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This December, let's recall the spirit of the 1914 Christmas truce
That morning, the skies were clear. For the first time in months, they weren’t swarming with fighter planes and missiles. The air wasn’t yellow with noxious gas or red with the mist of blood.
You could not hear gunfire or explosions or the screams of dying men.
'First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up "O Come, All Ye Faithful," the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words "Adeste Fideles."'
“I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” veteran Alfred Anderson later said. “It was a short peace in a terrible war.”
A pope's request
On that day in 1914, Christmas Day — not even six months after the start of World War I and about three years before it would end — troops all along the Western Front had a few precious hours to remember what peace was like.
Soldiers from England and Belgium and France arose from their muddy trenches, facing their enemies, and stepped onto the battlefields without a single weapon at the ready. The German troops did the same, and all the men gathered on the battered fields of Europe, where many of their fellow soldiers had lain dead for weeks, stuck in “no man’s land.”
Pope Benedict XV had called for a Christmas Day truce. Commanders on both sides outright rejected the idea and insisted that the men would fight, Christmas or not. But when Christmas Day arrived, a wave of humanity overtook the soldiers.
It began slowly, on Christmas Eve, described by one soldier as “a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere.”
It began quietly. It began with a song.
All ye faithful
Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade wrote:First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up "O Come, All Ye Faithful," the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words "Adeste Fideles." And I thought, well, this was really a most extraordinary thing — two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.
The truce spread throughout the front, and about 100,000 soldiers honored the pope's truce.
The next morning, on Christmas Day, Germans troops shouted “merry Christmas” in English across the battlefield. They held up signs that read, “You no shoot, we no shoot.”
Men exchanged gifts. They gave haircuts; they even played soccer. For one day, they could live a somewhat normal life.
Life multiplied
Too often, the public is disconnected from its military. We forget the atrocities of war. Journalist Sebastian Junger writes about this in his book “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.” In 2009, Junger spent a year embedded with a platoon of Marines in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, which was one of the deadliest places on earth at the time. He saw the tragedies that war brings.
He writes: “War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”
By the end of World War I, there were an estimated 20 million people dead and 20 million wounded. It had been billed as “the war to end all wars,” but that would not be the case. In a matter of years, the world would become embroiled in yet another apocalyptic war.
But amid it all, the Christmas truce stands as a reminder that humanity can emerge at the darkest times, in the most broken places.
The truce of 1914 was seen by many officers and commanders as an act of mutiny and cowardice. To them, 100,000 had disobeyed their superiors’ orders. Adolf Hitler, then a corporal of the 16th Bavarians, reportedly said of the truce: “Such a thing should not happen in wartime. Have you no German sense of honor?” The fact that Hitler hated it makes the whole miracle shine even brighter.A war on war
The soldiers themselves, the men dying in trenches and fields, engulfed by gas and smoke and blood, they saw it differently. For one day, the warfare did not involve one superpower against another superpower, with all the soldiers as pawns; it was bedraggled men against the superpower of war itself.
British soldier Murdoch M. Wood later said: “I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.”
Unfortunately, that is not the case. War remains. Despite the dramatic drop in war and violence following World War 2, we still have to deal with the ugly realities of war. The people who live with those ugly realities the most are not the superpowers but the men themselves.
Sebastian Junger, in "Tribe," again: “Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it.”
On Christmas Day, many soldiers will find themselves in combat zones, thousands of miles from home, and many veterans will find themselves just as lost and broken.
Let’s bring back the Christmas Day truce, for the women and men who must fight every other day of the year. Wherever you are, whoever you’re with, may Christmas be a day of peace and compassion. A day guided by hope. A reminder that our shared humanity is stronger than we know.
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