The Christmas Truce 12/25/1914
 

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE

On Christmas Day, 1914, in the first
year of World War I, German,
British, and French soldiers disobeyed
their superiors and fraternized
with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the
Western Front. German troops
held Christmas trees up out of the
trenches with signs, "Merry Christmas."
"You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of
troops streamed across a
no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses.
They sang Christmas carols,
exchanged photographs of loved ones back
home, shared rations, played football,
even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced
men they had been trying to
kill a few short hours before. They agreed
to warn each other if the top brass
forced them to fire their weapons, and to
aim high.
A shudder ran through the high command
on either side. Here was
disaster in the making: soldiers declaring
their brotherhood with each
other and refusing to fight. Generals on
both sides declared this
spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous
and subject to court martial. By March,
1915 the fraternization movement had been
eradicated and the killing
machine put back in full operation. By the
time of the armistice in
1918, fifteen million would be
slaughtered.
Not many people have heard the story
of the Christmas Truce.
Military leaders have not gone out of
their way to publicize it. On
Christmas Day, 1988, a story in the Boston
Globe mentioned that a local FM radio
host played "Christmas in the Trenches," a
ballad about the Christmas Truce,
several times and was startled by the
effect. The song became the most
requested recording during the holidays in
Boston on several FM
stations. "Even more startling than the
number of requests I get is the
reaction to the ballad afterward by
callers who hadn't heard it before,"
said the
radiohost. "They telephone me deeply
moved, sometimes in tears, asking,
`What the hell did I just hear?'"
I think I know why the callers were in
tears. The Christmas Truce
story goes against most of what we have
been taught about people. It
gives us a glimpse of the world as we wish
it could be and says, "This really
happened once." It reminds us of those
thoughts we keep hidden away, out
of range of the TV and newspaper stories
that tell us how trivial and
mean human life is.
It is like hearing that our deepest wishes
really are true: the world
really could be different.

Excerpted from David G. Stratman, We CAN
Change the World: The Real
Meaning of Everyday Life (New Democracy
Books, 1991). Available for
$3.00 from
New Democracy Books, P.O. Box 427, Boston,
MA 02130.