Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Christmas Truce 1914: All quiet on the Western Front?




   One of my favourite Yuletide war stories is the unofficial truce on the Western front in 1914.

   Sure, it's a clichéd story today and everybody uses it as the feel good wartime Christmas story but so what, I'm sipping eggnog by a roaring log fire in a Swiss chateaux overlooking the holiday lights of an alpine ski resort. Actually, I'm telling you outrageous lies. I'm really knocking back cheap CVS pharmacy vodka next to a crusty electric heater in Los Angeles suburbia overlooking my douchebag neighbor's dog shit stained lawn. But that's why I love military history. You get to realize how worse off you could be. You could be in the trenches on the Western Front but for a simple accident of chronology. If you were born male in Britain, Germany, France or Russia in the years 1885-95 it was pretty much guaranteed you'd wind up spending a Christmas knee deep in mud, rats and lice while waiting for your turn to play dodgeball with machine gun bullets.

  That's why there's something really heart warming about a football match in No Man's Land.




   It was Christmas 1914 in a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914. The soldiers on the field had no real beef with each other. This whole war was triggered because some rich guy the average infantry man had never heard of ate a bullet in Sarajevo. And no mustard gas had melted off anyone's skin yet and the meat stacking operations of the Somme or Passchendaele hadn't even happened. There was still room in 1914 for an outbreak of human camaraderie, spontaneously between men who realized, in a shared holiday season, that they were all human, ordinary joes, flung into the wrong place and time as enemies and destined to be mere pawns chewed up in the global games of fat cat financiers, politicians, generals and old aristocracies.

   Some things in history never change right?




   It's hard to imagine Christmas in the trenches in 1914. It's not the type of war that happens anymore.  Siege warfare in open mud. WWI came at an interesting period where, for the first time in military history, there was no battlefield mobility. Cavalry were obsolete and armored maneuver warfare hadn't arrived yet. Modern small arms were pretty much perfected though. The British Lee Enfield and German Mauser rifles were both accurate up to 600 meters in the hands of a good shooter. That the Enfield was in use all the way up to 1957 was testimony to the effectiveness of those simple bolt action rifle designs. Of course, trench warfare was also the stage where the machine gun finally came into its own. The British water cooled Maxim gun could spit out a flesh ripping 600 rounds per minute. Artillery too had developed to the point of precision accuracy, timed fuses, multiple shell trajectories, howitzers, air bursts, rolling barrages, all of that steel rain was pretty much perfected by this time.

   This made for the worst kind of stalemate in military history.




   Hell, you can go all the way back to Themistocles and a general would still have multiple unit types at his disposal; heavy infantry, ranged units and cavalry, giving a commander at least three unique elements to play around with when trying to defeat the enemy. But in 1914, you lost that fast moving cavalry unit (the first tanks would not come until Delville Wood in 1916) so all you had as a commander to play war with on your carnage planning desk was artillery and sad meat sacks called men.

   1914 was still early in the war. The British army was composed, at this stage, of elite non conscripted men. Real soldiers. Volunteers. (They hadn't all been wiped out yet). The German Schlieffen Plan had been attempted through Belgium and had failed spectacularly at the last minute. Yet it was still a 'fair war' at this stage. Even with the trenches being laid all the way to the Channel, the barbed wire, the artillery strikes, it was still a war all soldiers could 'relate to' on some 'working class' level. With 'workers of the world unite' brewing in the East, there was a definite sense amongst the officer corps on both sides that they could lose control of their forces ideologically if fraternization were ever allowed to occur.

   And then Christmas Eve 1914 rolled up.

   And the war was still on like the newspapers had said it wouldn't be. I think this was the point where the average soldier on both sides realized they'd been duped. The situation in the trenches was taking on a permanency in winter that was starting to look like a really shitty long term deal for a soldier who was far from home with no personal grievance against the 'enemy'; except the one manufactured by hysterical propagandist newspaper headlines.

   And then it happened...

   The Germans in the trenches along the Western Front in Flanders received an influx of mini Christmas trees in wartime care packages from home (German supply lines being shorter than British ones). They lit their trees with candles and began singing traditional Christmas hymns (Tannenbaum) from the trenches on the other side of No Man's Land.

   The British were confused.

   Let's not get all fuzzy nostalgic here. The British had lost 94 men that day to German snipers all along the front. The Germans had lost similar numbers. This wasn't some outbreak of peace and love '60s style. This was a spontaneous Christmas celebration by the enemy in a trench across the way.

   But the British got curious. Like any enemy would.
  
   They popped their heads up over trench parapets to watch the lighted spectacle the Germans were putting on. Suddenly, signs began to appear from the opposing trenches in broken English.

   "You no fight, we no fight! Tommy!"

    That must have been a weird moment as the sun came up on the frost hardened mud of Christmas Day Flanders. The first man stood up and offered himself up to the snipers. But nobody fired. He was not shot. More men stood up, testing life itself at the hands of an easy bullet, for Christmas' sake. And then they began to march, from both sides, toward each other.

   I'm getting misty now. Someone has begun chopping onions in my immediate vicinity. It's Christmas right?

   Both sides met in the middle of no man's land

   Smokes were swapped. Hands were shaken. Alcohol was shared. Helmets were sampled. A game of football was played on shell pocked land where, the story goes, the Germans won 3-2. This fabled match is recorded as hearsay in regimental histories, something that was witnessed but never actually recorded by the players. God, I hope it happened. I would like it to have happened in the same way that I would like that some Jewish baby born two thousand years ago can make me survive my own death. Both stories are equally unlikely but it doesn't spoil Christmas by wanting to believe in them.

  The generals on both sides had a shit fit of course. How could it happen? How could ordinary men be friends with each other in the absence of state sponsored propaganda? It was never to happen again. The war got increasingly ugly and left everybody with scars. People wondered where had all the 'good' wars gone?

   To No Man's Land?

   Just the way the politicians, generals and old aristocracies always intended.

    Merry Christmas to you all.






18 comments:

  1. I guess he could have censored you so, no, he not mad.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm not mad. Figler made a correct point about the German Army not being a volunteer army so I deleted the words "and German" from my post.

    I still think Marx's ideas were more prevalent in 1914 Russia than Figler gives them credit for.

    But it's not something I'm gonna get into a dick waving contest over. This was supposed to be a Merry Christmas post where we all lurve each other and stay celibate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Indeed I noticed the change. Well, the comment was made with the intention of correcting, and a correction has been made. I do it constantly in my own writings. Nothing sour with that.

    Will decline the dick waving contest also. But be careful, Marx's ideas are one thing. Lenin's could be a bit different in some points. My point is that Communist agitation was a minor concern for the Ochrana in 1914. There was unrest in Russia (see 1905), but assuming it was just Commies getting ready is a mistake the Russian Communists had been glad everybody has made for decades. Russia was a huge stampe into which the Bolsheviks just managed to saddle, and stay on top.

    As for western Europe, German left was pretty much civilized, meaning Parlament inclined, yet. As for the Brits... well, is there a British Left anyway? (just kidding).

    Celibate is not a tolerable proposition to me, though.

    Bests.

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  4. Fuck, I'm reading this in the middle of summer and getting teary eyed. You paint a nice picture.

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  5. Have you seen this music video...of that Christmas morning in 1914? Quite good I'd say, if you asked me:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoZpkTZKBco

    ReplyDelete
  6. Without even linking, I'm going to guess it's Paul Mc Cartney's Pipes of Peace.

    CLICK!

    Yup, confirmed.

    But you are right though. I agree with all of it!

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  7. Fantastic article.

    More than any WWI article I've read, doing my history major thesis, you made "The Christmas Truce" personal and universal all at the same time.

    Thank you for that.

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  8. I'm reading this on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

    Coming up to the Christmas holdidays, your writing really put me in the trenches.

    Fuck War!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Fuck propaganda, fuck the "NWO" all human beings want the same things :- Love and security which no government offerers us we must stick together, stop attacking no matter what country, colour, race, or religion lets live, exchange and thrive together.
    happy every day to all.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Great article, however small error on your part, not real important to the general content of the article. Anyways, The Lee-Enfield is still used in military and policing applications, mostly in Commonweath countries, and it has also garnered use by anti-government forces in various countries (I've seen pictures of Maoist rebels in Nepal with Enfields).. Here in Canada, I know it's the standard issue rifles for our Rangers (Volunteers who patrol the North) due to the reliability of the gun (They're also manufactured here in Canada!)

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  11. I caught 'Joyeux Noel' on some late night movie channel earlier this week; it's based on this actual event....worth a look.

    Dialogue is in english, with french/german (with english subtitles.

    I stumbled across this article while browsing the Wartard back-catalogue...

    Merry Christmas, man. Hope its a good one.

    ReplyDelete
  12. ... and again-
    http://youtu.be/F7MwXniOD44

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  13. Hello there, this is a great and illuminating post. I liked theoff-hand and informal approach. I was wondering, what is the copyright situation on these photos? The football one in particular is great

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  14. But your football photo is 1915, in Greece.

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  15. Great article. Stumbled on this as I want to write about how football can be a healthy distraction even in the darkest of times. The 1914 war came to mind and this helped a lot.

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