The sky was clear that morning. For the first time in months, there were no swarms of fighter jets or missiles. The air was neither yellow with poisonous gas nor red with blood mist.
There were no gunshots, no explosions, no screams of dying men.
“First the Germans sing one of their carols, then we sing ours, and as soon as we start singing, “Come, O ye of faith,” Germans also joined in and sang the same hymn in Latin, “Adeste Fideles.” “”
“I remember that silence, the eerie sound of silence,” veteran Alfred Anderson later said.
“It was a brief moment of peace in the middle of a terrible war.”
Pope's request
On that Christmas day in 1914, less than six months after World War I began and nearly three years before its end, troops on the Western Front received a rare reminder of what peace could be like. We spent several hours there.
English, Belgian, and French soldiers rose from their muddy trenches and marched onto the battlefield, without weapons or preparation, facing the enemy. The German army did the same, all its soldiers converging on the desolate fields of Europe. There, many of his fellow soldiers lay dead for weeks, stranded in a “no man's land.”
Pope Benedict XV called for a ceasefire on Christmas Day. Commanders on both sides rejected the idea outright, insisting that their soldiers would fight Christmas or not. But when Christmas Day arrived, a wave of humanity attacked the soldiers.
It began slowly on Christmas Eve, with what one soldier described as a “beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere.”
It started quietly. It started with a song.
faithful people
Graham Williams of the 5th London Rifles Brigade wrote:
First the Germans sing one of their carols, then we sing one of ours, and as soon as we start singing, “Come, O faithful,” the Germans also joined in singing the same hymn in Latin, “Adeste Fideles''. And I thought, this is really amazing. Two countries singing the same hymn in the midst of war.
The ceasefire spread across the front, with approximately 100,000 soldiers respecting the Pope's ceasefire.
The next morning, Christmas Day, German troops shouted “Merry Christmas” in English across the battlefield. they held out signs It read, “You don't shoot, we don't shoot.''
The men exchanged gifts. they got haircuts. They also played soccer. For just one day, they can live a somewhat normal life.
more lives
Too often, citizens are separated from the military. We forget the atrocities of war. Journalist Sebastian Junger writes about this in his book Tribes: On Homecoming and Belonging. In 2009, Junger spent a year holed up with a platoon of Marines in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley, one of the deadliest places on earth at the time. He saw firsthand the tragedy that war brings.
He writes: “War is life multiplied by numbers no one has ever heard of.”
By the end of World War I, an estimated 20 million people had died and 20 million were injured. It was billed as “the war to end all wars,” but that's not really the case. Within a few years, the world will be engulfed in yet another apocalyptic war.
But even in the midst of all this, the Christmas Truce reminds us that humanity can rise up from its darkest times and most broken places.
The Armistice of 1914 was considered by many officers and commanders to be an act of rebellion and cowardice. To them, 100,000 people disobeyed their superiors' orders. Adolf Hitler, then a corporal in the 16th Bavarian Regiment, is reported to have said of the armistice: Do Germans have no sense of honor? ” The fact that Hitler hated it makes the whole miracle even more brilliant.
war and war
The soldiers themselves, the people dying in the trenches and fields surrounded by gas and smoke and blood, saw it differently. One day's war was never waged by one superpower against another, with all soldiers as pawns. These were people who were held back by the superpower of war itself.
British soldier Murdoch M. Wood later said: “I have come to a conclusion that I have believed ever since: If we had been left alone, there would never have been another shooting.”
Unfortunately not. The war remains. Even though war and violence have decreased dramatically since World War II, we still have to deal with the ugly realities of war. It is humans themselves, not superpowers, who are most burdened with this ugly reality.
Sebastian Jünger again says this in “Tribes”: “Today's veterans often return home to find that although they are prepared to die for their country, they do not know how to live for their country.”
On Christmas Day, many soldiers will be in combat zones thousands of miles from home, and many veterans will find themselves lost and heartbroken as well.
Let's restore the Christmas Day truce for the women and men who have to fight every other day of the year. May Christmas be a day of peace and compassion, wherever you are and whoever you are with. A day filled with hope. It reminds us that our shared humanity is stronger than we think.
