At p. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions. The same basic understanding seems to have sprung up spontaneously at other spots. Officers, fearing treachery, ordered the men to be silent. But up and down our line one heard the men answering that Christmas greeting from the enemy. So we kept up a running conversation with the Germans, all the while our hands ready on our rifles. The night wore on to dawn—a night made easier by songs from the German trenches, the pipings of piccolos and from our broad lines laughter and Christmas carols.
Not a shot was fired. A German trench in December Workmanship was far less sophisticated than it became later in the war, and the muddy conditions were terrible.
Several factors combined to produce the conditions for this Christmas Truce. By December , the men in the trenches were veterans, familiar enough with the realities of combat to have lost much of the idealism that they had carried into war in August, and most longed for an end to bloodshed. The war, they had believed, would be over by Christmas, yet there they were in Christmas week still muddied, cold and in battle.
Then, on Christmas Eve itself, several weeks of mild but miserably soaking weather gave way to a sudden, hard frost, creating a dusting of ice and snow along the front that made the men on both sides feel that something spiritual was taking place. Just how widespread the truce was is hard to say. It was certainly not general—there are plenty of accounts of fighting continuing through the Christmas season in some sectors, and others of men fraternizing to the sound of guns firing nearby.
One common factor seems to have been that Saxon troops—universally regarded as easygoing—were the most likely to be involved, and to have made the first approaches to their British counterparts. Men from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers meet their German counterparts in no man's land somewhere in the deadly Ypres Salient, December 26, Even so, accounts of a Christmas Truce refer to a suspension of hostilities only between the British and the Germans.
The Russians, on the Eastern Front, still adhered to the old Julian calendar in , and hence did not celebrate Christmas until January 7, while the French were far more sensitive than their allies to the fact that the Germans were occupying about a third of France—and ruling French civilians with some harshness. It was only in the British sector, then, that troops noticed at dawn the Germans had placed small Christmas trees along parapets of their trenches.
Communication could be difficult. German-speaking British troops were scarce, but many Germans had been employed in Britain before the war, frequently in restaurants. Of course, only a few men involved in the truce could share reminiscences of London.
Perhaps it was inevitable that some men on both sides would produce a ball and—freed briefly from the confines of the trenches—take pleasure in kicking it about.
This was so contrary to the war I had learnt about at school, full of suffering, selflessness, and courage in the face of the enemy. I met with the author of the book to ask him for evidence. He took me to the Imperial War Museum in London and showed me British soldiers' letters, sketches and photos - yes photos.
They show smiling faces, comrades standing arm-in-arm and a real sense of joie de vivre. I felt the tears welling up. What a shock. Perhaps the Tommies were able to relax in this way because they were not fighting on their own land to win back lost provinces.
Any remaining doubts disappeared when I visited the French army archives at the Chateau de Vincennes. Thanks to Yves Buffetaut, I was able to access accounts by French soldiers who were involved in fraternisation. I should point out that this was no easy task back then. Without the historian's knowledge of the habits and customs of such facilities placed under military authority, I am sure I would never have been able to read these reports and accounts.
To obtain, for example, the archives from the month of December where one can find the accounts of the fraternisations, it was necessary to justify the request on the pretext of working on the French attack of 17 December.
Germany must be given back a memory which belongs to it. The documents I consulted expressed the same desire to meet up, sing songs on Christmas Eve and swap addresses with the intention of meeting after the war.
When I returned home, several things dawned on me. A large number of soldiers of all nationalities in various locations along the front were involved in fraternisation over Christmas As one British officer wrote, "No man's land became everyman's land. The UK may be busy commemorating the Christmas Truce of , when soldiers on the WW1 front line briefly made friends with the enemy, but few Germans have heard of it - and most would be startled to see it dramatised in a TV ad, writes Sebastian Borger of Berliner Zeitung.
These "overspills" took the top brass by surprise. They attempted to restore order by moving "contaminated" units, as one senior officer described them at the time. Some Scottish volunteers were sent home after two weeks of drinking tea and playing football with the Germans. No-one faced the firing squad for fraternisation as too many men had been involved. However, fraternisation and particularly its memory, from a French perspective, had to be broken.
Had an entire population not been raised to surrender its young to the "field of honour" when the time came? All this work had been undone in the space of an evening by singing from the opposite trench, the sound of a harmonica or bagpipes, or a candle lit to guide those walking unarmed through no man's land. It made no sense that these men who set out on 3 August would simply forget about Christmas.
The newspapers in Great Britain and Germany gave accounts of the phenomenon of fraternisation. Photographs were posted by the press on the banks of the Thames. In France, not a word was written on the subject.
The newspapers had become tools enabling the army and authorities to spread propaganda. In the country that had given the world human rights, the press was no longer free. There was no question of fraternisation being covered in newspapers which were in the pay of a government run by Raymond Poincare whose home town was acquired by Germany in But why did no-one talk about it after the war?
There are no books or research on the subject. I felt this silence was a second punishment for the men of Christmas This feeling of injustice stirred a profound desire in me to make the film Joyeux Noel Happy Christmas in I set about recreating, in relative terms, situations which had occurred back then. A minority in the French army denied me access to a military site where I planned to reproduce the battlefield. The army could not be seen to be "involved in a film about rebels", I was told.
With heavy hearts, we went into exile, shooting the film in Romania despite everything that had happened. This was achieved thanks to the energy of the actors, technicians and everyone else involved. The so-called Christmas Truce of came only five months after the outbreak of war in Europe and was one of the last examples of the outdated notion of chivalry between enemies in warfare.
During World War I, the soldiers on the Western Front did not expect to celebrate on the battlefield, but even a world war could not destroy the Christmas spirit.
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Charles Brewer never expected to be spending Christmas Eve nearly knee-deep in the mud of northern France. Stationed on the front lines, the year-old British lieutenant with the Bedfordshire Regiment of the 2nd Battalion shivered in a trench with his fellow soldiers. On Christmas Eve , in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the first world war, a remarkable thing happened. It came to be called the Christmas Truce. And it remains one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War—or of any war in history.
Christmas is celebrated on December 25 and is both a sacred religious holiday and a worldwide cultural and commercial phenomenon. For two millennia, people around the world have been observing it with traditions and practices that are both religious and secular in nature.
The history of Christmas trees goes back to the symbolic use of evergreens in ancient Egypt and Rome and continues with the German tradition of candlelit Christmas trees first brought to America in the s. Discover the history of the Christmas tree, from the earliest winter The War on Christmas begins around the same time each year, when stores start peddling plastic Christmas trees and giant Santa Claus inflatables.
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