Silent Night

The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce

Stanley Weintraub

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781439107133
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Erster Weltkrieg

From an acclaimed military historian comes the astonishing story of World War I's 1914 Christmas truce—a spontaneous celebration when enemies became friends. It was one of history's most powerful—yet forgotten—Christmas stories. It took place in the improbable setting of the mud, cold rain, and senseless killing of the trenches of World War I. It happened in spite of orders to the contrary by superiors. It happened in spite of language barriers. And it still stands as the only time in history that peace spontaneously arose from the lower ranks in a major conflict, bubbling up to the officers and temporarily turning sworn enemies into friends. Silent Night, by renowned military historian Stanley Weintraub, magically restores the 1914 Christmas Truce to history. It had been lost in the tide of horror that filled the battlefields of Europe for months and years afterward. Yet, in December 1914, the Great War was still young, and the men who suddenly threw down their arms and came together across the front lines—to sing carols, exchange gifts and letters, eat and drink and even play friendly games of soccer—naively hoped that the war would be short-lived, and that they were fraternizing with future friends.It began when German soldiers lit candles on small Christmas trees, and British, French, Belgian, and German troops serenaded each other on Christmas Eve. Soon they were gathering and burying the dead, in an age-old custom of truces. But as the power of Christmas grew among them, they broke bread, exchanged addresses and letters, and expressed deep admiration for one another. When angry superiors ordered them to recommence the shooting, many men aimed harmlessly high overhead.Sometimes the greatest beauty emerges from deep tragedy. Surely the forgotten Christmas Truce was one of history's most beautiful moments, made all the more beautiful in light of the carnage that followed it. Stanley Weintraub's moving re-creation demonstrates that peace can be more fragile than war, but also that ordinary men can bond with one another despite all efforts of politicians and generals to the contrary.

1
An Outbreak of Peace

In December 1914, on both sides of the front lines in Flanders, astride the borders of Belgium and France, soldiers of two of Queen Victoria’s grandsons, Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V, faced off from rows of trenches that augured a long war of attrition. Belgian and French forces were also along the line, and with the British and French were troops from India and Africa who had never seen winter snows. Opposite were not only Prussians, but Saxons and Bavarians and Westphalians who would rather have been home for the holidays. Christmas was approaching, a festive time common to all the combatants, from Russia in the East to England and France in the West. Some of its most resonant symbols were claimed by Germany, especially the Christmas tree, the Tannenbaum of carols sung in both languages. Gift-giving, the Yule log, even Santa Claus—St. Nikolaus’s name mispronounced—were also attributed to German custom, but long appropriated by both sides.

One of the few things about which the combatants agreed was the centrality of Christmas, but both sides also expected no let-down in the war. Separated by the miserable waste of No Man’s Land as Christmas approached, troops seemed likely to enjoy nothing of the holiday’s ambience—not even mere physical warmth. Cold rain had muddied and even flooded many trenches, and decomposing bodies floated to the surface. Crude duckboard platforms barely kept soldiers dry, but few were eager to shelter in mucky hideaways that might be worse. Unless soldiers moved about, they would sink into the liquefying mud, and many slept erect if they could, leaning against the dripping trench walls. It was a stomach-churning atmosphere for eating one’s rations. Latrines were nearly nonexistent and accomplishing bodily functions a nightmare. German Expressionist artist Otto Dix described the landscape of fortified ditches as “lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that’s what war is. It is the work of the devil.”

A lieutenant in the 143rd Lower Alsatian Regiment described German dugouts as desperate defenses against nature. Candle stubs lit the dripping, rotting sandbagged walls. Floors were foul-smelling, “viscous mush.” Sand-filled sacks hung from the ceilings not always successfully kept food from the reach of rats. Men deloused themselves by sizzling lice in the flame of a candle while others not so fortunate blew on their hands, seized rifles, and ascended for sentry duty. Relieved soldiers would stagger in, blinded by the candles, unbuckle and search for food. Then came sleeping. “Eating and sleeping, standing guard, and, in between, trench digging,” one recalled, “that was the routine.”

Much of the Ypres area was below sea level—a thin crust of soil concealing reclaimed swampland, dependent upon a disrupted drainage system. Yet as miserable as the mud was, the word was evaded, and mud slides were described as “land-slips.” Trenches became—and echoed—home. The Durhams lay what they labeled the Old Kent Road, the Farm Road and New Road with bricks from “ruined houses.” A strong point near Hoogstade was christened Clapham Junction; others were Battersea Farm, White Horse Cellars and Beggar’s Rest.

Some German trenches were no longer awash, although rain and saturated meadows kept them soggy. Already dug in on slightly higher ground was an earthwork barrier, protected by masses of barbed wire, that left no flanks to turn and suggested that they might remain there until the other side wearied of the attrition. Both sides were unhappily expecting a long war. (It would be so long and bloody as to last only six weeks short of a fifth Christmas.) From the Channel to the Swiss frontier, neither side was yielding land in which it was entrenched. The Germans were bringing in electric power and telephone lines, flooring deep-dug walkways, and constructing concrete machine-gun posts behind the first rows of trenches. But concerned that troops might not then hold their first line at all costs, front-line generals objected to plans to build a second line of German defenses two or three thousand yards to the rear.

Despite propaganda from both sides, and a diet of daily casualties from artillery and small-arms fire, the ordinary British soldier had no strong feelings about fighting the Germans, other than to defend himself and the few creature comforts he had made for himself in his maze of dreary trenches. The British mocked their plight in a song imploring military recruiters—it was still a volunteer army—to

Send out my mother,
My sister and my brother,
But for Gawd’s sake don’t send me.

The French and the Belgians reacted to the war with more emotion than the British. It was being waged on their land, every hectare of which they wanted back. As treaty-bound neutrals, the Belgians had lived under a guarantee of their borders since independence in 1830. The French had lived in an atmosphere of revanche since 1870, when Alsace and Lorraine were seized by the Prussians. (In Paris there was a statue of a young woman swathed in chains, symbolizing Strasbourg.) With that in mind, when Ludwig Renn, a young officer near the front lines at Bertincourt, south of Arras, received orders for his chemical company to go into reserve and rest, his captain quickly had second thoughts. “Nein,” he said, recalling Renn to the field telephone. Christmas Eve was approaching. “The French realize that Christmas is, for the Germans, a great festive day and they might turn to account precisely this night.”

By December 4, as wintry rain made movement impossible, the British commander of the II Corps worried about the “live-and-let-live theory of life” that had surfaced on both sides. Neither side was firing, for example, at mealtimes, and although little fraternization was apparent, unspoken understandings accepted the status quo, and friendly banter echoed across the lines. The “death and glory principle,” as Lieutenant Charles Sorley, a poet, put it, was, in the circumstances, useless. Unannounced, even unspoken, arrangements lessened the discomfort while discouraging the enmity that encouraged the killing. A Royal Engineer, Andrew Todd, wrote to the Edinburgh Scotsman that soldiers on both sides, “only 60 yards apart at one place,” had become “very ‘pally’ with each other.” They were so close that they would throw newspapers, weighted with a stone, across to each other, and sometimes a ration tin, and, Rifleman Leslie Walkinton of the Queen’s Westminsters recalled, “shout remarks to each other, sometimes rude ones, but generally with less venom than a couple of London cabbies after a mild collision.”

On the morning of December 19, so Lieutenant Geoffrey Heinekey, new to the 2nd Queen’s Westminster Rifles, wrote to his mother, “a most extraordinary thing happened…. Some Germans came out and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves immediately got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to them and they helped us to bury our dead. This lasted the whole morning and I talked to several of them and I must say they seemed extraordinarily fine men…. It seemed too ironical for words. There, the night before we had been having a terrific battle and the morning after, there we were smoking their cigarettes and they smoking ours.”

The initiatives for one of the long war’s few humane episodes came largely from the invaders, yet not from their generals or their bureaucrats. Leading intellectuals like Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann had viewed the war as an essential defense against hostile forces representing cultures less rich and technologies less advanced. In “Fünf Gesänge” Rilke, the leading lyric poet in the language, celebrated the resurrection of the god of war rather than a symbol of weak-minded peace. In defense of Kultur, Mann went to occupied Belgium to observe the future. To be excoriated as Hun barbarians when Germans represented the higher civilization appeared to him an absurd inversion of values, a feeling shared by educated young officers at the front who came out of professional life. Although war itself might seem necessary for Germany, a wartime Christmas seemed, to many who took the festival seriously, befouled. Captain Rudolf Binding, a Hussar, wrote to his father on December 20 that if he were in authority, he would ban the observance of Christmas “this year.”

Ordinary soldiers were oblivious to such sensitivities. As Christmas approached, Tommy and Jerry indulged in occasional and undeclared live-and-let-live cessations of fire. Jeers were swapped where the trenches were close enough to permit it—“Engländer!” one side would shout, “Jerry!” (or “Fritz!”) the other. Most exchanges were in English, for many Germans had lived and worked across the Channel, some as waiters in hotels or seaside resorts, others as cooks, cabbies and even barbers, all summoned home in the last, hectic, prewar days late in July. So many Germans were working in England before the war that at a House of Lords debate a speaker charged that eighty thousand German waiters remained as a secret army awaiting a signal to seize strategic points. P. G. Wodehouse satirized such nonsense in The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England, about a Boy Scout who perceives, in the sporting results in his newspaper, a secret code to alert the Germans. Few readers were amused.

So much interchange had occurred across the line by early December that Brigadier General G. T. Forrestier-Walker, chief of staff to Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien of II Corps, issued a directive unequivocally forbidding fraternization, “for it discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys the offensive spirit in all ranks…. Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and the exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.”

Tempting they were. In World War I, creature comforts were cherished even more than comradeship and unit loyalties. The serving soldier’s idea of high civilization was a warm, dry place, the opportunity to satisfy the stomach and the bladder, and sleep. Both commands had warned against fraternization, for incidents unrelated to the season had already been reported. Such violations likely to erode discipline, General Erich von Falkenhayn warned, were to be “investigated carefully by superiors and discouraged most energetically.” It was difficult, however, to feel belligerent behind muddy earthworks or from a flooded trench. The Flanders mud, Captain Valentine Williams of the Irish Guards remembered, “was greasy and glutinous around Ypres, chalk-white and slimy but no less sticky to the south.” There was “no stone anywhere in the region,” and a few hours of rain churned up “a rich layer of creamy, foamy mud that absorbs water like a sponge and never gives it up.” An expanse of squalid, isolated farms at best, intersected by ditches and canals and dotted with poplars and polder willows before artillery fire had obliterated most of them, Flanders was prey to bitter winds from the North Sea, and icy rain. Yet even stalemate exacted a price. There were always more dead and dying sprawled inaccessibly between the lines, the result of raids across No Man’s Land to assess enemy strength and to take a prisoner for interrogation. Still, a shift in mood was quietly creeping over the desolation, in part because a disproportionate number of German units were now undertrained and unenthusiastic Bavarian, Saxon, Hessian and Westphalian reservists, rather than elite Prussian professionals, many of whom were deployed on the Eastern Front to keep their own homelands from the Russians. Once the Czar’s armies were defeated, the German command planned to bring most of its Prussian divisions westward by rail to overwhelm the French, and what British remained. Dismayed by early casualties, the War Office in London considered withdrawing all but a token force to protect the Channel coast—a defeatist prospect to which British generals in France objected.

Most higher-ups had looked the other way when scattered fraternization occurred earlier. A Christmas truce, however, was another matter. Any slackening in the action during Christmas week might undermine whatever sacrificial spirit there was among troops who lacked ideological fervor. Despite the efforts of propagandists, German reservists evidenced little hate. Urged to despise the Germans, Tommies saw no compelling national interest in retrieving French and Belgian crossroads and cabbage patches. Rather, both sides fought as soldiers fought in most wars—for survival, and to protect the men who had become extended family.

To prevent deadlock, British commanders began mounting, in mid-December, a series of small although costly attacks on German positions intended to provoke aggressive responses. The most expensive failure, at Ploegsteert Wood—“Plugstreet” to soldiers in the field—on December 18, resulted in massive casualties, including many from poorly directed friendly artillery fire. Many of the dead remained unburied, some literally impaled on enemy barbed wire, a rueful song already much too familiar conceding the realities:

If you want to find the old battalion,
I know where they are….
They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.

Private Henry Williamson remembered seeing some of their graves after the war, including one, under a Star of David rather than a cross, reading “R. Barnett. The Rifle Brigade. Stoke Newington. Age 15.” The misdirected lyddite shells had been imported from prewar Germany.

As the Germans prepared for the holiday, bringing up small trees and holiday provisions, Rudolf Binding was not appeased by what he labeled the “Christmas gift stunt.” Promoted by newspapers, commercial enterprises packaged Liebesgaben, or loving gifts. One advertisement showed two comfortable officers sitting by opened boxes of Weihnachtspakete, and behind them a small Christmas tree on an ammunition box decorated with a holly wreath. No trench was visible. At the front, as real Weihnachtsbäume were emplaced, the troops, especially the Saxons, attempted to decorate them, no easy matter in trench conditions, although the weather was becoming more Christmaslike. Rain was giving way to frost, but beyond both banks of the flooded Lys, the fields were covered by shallow ponds that were treacherous at night.

The British were making very different Christmas preparations. Recalling the success of Queen Victoria’s brass chocolate box for Boer War troops in 1899, a prized acquisition embossed on the lid with her royal profile, the government-sponsored but privately financed Princess Mary’s Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Christmas Fund replicated the gift. Everywhere that men (and 1,500 nurses) wore the King’s uniforms the services shipped a packet in the name of George Vs daughter, Princess Mary. The small oblong box contained cigarettes, pipe tobacco and a greeting card in the King’s script, “May God protect you and bring you home safe.” A nonsmoker’s tin of sweets was also prepared, and special ones for Indian troops—altogether 2,166,008 boxes. Plum puddings were sent by the Daily Mail, chocolates from Cadbury, butterscotch from Callard & Bowser. For fifteen shillings, an advertisement in British papers promised, one could send a soldier at the front a thousand Gold Flake cigarettes, or for only nine shillings a thousand Woodbines, each with a Christmas card.

The plethora guaranteed that even the few possibly overlooked received something. “I am keeping well,” Rifleman Percy H. Jones wrote home on the 24th, “in spite of the large number of Christmas parcels received.” In what was left of Belgium, its troops received a royal bounty of King Albert cigars and Queen Elizabeth mufflers. Mobilized by their government to organize private giving, Frenchwomen had issued a call for Noël du soldat donations. At a time when a man wasn’t considered a warrior unless he smoked, and when the act of incinerating tobacco and ingesting smoke filled the monotony of waiting, which was much of war, or blotted out fear, which was the rest of war, Christmas gifts at the front often meant either the implements of smoking or the product to be smoked away. The surplus impossible to stuff in a knapsack, store in a muddy trench or consume, created some of the impetus for exchanges, often disproportionate ones, and even with the enemy.

Military deliveries were suspended for twenty-four hours in order to bring forward 355,000 Princess Mary tins, which a Grenadier Guards major complained were “a positive nuisance.” In his diary G. D. Jeffreys complained that it was “rather ridiculous to hold up rations and ammunition “when, after all, our first business is to beat the Germans. Our enemy thinks of war, and nothing else, whilst we must mix it up with plum puddings.” That Major Jeffreys was mistaken seems evident if one accepts even a fraction of such reports from the front as appeared in the Jenaer Volksblatt. The “semi-official” dispatch, “A Christmas Onslaught onto the Field-Grey [Troops],” was the witless sort of soldier humor palatable when one’s side is winning:

Yesterday about four-o’clock in the afternoon there was a fierce and terrible onslaught of Christmas packages onto our trenches. No man was spared. However, not a single package fell into the hands of the French. In the confusion, one soldier suffered the impaling of a salami two inches in diameter straight into his stomach. … Another had two large raisins from an exploding pastry fly directly into his eyes…. A third man had the great misfortune of having a full bottle of cognac fly into his mouth.

One German soldier, realizing that in their comfortless trenches such gifts were mere Weihnachtspakete to men without a Mädel to deliver them at the traditional Bescherung ceremony on Christmas Eve, wrote a plaintive “Notschrei aus den Argonnen” to his hometown newspaper:

I wear love’s gloves on my hands,
Love’s leggings warm my thighs,
Love’s tobacco fills love’s pipe,
In the mornings I wash with love’s soap.
For loving gifts, a thank-you letter:
Warm is love’s cap against my skull;
I sigh to myself, “So much love—and no girl!”

The kaiserliche equivalent to the Princess Mary box was, for the ranks, a large meerschaum pipe with the profile of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm on the bowl, or a box of cigars inscribed Weihnacht im Feld, 1914. Noncommissioned officers got a wooden cigar case, each inscribed Flammenschwert—a flaming sword. Liebesgaben by public subscription were more generous. Dominik Richert, a young infantryman who marked his Christmas at Vendin-le-Vieil, near Armentieres, noted that his Pakete included “Schokolade, Zuckerbrötchen, Bonbons, Zigarren, Zigaretten, Dauerwurst, Ölsardinen, Pfeifen, Hosenträger, Halstücher, Handschuhe und so weiter.” Such openhandedness relieved any guilt feelings at home a...