The First World War stands as the real demarcation line between the 19th and 20th centuries and an older world and the modern era. In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book that talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sanford Fleming’s worldwide standard time. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914. Yet there were still vestiges of that older world of shared values and decency – even among enemies – and even in the barbarism of trench warfare in the early years of the First World War.
While it has become one of the most mythologized events of the First World War, the essence of the story remains: “Late on Christmas Eve 1914,” writes Amanda Mason, curator-historian with the Imperial War Museum in London, “men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard Germans troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts.”
John McCutcheon’s ballad Christmas in the Trenches has been described as “perhaps the best and most heartening Christmas story of modern times.” McCutcheon, an American from Wisconsin, tells the story of the famous Christmas Truce through the voice of a fictional British soldier, Francis Tolliver.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, later described it as an “amazing spectacle.”
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1914 were marked by the remarkable unsanctioned fraternization of enemy troops along much of the Western Front, which included caroling in German, French and English, exchanges of small gifts between soldiers, and even a soccer game. And when the Christmas bells sounded in the villages of Alsace-Lorraine-Franche-Comté in the Vosges Mountains late on Christmas Eve Dec. 24, 1915, they triggered a second First World War Christmas Truce along that particular area of the Western Front, much like the now more famous 1914 Christmas Truce.
Most recently, on Dec. 20, Raf Casert, a writer for The Associated Press in Brussels, in an AP “Big Story” placelined Ploegsteert, Belgium, has revisited the 1914 Christmas Truce in a well-researched and colourful human interest piece of reportage, contributed to by Virginia Mayo, a veteran AP photographer and photo editor in Brussels. You can read the piece here: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ce7bcbc9b7a444af9e5c88dc065aaf51/christmas-1914-day-even-wwi-showed-humanity
“With British and German forces separated only by a no-man’s land littered with fallen comrades, sounds of a German Christmas carol suddenly drifted across the frigid air: “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night, Holy Night”),” writes Casert in his lede.
“It was a time when swift military movement from Germany across France to the Belgian coast was grinding to a stalemate, leaving hundreds of thousands of casualties behind. For both sides — Germany versus an alliance led by France and Britain — this buried any hope that the war would be over by Christmas,” writes Casert.
He goes on:
“Frank and Maurice Wray of the London Rifle Brigade settled in to keep watch when they suddenly heard a German band in the trenches play songs ‘common to both nations,’ they later wrote in an article. ‘Quite understandably a wave of nostalgia passed over us.'”
As dawn broke, Casert writes, “a German called out, ‘We good. We no shoot,’ and the Wrays noted: ‘And so was born an unofficial armistice.’ Men walked out, extremely apprehensive at first, many fearing some deadly trick. Then human warmth cracked the freezing cold.”
Similar scenes played out here and there along the Western Front, “which ran from the North Sea to the Swiss border,” he notes.
“Apart from talk in a shared language or merely with hands and kindred eyes, the men exchanged gifts, using everything from bully beef and barrels of beer to small mementos. Some played football.”
When British General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien learned of the Christmas Truce two days later, he wrote in a confidential memorandum, Casert notes, ‘this is only illustrative of the apathetic state we are gradually sinking into.’
While Christmas bells sounding in the villages of Alsace-Lorraine-Franche-Comté in the Vosges Mountains late on Christmas Eve Dec. 24, 1915, triggered a second First World War Christmas Truce along that particular area of the Western Front, deliberate and intensive shelling, ordered by the High Commands on both sides in an attempt to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again, precluded any repeat of the larger scale, if unofficial and piecemeal, truce of Dec. 25, 1914.
Joyeux Noël, a 2005 heart-warming, albeit highly fictionalized account of the 1914 Christmas Truce, written and directed by Christian Carion, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 78th Academy Awards on March 5, 2006, losing to the South African film, Tsotsi.
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