Christmas truce
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The "Christmas truce" is a term used to describe the brief unofficial cessation of hostilities that occurred between German, British troops stationed on the Western Front of World War I during Christmas 1914. The truce began on Christmas Eve, December 24 1914, during World War I, when German troops began decorating the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium, for Christmas. They began by placing candles on trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols, namely Stille Nacht (Silent Night). The British troops in the trenches across from them responded by singing English carols.
The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were calls for visits across the "No Man's Land", where small gifts were exchanged — whisky, cigars, and the like. The artillery in the region fell silent that night. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently-fallen soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Proper burials took place as soldiers from both sides mourned the dead together and paid their respect. At one funeral in No Man's Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm:
- "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."
In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, but in some areas, it continued until New Year's Day.
The truce occurred in spite of opposition at higher levels of the military. Earlier in the autumn, a call by Pope Benedict XV for an official truce between the warring governments had been ignored.
British commanders Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien vowed that no such truce would be allowed again. (However, both had left command before Christmas 1915.) In all of the following years of the war, artillery bombardments were ordered on Christmas Eve to ensure that there were no further lulls in the combat. Troops were also rotated through various sectors of the front to prevent them from becoming overly familiar with the enemy. Despite those measures, there were a few friendly encounters between enemy soldiers, but on a much smaller scale than the previous year.
Nevertheless, commanders of both allied forces and the central powers were against informal truces. One soldier in the German army who felt that such an understanding should not exist during wartime was Adolf Hitler [link].
During Easter 1916 a similar truce also existed on the Eastern Front.
Informal Armistice
During the first 2 years after the lines of the Western Front stabilized, other situations of informal armistice, i.e. armistice not imposed by high command, were recognized by both sides. According to anecdotes, inexperienced British commanders were astonished to find British and German forces both exposing themselves above the trench line within clear range of enemy guns. Artillery was often fired at precise points, at precise times, to avoid enemy casualties by both sides. This has been described as an instance of the iterated prisoner's dilemma by the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins. Situations of deliberate dampening of hostilities also occurred by some accounts, e.g. a volley of gunfire being exchanged after a misplaced mortar hit the British line, after which a German soldier shouted an apology to British forces, effectively stopping a hostile exchange of gunfire. [The Selfish Gene|http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-929115-2]Legacy
In 1999, the so-called "Khaki Chums" (officially: The Association for Military Remembrance) visited a region of Flanders and recreated the Christmas truce. They lived as the World War I British soldiers had lived, with no modern conveniences.The stories of this event has been told and retold in several media. American folk musician John McCutcheon recounts the incident in his song, "Christmas in the Trenches". American country music singer Garth Brooks also describes the incident in his song "Belleau Wood" from the 1997 album Sevens, the lyrics of which are repeated in spoken word style on Andy Griffith's 2003 album "The Christmas Guest: Songs and Stories of Christmas". In 1967, The Royal Guardsmen had a #1 hit with "Snoopy's Christmas", which relates a similar story through the struggle of Snoopy and The Red Baron.
A number of books have been written on the Christmas Truce, including Stanley Weintraub's Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, which chronicles the event itself from first hand accounts.
Similar events are depicted in William Wharton's autobiographical novel of World War II, A Midnight Clear (ISBN 1557042578, filmed in 1992). The truce is also depicted in the video for Sir Paul McCartney's 1983 hit song Pipes of Peace, and was referred to in an episode of the science fiction TV drama, .
The Christmas Truce has often been characterized as the last "twitch" of the nineteenth century: the last moment when, in war, two sides would meet each other in proper and mutual respect for one another; when they would greet each other with kindness to show that — in spite of the horrible turn of events that had unfolded — they were still honorable and respectful soldiers of war.
On 21 November 2005, the last remaining Allied veteran of the truce, Alfred Anderson, died in Newtyle, Scotland at the age of 109. [link]
The truce was the subject matter of the 2005 film Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noël). The film was nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film" category at the 78th Academy Awards.
In the final episode of , the protagonists discuss events of the past that led them to their current situaition, including the Christmas Truce. Captain Blackadder was apparently still sore over being ruled offside during a football game with the Germans. He also cynically muses that "Both sides advanced further during one Christmas piss-up than they did in the next two-and-a half years of war."
References
- Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton; Christmas Truce: The Western Front, 1914 (1984)
- Stanley Weintraub; Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001)
- David Brown; Washington Post, December 25, 2004; Remembering a Victory for Human Kindness; W.W. I’s Puzzling, Poignant Christmas Truce
- Thomas Vinciguerra; New York Times, December 25, 2005; The Truce of Christmas, 1914
- Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1989 edition)
External links
- [Page from firstworldwar.com]
- [Report on the Khaki Chums reenactment]
- [Hellfire Corner — the Christmas Truce]
- [Q: World War I — The Christmas truce of 1914]
- [The Heritage Of The Great War article: Demystifying the Christmas Truce]
- [Christmas Truce 90th Anniversary article]
- [IMDb entry on fictional film Joyeux Noel] based on the event
- [Motion picture based on the events of the Christmas Truce]
- [Christmas in the Trenches], a poem and folk song by John McCutcheon
- [Letters written by participants in the truce], from a project to transcribe all such letters published in regional UK papers
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