The Christmas Truce

Myth, Memory, and the First World War

Terri Blom Crocker

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813174020, 9780813166155
• eBook ISBN: 9780813166179
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In late December 1914, German and British soldiers on the western front initiated a series of impromptu, unofficial ceasefires. Enlisted men across No Man's Land abandoned their trenches and crossed enemy lines to sing carols, share food and cigarettes, and even play a little soccer. Collectively known as the Christmas Truce, these fleeting moments of peace occupy a mythical place in remembrances of World War I. Yet new accounts suggest that the heartwarming tale ingrained in the popular imagination bears little resemblance to the truth.

In this detailed study, Terri Blom Crocker provides the first comprehensive analysis of both scholarly and popular portrayals of the Christmas Truce from 1914 to present. From books by influential historians to the Oscar-nominated French film Joyeux Noel (2006), this new examination shows how a variety of works have both explored and enshrined this outbreak of peace amid overwhelming violence. The vast majority of these accounts depict the soldiers as acting in defiance of their superiors. Crocker, however, analyzes official accounts as well as private letters that reveal widespread support among officers for the détentes. Furthermore, she finds that truce participants describe the temporary ceasefires not as rebellions by disaffected troops but as acts of humanity and survival by professional soldiers deeply committed to their respective causes.

The Christmas Truce studies these ceasefires within the wider war, demonstrating how generations of scholars have promoted interpretations that ignored the nuanced perspectives of the many soldiers who fought. Crocker's groundbreaking, meticulously researched work challenges conventional analyses and sheds new light on the history and popular mythology of the War to End All Wars.

1

“A Candle Lit in the Darkness”

The Christmas Truce and the First World War

To fraternize was in itself an implicit condemnation of the war.

—Remy Cazals, Meetings in No Man’s Land:
Christmas 1914 and Fraternization in the Great War (2007)

The three Battalions in the line, like the rest of the British Army, met the enemy in No-man’s-land; exchanged the “souveneer” so precious to the hearts of the Private Rifleman; smoked German cigars and gave “gaspers” in return; speculated with philosophically minded Teutons upon the futility of the whole thing, and upon the “rumness” of talking together today and killing each other tomorrow; passed Boxing Day in the traditional spirit of sentimentality; and resumed the war hammer and tongs on the 27th.

—Reginald Berkeley, The History of the Rifle Brigade
in the War of 1914–1918 (1927)

“To die tomorrow,” proclaims a German soldier in Joyeux Noel after the Christmas truce, “is even more absurd than dying yesterday.” The 2004 film takes the futility of the First World War as its theme and uses the 1914 holiday armistice, the day when “enemies leave their weapons behind for one night as they band together in brotherhood and forget about the brutalities of war,” to advance its theory that the soldiers who participated in the truce were rebelling against the senseless conflict in which they were engaged. Joyeux Noel begins with British, French, and German schoolchildren parroting their national attitudes toward their enemies; the British child recites, “To rid the map of every trace / Of Germany and the Hun / We must exterminate that race.” This early scene establishes the film’s attitude toward the war: that all combatants were equally culpable for the conflict, and yet equally innocent, as they had clearly been indoctrinated by their governments to hate their enemies. The film then shows French and Scottish soldiers on the Western Front attacking a German trench in December 1914, an assault that results in many casualties but no gain of territory. Soon afterward, on Christmas Eve, the Germans place lit Christmas trees on their parapets, a soldier sings “Silent Night,” and the men from all three countries walk hesitantly into the bomb-cratered area between the trenches. The German, French, and Scottish officers share a bottle of champagne and arrange for an evening’s cease-fire. The lower ranks exchange drinks, cigarettes, and chocolate, and at midnight a Scottish priest leads them all in a Mass.¹

On Christmas morning, the officers return to No Man’s Land and coordinate the burial of the dead. After the bodies are interred and a service is read over the graves, fraternization resumes with a hastily arranged football match and card playing, and there is even a juggler entertaining the troops. The next morning Horstmayer, the German officer, walks over to the French line. The French officer, Audebert, protests that the truce is over, but the German has not come to extend the armistice. Horstmayer instead warns the French that they will shortly be shelled by German artillery, and he invites the French and Scottish soldiers to take shelter in the safety of the German trenches during the bombardment. Once the German shelling has ceased, the soldiers from all three armies congregate in the French trenches to avoid retaliatory shelling from the French artillery on the German lines. Afterward, the German soldiers return to their trenches on the other side of No Man’s Land, while the three officers shake hands wistfully and a Scottish bagpiper plays “Auld Lang Syne.”

After the truce ends, the narration shifts to military censors reading the letters that the soldiers have written home about the event, which also announce their intentions of continuing the armistice:

The Scots photographer promised us pictures at New Year’s.

Be a chance to get back together.

We and the British decided to accept the Krauts’ invitation.

We’ll go spend New Year with them.

And above all, drink to the health of all those bastards who, sitting pretty, sent us here to slug it out.

Joyeux Noel then shows the official consequences of participation in the impromptu cease-fire. Audebert is chastised by a superior officer, who tells him that it was disgraceful for his unit to have been involved. “If public opinion hears of this—” the officer warns, at which point Audebert interrupts, “Have no fear, no one here will tell . . . because no one would believe or understand.” Audebert also admits that he “felt closer to the Germans than to those who cry ‘Kill the Krauts!’ before their stuffed turkey!” His unit is then sent back into battle in a different part of the front lines. The Scottish battalion that participated in the truce is disbanded “by order of the King” and its soldiers scattered among other regiments. The Germans are reprimanded for their participation in the truce by their crown prince, who lectures the soldiers briefly on their insubordination before informing them that they are being sent to “East Prussia to take part in an offensive against the Russian Army.” As punishment for their fraternization with the enemy, therefore, the Scottish battalion is dispersed, the French soldiers are returned to a brutal sector in the front line, and the Germans are dispatched to the Eastern Front.

Joyeux Noel’s depiction of the Christmas truce will be familiar to many. As the reviews it received demonstrate, the film was accepted as an accurate representation of the famous day in 1914 when enemy troops fraternized on the Western Front. The Times observed that it was “inspired by the spontaneous ceasefire that occurred in the corpse-strewn no man’s land between the trenches in northern France on Christmas Day, 1914.” The New York Times noted that it “tells the true story of an improvised Christmas truce during the first year of World War I.” While it may sound unbelievable, the BBC asserted, Joyeux Noel “is actually based on fact.” Roger Ebert, the famous film critic, declared that the film’s “sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.” Christian Carion, the film’s director, stated that, although the characters presented in Joyeux Noel were fictional, “the detail is historically accurate.”²

As recounted in Joyeux Noel and echoed in many other sources, the story of the Christmas truce is indeed a heart-warming tale—but one that bears little relation to the truth. There may have been British soldiers who rushed out to meet the Germans with peace and brotherhood in their hearts and mutiny on their minds, but for the vast majority of the troops involved, the reality was much different. The truce, which at the time it occurred was largely perceived as an interesting but unimportant event, was not an act of defiance but one that arose from the convergence of a number of factors: the professionalism of the soldiers involved, the unprecedented conditions of static trench warfare, the adaptation of the troops to their new environment, foul weather on the Western Front in the first winter of the war, the absence of major initiatives along that front during the last two weeks of December, and memories of traditional celebrations of Christmas. The holiday truce, in short, was caused by rain, mud, curiosity, lack of personal animosity toward the enemy, and homesickness rather than by frustration and rebellion.³

The actual armistice, however, does not have the narrative appeal of the Christmas truce as it is commonly portrayed in historical and fictional accounts. In the popular imagination, the holiday cease-fire, which appeared out of nowhere and ended just as quickly, has left behind the legend of a “candle lit in the darkness of Flanders” and a lingering collective memory of football matches, shared cigars, and camaraderie. In Britain the conventional story of the truce is well known: on 25 December 1914, the soldiers in the trenches, trapped in a pointless war and angry with both the politicians who had deceived them into enlisting and the incompetent generals who commanded them, were eager to show their opposition by defying their officers and consorting with the Germans. The military leaders, outraged by the willingness of their men to fraternize with the enemy, issued harsh orders commanding that the truce end, and the soldiers, now reluctant to fire on opposing troops, had to be coerced into resuming the war and were subsequently punished for their participation in the cease-fire. Some regiments that took part in the truce even had to be transferred to different parts of the line, or to other fronts altogether, as they refused to fight the men they now considered comrades. Soldiers, whose letters were censored, were forbidden to write home about the armistice, and press censorship, imposed by the government to keep civilians ignorant about the truth of the war, prevented the news of the truce from reaching the British public. In any case, the conspiracy that the press barons had willingly entered into with the authorities to promote the war made it impossible, even without government-imposed restrictions, for the newspapers to acknowledge the existence of the truce or the soldiers’ attitudes that prompted it.⁴

According to the widely accepted narrative of the truce, since the episode was covered up at the time it occurred, only the soldiers who had been involved in it knew about the holiday cease-fire. The general public supposedly did not find out about it until decades later, when the truce was mentioned in the famous 1964 BBC documentary series, The Great War, and memorialized in the antiwar play and film Oh! What a Lovely War. As soon as the British became aware of the 1914 Christmas fraternization, the story of the truce and the desire for peace on the part of the soldiers involved that it symbolized became a vital part of the narrative of the war, as the number of books, newspaper articles, and websites devoted to it demonstrate. It has been the subject of television documentaries, plays, children’s books, and an opera, Silent Night. The truce was mentioned in the last episode of the popular BBC television series Blackadder Goes Forth, a cross has been put up in Ploegsteert Wood to memorialize the spot where enemies met and fraternized in No Man’s Land, and the centenary of the First World War was celebrated by recreating the truce’s most famous feature, “the football match played against German troops which remains one of the most poignant moments of the conflict.” As a recent Guardian article claims, the story of the Christmas truce is one “that seems to gain in resonance and potency as the years go by.”⁵

It is certainly true that the tale of the truce is one that has expanded throughout the years to encompass the changing narrative of the First World War, but as the holiday armistice has gained a cherished position in public memory, myths about it have overtaken its reality. Although the conventional narrative of the truce maintains that soldiers defied their officers to participate in it, this was rarely the case: in fact, Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Fisher-Rowe, commander of the 1st Grenadier Guards, wrote to his wife that the Germans “say they want the truce to go on till after New Year and I am sure I have no objection. A rest from bullets will be distinctly a change.” No soldiers were punished for their participation in the 1914 armistice, and no troops refused to fire on their enemies afterward. The military diaries of the regiments involved often reported the truce openly, and numerous accounts of it were published in the British national press soon after it occurred. The truce remained a part of the public narrative of the First World War from the time the conflict ended through the early 1960s, when it was repackaged and repurposed by historians and others who were determined to advance a certain view of the war.⁶

In spite of the readily available information regarding the episode that demonstrates otherwise, the romanticized version of the Christmas truce, with its defiant soldiers, disapproving leadership, and ignorant home front, is one that has increasingly been pressed into the service of the conventional discourse of the First World War. That assessment of the 1914–1918 conflict that came into prominence during the 1960s and is embodied in the works of authors such as Alan Clark, A. J. P. Taylor, Paul Fussell, and John Keegan, is that it was a “stupid, tragic and futile” war. It is famous, first, for the enormous numbers of people who died in it. Gerard De Groot, for example, opens his history of the war with the stark observation that “nine million combatants and twelve million civilians died during the Great War.” The sheer scale of the war’s destruction and its unprecedented impact on the civilian populations involved greatly surpassed any previous conflicts, as Martin Gilbert notes when he adds the “mass murder of Armenians in 1915, and the influenza epidemic that began while the war was still being fought” to the butcher’s bill.⁷

Of course, horrific as these totals are, the number of people killed by the war is not necessarily sufficient grounds on which to condemn it. The judgment of history, however, is that in spite of the millions who died fighting in it, the 1914–1918 war achieved nothing. “The First World War,” John Keegan states unequivocally, “was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.” The twin themes of tragedy and futility are present in most works about that war, ceaselessly underlining this view of the conflict and propagating the belief that the nations of Europe, through lack of foresight and with insufficient justification, had blundered into a war that they foolishly expected would be localized, short, and relatively easy to win. As Adam Gopnik sums up the attitudes of the countries involved, they went to war in 1914 because “the Germans thought that, more or less, it would be like 1870; the French thought that, with the help of the English, it wouldn’t be like 1870; the English thought that it would be like a modernized 1814, a continental war with decisive interference by Britain’s professional military; and the Russians thought that it couldn’t be worse than just sitting there.”⁸

The catalyzing event that prompted the British to get involved in the war, the violation of Belgian neutrality, is now perceived as an excuse rather than a reason, and the subsequent emphasis on the atrocities committed against that country by the Germans is also viewed cynically. In addition, many theorize that the British press deliberately published a number of outright lies about the behavior of the German army in Belgium and France in order to sway British public opinion in favor of the conflict and therefore assist with recruiting. Niall Ferguson argues that in Britain “the most commonly aired justification for the war was that it was necessary to defeat Prussian militarism and ‘frightfulness,’ exemplified by the atrocities perpetuated by the German army against Belgian civilians.” John Simpson, the noted BBC reporter, agrees that the situation in Belgium was exploited by the British government, observing that on the basis of the “memory of 1870 . . . there was an expectation that when the Germans invaded Belgium and France they would behave savagely. It was this expectation which the British wartime propaganda services took advantage of.”⁹

According to the conventional narrative, the series of miscalculations and pretexts that entangled Europe in the First World War paled in comparison to its sheer incompetence in fighting it. Military leaders on both sides, trained for and expecting a war of movement, proved unable to cope with the conditions of defense-oriented industrialized warfare. As a result, soldiers were slaughtered in the millions on the battlefields of the war simply because of the shortsightedness and callousness of the generals leading them, and those same generals were willing to endure enormous casualties rather than admit to incompetence. On the Western Front, Fussell asserts angrily, “even in the quietest times, some 7000 British men and officers were killed and wounded daily, just as a matter of course. ‘Wastage,’ the Staff called it.”¹⁰

The battles of the First World War—of which the Somme and Passchendaele are by far the most infamous in British remembrance—are thought of today chiefly in terms of the ineffectual generals who caused the gratuitous death and destruction of the men involved. The combat on the Western Front, with its characteristically static nature, came to embody the typical soldier’s experience in the war: endless spells of duty in horrific conditions, interrupted only by orders to “go over the top” and take part in yet another fruitless, and generally fatal, assault. The modern attitude toward the Western Front can be inferred from the titles of the books written about it, including Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I and The Killing Grounds: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918. The time spent in the hell of the killing grounds took its toll on those involved, even if they survived the experience; Keegan, for example, notes that the war not only “ended the lives of ten million beings,” but also “tortured the emotional lives of million...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• 1. “A Candle Lit in the Darkness”: The Christmas Truce and the First World War
• 2. “Absolute Hell”: The Western Front in 1914
• 3. “A Great Day with Our Enemies”: The Christmas Truce
• 4. “No War Today”: The Christmas Truce as Reported in Official War Diaries and Regimental Histories
• 5. “One Day of Peace at the Front”: The Christmas Truce and the British Press
• 6. “That Unique and Weird Christmas”: The Christmas Truce during the War
• 7. “The Curious Christmas Truce”: The First World War and the Christmas Truce, 1920–1959
• 8. “The Famous Christmas Truce”: The First World War and the Christmas Truce, 1960–1969
• 9. “The Legendary Christmas Truce”: The First World War, the Christmas Truce, and Social History, 1970–1989
• 10. “Memories of Christmas 1914 Persist”: Orthodoxy, Revisionism, and the Christmas Truce, 1990–2014
• 11. “It Was Peace That Won”: The Christmas Truce and the Narrative of the First World War
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index