED WITH SMALL GLIMMERS OF LIGHT – could they possibly be candles? – flickering on the crusted mud of the enemy trenches a hundred yards or so away. The British sentries could not make them out. At first there were just one or two. Then more appeared, several dozen perhaps – miniature Christmas trees were being hoisted over the parapet, accompanied by strange but unmistakable sounds of jollity. The Germans were singing carols now: Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht! – ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’. It was Christmas Eve on the Western Front.
The Christmas trees were presents from the German homeland – tiny conifers shipped in by the thousand to raise morale and, presumably, to encourage their boys to fight more fiercely. But on 24 December 1914 their effect was quite the opposite, for the Germans started to clamber out of their fortified positions. And on the other side of the corpse-littered No Man’s Land between the trenches, the British found themselves doing the same.
‘I went out, and they shouted “No shooting!” and then somehow the scene became a peaceful one,’ wrote Captain R.J. Armes of the 1st Battalion North Staffordshire Regiment in a letter home to his wife. ‘All our men got out of their trenches and sat on the parapet. The Germans did the same and they talked to one another in English and broken English. I got on top of the trench and talked German and asked them to sing a German folk song, which they did; then our men sang quite well, and each side clapped and cheered the other.’
‘It all happened spontaneously and very mysteriously,’ remembered Major Leslie Walkinton, then a seventeen-year-old rifleman. ‘A spirit stronger than war was at work that night.’
A bright full moon made for classic Christmas card weather. White frost had crispened and had even brought a certain beauty to the normally glutinous wastes of mud. Captain Armes saw the chance to clear the former turnip field of the dead of both sides, so he negotiated an agreement with his German counterpart. The two officers also agreed ‘to have no shooting until midnight tomorrow’.
Similar agreements to celebrate Christmas Day peacefully were being negotiated up and down the war zone around Armentières near Lille in northern France. Elsewhere along the four hundred miles of the Western Front, which stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border, hostilities continued. But in this little patch of Flanders, a bizarre and rather wonderful interlude was imposing itself upon the lethal squalor of the ‘war to end all wars’.
Christmas morning started with burial services, the troops from both sides sometimes lining up together. ‘Our padre gave a short sermon, one of the items of which was the 23rd Psalm,’ wrote Lance Corporal Alex Imlah of the 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders. ‘Thereafter a German soldier, a divinity student I believe, interpreted the service to the German party. I could not understand what he was saying, but it was beautiful to listen to him because he had such an expressive voice.’
The service over, the two bands of men started fraternising. ‘One can hardly believe them capable of the terrible acts that have been laid at their door,’ Alex Imlah told his father. ‘Some of them could speak English fluently, one of them had been a waiter at the Cecil Hotel, London, and I gathered from them they were pretty well tired of this horrible business.’
The British packages from home included Christmas cards and cigarettes from Buckingham Palace, plus plum puddings from the Daily Mail,which formed the basis of some lively barter. Beer, tins of jam, ‘Maconochie’s’ (a canned vegetable stew) and cigars (the Kaiser’s Christmas gift to his troops) all changed hands. ‘I met a young German officer, and exchanged buttons as souvenirs,’ remembered Captain Bruce Bairnsfather of the 1st Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment. ‘With my wire-cutting pliers I removed a button from his tunic, and gave him one of mine in exchange. Later I was photographed by a German with several others, in a group composed of both sides.’
In several sectors of the Front the climax of Christmas Day was a series of knock-up football matches, using empty bully-beef cans where balls were not available – one match featured teams of fifty or so per side. Three-two in favour of the Germans was the only result recorded, but the losers did not seem to mind. ‘There was not an atom of hate on either side that day,’ remembered Bairnsfather.
Such a widespread flowering of peace and friendship had never been seen in the history of war, and it has prompted two myths – that it did not actually happen, or, alternatively, that the truth about ‘the Christmas truce’ was suppressed by the authorities. Sir John French, the morose commander of the British Expeditionary Force, certainly expressed his ‘grave displeasure [at] the reports he has received on recent incidents of unauthorised intercourse with the enemy’. But there was no censorship of the numerous letters in which British officers and men sent home their tales of celebrating Christmas with the enemy, and these were picked up in the newspapers.
These letters also tell the stories of how eventually, and in different ways, the Christmas truce ended. One went like this: ‘At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with “Merry Christmas” on it,’ wrote Captain J.C. Dunn of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, whose unit had celebrated with two barrels of beer sent over by the Saxons in the opposite trenches. ‘The German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down in our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air . . . The War was on again.’