By MICHAEL D. HULL
Across northeastern France and Belgium 100 years ago, a cloudless August — the first month of World War I — gave way to a rain-soaked autumn and then one of the coldest winters in European memory.
Huddled in long, twisting trench lines that separated the French-British and German Armies after several bloody campaigns, the opposing soldiers tried to shelter from the rain, frost, and snow in crude dugouts.
Existing more like animals than men amidst mud, rats, lice, and unburied corpses, they kept nervous vigils across no-man’s land — watching for enemy patrols and snipers, holding their breath when artillery barrages screamed overhead, and praying for tomorrow. After the initial months of open warfare, the armies were locked into what would become long months of grim, static warfare.
The small, volunteer British Expeditionary Force held 76 miles of the active front from the Ypres salient in Belgium to Picardy, while the French Army manned the rest of the line from Soissons to St.-Mihiel. Eighty-eight German divisions faced 82 French, seven Belgian, and five (later seven) British divisions. The Allied force was plagued by poor coordination and flawed tactical doctrines.
As the year 1914 waned, bitter fighting raged on in Champagne, Belgium, Poland, and the Balkans. Then, December brought an occurrence unprecedented in military history when a spontaneous outburst of pacific feeling descended, albeit briefly, along the 440-mile Western Front. Shivering, hungry, weary, and far from their homes, the troops on both sides realized that the birthday of Jesus Christ was imminent.
In the midst of the carnage and despair came one of the most poignant moments of that or any other war — the Christmas Truce of 1914.
When darkness fell on Thursday, December 24, the guns were silent and a glimmer of peace flickered along the trench lines where savage fighting had raged five days before. Allied soldiers in Flanders glimpsed lighted makeshift Christmas trees in the enemy trenches and heard German voices singing Silent Night. The British Tommies and French Poilus responded.
After a while, some of the opposing troops hesitantly started filtering into no-man’s land to make contact. “We got into conversations with the Germans, who were anxious to arrange an armistice during Xmas,” reported Sir Edward Hulse, a 25-year-old lieutenant in the crack Scots Guards Regiment. “A scout named F. Murker went out and met a German patrol, and was given a glass of whiskey and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them they would not fire at us.”
Friday morning, Christmas Day, dawned cold and frosty, and the Western Front was strangely quiet for the first time. Eighteen-year-old Pvt. Alfred Anderson of the 5th Battalion of the Black Watch (“Ladies from Hell”) Regiment, one of the British Army’s most famous units, was billeted in a French farmhouse behind the front lines.
He recalled later, “All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking, and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire, and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. The silence was uncanny — the eerie sound of silence.”
Anderson, who grew up in the village of Newtyle in craggy eastern Scotland, and served in the British Territorial Army (National Guard) before going to France, reported, “Only the guards were on duty. We all went outside the farm building and just stood listening. And, of course, thinking of people back home. We shouted, ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt very merry.”
That morning, said Lieutenant Hulse, some German soldiers wandered toward the British barbed-wire line, and Tommies went out to meet them. The soldiers mingled nervously to sing carols, pose sheepishly for photographs, and exchange regimental badges, tunic buttons, cigarettes, and souvenirs. The British soldiers handed their foes some traditional Christmas plum puddings, “which they much appreciated,” said Hulse.
The opposing soldiers then made arrangements to bury some British troops killed in a raid on the night of December 18 and whose bodies lay in front of the German wire. “The Germans brought the bodies to a halfway line, and we buried them,” Hulse wrote in his battalion logbook. “Detachments of British and Germans formed a line, and a German and English chaplain read some prayers alternately. The whole of this was done in great solemnity and reverence.”
The unofficial Christmas Day fraternization was evident almost everywhere in the British-German no-man’s land, and at some places along the French and Belgian lines. It was invariably initiated by German troops through messages, carols, or songs. Near Ploegsteert (called “Plugstreet” by the Tommies) in Belgium, a German-speaking British officer, Capt. R.J. Armes, and his men listened with pleasure to a German soldier serenading. When they called for another tune, the German responded with Schumann’s The Two Grenadiers.
Men from both sides then left their trenches and met “convivially” in no-man’s land, after which two more songs were sung — Die Wacht am Rhein by the Germans and Christians Wake! by the Britons.
“Most peculiar Christmas I’ve ever spent and ever likely to,” British sapper (engineer) J. Davey jotted in his diary. “One could hardly believe the happenings.” He exchanged souvenirs with the Germans in the trenches opposite his.
The yuletide camaraderie continued. Some Tommies and Germans joined to chase hares in no-man’s land; British Lt. R.D. Gillespie was invited into the enemy lines and shown a memorial board which had been erected to honor a British officer killed in an earlier assault, and a BEF machine-gunner who had been an amateur barber in civilian life took out his automatic clippers and trimmed a shaggy-haired German soldier. Many Tommies and Germans kicked footballs about in no-man’s land, and in one sector a soccer match was played.
Capt. Bruce Bairnsfather of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, a poet and creator of the popular “Old Bill” cartoon character symbolizing Western Front Tommies, went into no-man’s land that Christmas morning to join “the throng about halfway across to the German trenches.”
He recorded, “It all felt most curious: Here were these sausage-eating wretches, who had elected to start this infernal European fracas, and in so doing had brought us all into the same muddy pickle as themselves.” It was his first close glimpse of German soldiers. “There was not an atom of hate on either side that day,” Bairnsfather reported, “and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed.”
A Happy Christmas
But not all of the Allied soldiers were in a mood to consort with the enemy. As incessant rain fell on their trenches near the northern French town of Armentieres that day, men of the 1st Battalion of the Cameronian Regiment (Scottish Rifles) refused to share the festive spirit and play soccer with the enemy. A German shouted, “Tommy, Tommy, why you not come across?” and a gruff voice replied, “Cause we don’t trust you and ye have been four months shooting at us!”
The Scots, mostly volunteers from the tough streets of Glasgow, contented themselves instead by playing with their pet stray dogs and having their snapshots taken by Major Fred Davidson, the regimental medical officer. His grandson, Andrew Davidson, said in a recent book, Fred’s War: A Doctor in the Trenches, “Basically, the Cameronians were a bunch of bloody-minded Glaswegians. Even though it was Christmas, they were pretty grumpy and saw no reason why they should play football with people who had been trying to kill them the day before.”
In a part of the Allied line held by French Foreign Legion units, however, the fighting stopped that Christmas Day. Burial parties went to work, and cigars and chocolate were swapped. One of the legionnaires, Victor Chapman, a 1913 Harvard University graduate, wrote to his parents on December 26, “No shooting was interchanged all day and last night; absolute stillness, though we were warned to be on the alert.”
He later flew with the legendary Lafayette Escadrille, and was its first casualty, killed in action on June 23, 1916.
From a trench near Armentieres on Christmas Day, Lt. Dougan Chater wrote to his mother about how several Germans approached the British lines. “We were just going to fire on them when we saw that they had no rifles,” he said, “so one of our men went out to meet them, and in about two minutes the ground between the two trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas.” For Chater, it was “an extraordinary sight.”
But the spirit of goodwill that silenced the guns was short-lived and never repeated. While the officers and troops on the lines welcomed the brief respite, their high commands disapproved.
When informed of the fraternization, Field Marshal Sir John French, the florid, peppery BEF commander, issued “immediate orders to prevent any recurrence of such conduct.” The general staff of the British 7th Division ordered that “such unwarlike activity must cease.”
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