A true story that should never be forgotten... The last surviving veteran of the
Christmas Truce, Sgt. Alfred Anderson, died just one month ago at age 109.
(It still amazes me that my own grandfather fought in the war, and survived
to teach me as a very young boy how to sing the lovely French folk-song,
"Alouette".) - Craig Gingold
Two short excerpts from the second article below, by historian Stanley
Weintraub:
Some troops referred to the "wonderful day". One wrote of the
experience as
"a waking dream". // Private Percy Jones of the Westminster Brigade
wrote
in his diary: "We parted with much hand-shaking and goodwill."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEW YORK TIMES
December 25, 2005
The Truce of Christmas, 1914
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
When Europe marched to war in the summer of 1914, both sides thought the
fighting would be over in a few weeks. Instead, by the close of
December, World
War I had already claimed close to a million lives, and it was clear
the fighting
would go on for a long time.
Yet on Dec. 24, much of the Western Front fell silent as ordinary
soldiers made
temporary peace with the enemy. This was the remarkable Christmas Truce
of 1914.
It's estimated that about 100,000 men, mainly British and Germans, took
part.
In fact, the sheer magnitude of the event led many to doubt that it
ever happened.
As late as 1983, one veteran called the truce a "latrine rumor."
Today, however, it is often seen as one of the few bright moments amid
the
slaughter of the Great War, in which 14 million people were killed.
The last survivor of the truce, Sgt. Alfred Anderson of Scotland's
Fifth Battalion
Black Watch, died last month at the age of 109. Here are excerpts from
letters,
journals and memoirs of some of the other participants.
The truce broke out spontaneously in many places. Pvt. Albert Moren of
the
Second Queens Regiment recalled the scene on Christmas Eve near the
French
village of La Chapelle d'Armentières:
It was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost
everywhere; and
about 7 or 8 in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German
trenches
and there were these lights -- I don't know what they were. And then
they sang
"Silent Night" -- "Stille Nacht." I shall never forget it, it was one
of the highlights of
my life. I thought, what a beautiful tune.
Rifleman Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade recalled how
the
mood spread:
Then suddenly lights began to appear along the German parapet, which
were
evidently make-shift Christmas trees, adorned with lighted candles,
which burnt
steadily in the still, frosty air! ? 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 is really a most
extraordinary thing
-- two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.
The shared carols inspired Capt. Josef Sewald of Germany's 17th Bavarian
Regiment to make a bold gesture:
I shouted to our enemies that we didn't wish to shoot and that we make a
Christmas truce. I said I would come from my side and we could speak
with each
other. First there was silence, then I shouted once more, invited them,
and the
British shouted "No shooting!" Then a man came out of the trenches and
I on my
side did the same and so we came together and we shook hands -- a bit
cautiously!
The enemies quickly became friends, as Cpl. John Ferguson of the Second
Seaforth Highlanders recalled:
We shook hands, wished each other a Merry Xmas, and were soon
conversing as if
we had known each other for years. We were in front of their wire
entanglements
and surrounded by Germans -- Fritz and I in the center talking, and
Fritz
occasionally translating to his friends what I was saying. We stood
inside the circle
like street corner orators. ? What a sight -- little groups of Germans
and British
extending almost the length of our front! Out of the darkness we could
hear
laughter and see lighted matches, a German lighting a Scotchman's
cigarette and
vice versa, exchanging cigarettes and souvenirs.
On Christmas Day, some Germans and British held a joint service to bury
their
dead. Second Lt. Arthur Pelham Burn of the Sixth Gordon Highlanders was
there:
Our Padre ? arranged the prayers and psalms, etc., and an interpreter
wrote them
out in German. They were read first in English by our Padre and then in
German
by a boy who was studying for the ministry. It was an extraordinary and
most
wonderful sight. The Germans formed up on one side, the English on the
other,
the officers standing in front, every head bared.
According to several accounts, soccer games were played in no man's
land with
makeshift balls that Christmas. Lt. Kurt Zehmisch of Germany's 134th
Saxons
Infantry Regiment witnessed a match:
Eventually the English brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and
pretty soon
a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it
was. The
English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the
celebration of
Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as our friends for a
time.
Second Lt. Bruce Bairnsfather of the First Warwickshires saw an even
more
unusual fraternization:
The last I saw of this little affair was a vision of one of my machine
gunners, who
was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civilian life, cutting the
unnaturally long hair
of a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground while the
automatic
clippers crept up the back of his neck.
Not everyone was so charitable. Cpl. Adolf Hitler of the 16th Bavarians
lambasted his comrades for their unmilitary conduct:
Such things should not happen in wartime. Have you Germans no sense of
honor
left at all?
When Gen. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the British II Corps,
learned of the consorting, he was irate:
I have issued the strictest orders that on no account is intercourse to
be allowed
between the opposing troops. To finish this war quickly, we must keep
up the
fighting spirit and do all we can to discourage friendly intercourse.
Inevitably, both sides were soon ordered back to their trenches. Capt.
Charles
"Buffalo Bill" Stockwell of the Second Royal Welch Fusiliers recalled
how the
peace ended early on Dec. 26:
At 8:30, I fired three shots into the air and put up a flag with "Merry
Christmas"
on it on the parapet. He [a German] put up a sheet with "Thank You" on
it, and
the German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted
and got
down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots into the air,
and the war
was on again.
Thomas Vinciguerra is deputy editor of The Week.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
THE INDEPENDENT (of London)
The Christmas truce: When the guns fell silent
So extraordinary was the Christmas truce of 1914 that some
no longer believe it could have happened. But as a new film
recreates those days, Stanley Weintraub says it was no myth
24 December 2005
Live-and-let-live accommodations occur in most wars. Chronicles since
Troy
record stops in fighting to bury the dead, to pray to the gods, to
assuage a
war-weariness, to offer signs of amity encouraging mutual respect. But
none
had happened on the scale or duration -- or the potential for change --
as when
the shooting suddenly stopped on Christmas Eve 1914.
The difference then was in its potential to become more than a
momentary respite.
In retrospect, the interruption of the horror -- to soldiers "the
sausage machine" --
seems unreal, incredible in its intensity and extent, impossible to
have happened
without consequences for continuing the war. Like a dream, when it was
over,
troops wondered at it, then continued with the grim business at hand.
Under the rigid discipline of wartime command authority, that business
was killing,
targeting even those whose hands one had clasped, whose rations one had
shared,
and who had joined in singing of Peace on Earth and Goodwill to all
men. The
Christmas truce of 1914 was no myth, although song, story, film, and
dubious
reminiscence have added layers of fantasy upon it.
For four, bloody months, what became known, with good reason, as the
Great War
had been raging. Christmas has always been hard on soldiers who are far
away
from home. The British and German troops facing each other in chill,
muddy,
sometimes freezing Flanders were as close to home geographically as
enemies on
someone else's territory get. London was 60 miles away, across the
watery trench
of the English Channel. The German border abutted Belgium, which the
Kaiser's
army had invaded and despoilt.
Yet the muck, and the crisscrossing, water-logged trenches and the
barbed-wire
entanglements separating the two armies, as well as the relentless
firing by
machineguns and artillery, made the distances home seem far greater.
A Royal Engineer, Andrew Todd, wrote to The Scotsman in Edinburgh that
soldiers were "only 60 yards apart" at some places on the front lines.
They could
see and hear each other, and even raise bold placards to taunt each
other. Such
intimacy hardly contributed to morale, because they could also fire at
each other,
and raising one's head above a trench parapet invited death. The number
of
casualties was already enormous. Troops dreamt of Christmas with their
families,
who seemed increasingly remote in time as well as place. A cynical
German saying
was, "We'll conquer until we're all dead". A cartoon by Lieutenant Bruce
Bairnsfather, "AD Nineteen Fifty", depicted two soldiers with drooping
white
beards musing over an old newspaper while shells scream over their
trench.
War-weary "Ole Bill" is asked how long he is "up for". "Seven years",
he groans.
"You're lucky," says the other. "I'm duration."
To make it feel more like Christmas, governments on both sides had
prepared small
holiday gift-boxes for the troops, with snacks, sweets and tobacco.
Queen Victoria
had set the precedent in 1899, ordering small tin boxes of chocolates
shipped to
soldiers in distant South Africa for a Boer War Christmas. In 1914,
Tommies
received a "Princess Mary" brass box, with her head embossed on the
lid, much
like that of the queen 15 years before.
German troops in Flanders, accessible from home by land, received,
along
with their wooden gift boxes decorated with a wreath and a
Flammenschwert --
a flaming sword -- tabletop-size Christmas trees with candles
conveniently
clamped to the branches. The law of unintended consequences activated
itself. On
Christmas Eve, as darkness came early, the Germans -- at some hazard --
placed
trees atop trench parapets and lit the candles. Then they began singing
carols, and
though their language was unfamiliar to their enemies, the tunes were
not. After
a few trees were shot at, the British became more curious than
belligerent, and
crawled forward to watch and to listen. And soon they began to sing.
By Christmas morning, no man's land between the trenches was filled with
fraternising soldiers, sharing rations, trading gifts, singing, and --
more solemnly --
burying the dead between the lines. (Earlier, the bodies had been too
dangerous to
retrieve.) The roughly cleared space suggested to the more imaginative
among them
a football pitch. Kickabouts began, mostly with balls improvised from
stuffed caps
and other gear, the players oblivious of their greatcoats and boots.
The official war
diary of the 133rd Saxon Regiment says "Tommy and Fritz" used a real
ball,
furnished by a provident Scot. "This developed into a regulation
football match
with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great
matter. Das
Spiel endete 3:2 fur Fritz." Other accounts, mostly German, give other
scores, and
British letters and memories fill in more details.
The high brass on both sides quickly determined that they could not let
the situation
develop. In the national interest, the war had to go on. Peace has
always been more
difficult to make than war, but it was materialising. Under threat of
court martial,
troops on both sides were ordered to separate and restart hostilities.
Reluctantly,
they drifted apart. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's order to II
Corps from his
cushy rear-area headquarters read: "On no account is intercourse to be
allowed
between opposing troops. To finish this war quickly we must keep up the
fighting
spirit."
But some units were too contaminated by Christmas to be reliable, and
it took a
few days to bring in replacements. Both commands ordered rolling
artillery barrages
to disrupt the stillness and to motivate responses.
In most sectors where the shooting had stopped, signals (in some cases,
flares) set
by their officers called men back to their trenches or confirmed the
imminent close
of the truce. Private Percy Jones of the Westminster Brigade wrote in
his diary:
"We parted with much hand-shaking and goodwill." Rifleman George Eade
of
the 3rd London Rifles said a German soldier told him: "Today we have
peace.
Tomorrow you fight for your country. I fight for mine. Good luck."
Some troops referred to the "wonderful day". One wrote of the
experience as
"a waking dream". The remarkable happening is corroborated by reports
from up
and down the line, even from French sources. Although the French
officially denied
there was a truce, Victor Granier, a Paris Opera tenor, sang "Minuit,
Chrétiens,
c'est l'heure solennelle" ["O Holy Night"] -- across the trenches near
the Polygon
Wood, and a leading singer from the Berlin Imperial Opera, Walter
Kirchoff,
performed for the British for the first time since his appearance at
Covent Garden
the year before.
There was no way to conceal French fraternisation even when the
unwelcome
reality was kept from the newspapers, because German accounts
identified the
units, and the sick and wounded evacuated to hospitals at the rear
delightedly
reported what had they had seen and done.
Most fascinating as corroboration of the truce are the letters posted
home, before
censorship closed such opportunities, by both sides. Many from the
British side can
still be read, because families eagerly sent them to their hometown
newspapers,
from the Exeter Argus to the South Wales Echo and Belfast Evening
Telegraph,
which through January 1915 described details of what otherwise would
indeed have
seemed a fairy tale.
The truce would reappear in song and story, seemingly stranger than
mere fiction.
Robert Graves, who joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers just after the
truce, wrote
a short story which included a game of football and a German juggler who
entertained the troops in no man's land. However improbable any account
of a
juggler in such circumstances, the 3rd London's official war diary
reported that he
"drew a large crowd".
The German writer James Kruss wrote of an impassioned soldier who took a
lighted tree into the French trenches to stop the shooting, and found
the enemy
were Algerian Islamic troops, who knew nothing of Christmas. In
astonishment
at the apparition, they put down their rifles. The tale, allegedly from
Kruss's
grandfather, came from his uncle, who had been at the front, I
discovered, opposite
the 45th Division of the Armeé d'Afrique.
The last veteran associated with the real thing, Alfred Anderson, died
at 109 on
21 November, in a nursing home in Scotland. In 1914, he was 18, and in
the Black
Watch. Off the line in reserve, Anderson was sheltering in a
dilapidated farmhouse
on Christmas Eve, when British and German troops, emerged from their
trenches
in the darkness near by, and fraternised. A spokesman for the Royal
British Legion
of Scotland called him "the last surviving link with a time that
shimmers on the edge
of our folk memory".
It could not have been better phrased, for Anderson was only on the
edge of that
remarkable event. He heard the stillness, the suddenly silent night in
embattled
Flanders. By New Year's Eve the firing almost everywhere along the line
had
restarted. Hundreds of thousands would die before the armistice four
gory years
later in November 1918.
Attempts at other Christmas truces failed. On 22 July 2001, Bertie
Felstead, a
veteran of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, died aged 106. He was also called
"the last
known survivor of the Christmas truce". The longer he lived, the more
famous he
became. He recalled hearing the Fritzes call out "Merry Christmas,
Tommy!" and
playing football with the enemy in no man's land, bartering souvenirs,
singing
carols. But he said the experience lasted only half an hour, a fleeting
moment for so
much to have happened to him. And the year was 1915. A second truce, he
called
it. Yet both the British and the German headquarters issued explicit
orders, under
pain of punishment, that there was to be no repetition of the
extraordinary 1914
stoppage of the war, football included. Wars were to be fought, with no
holidays
from the killing.
Two officers who tried to initiate that second truce, Captain Miles
Barnes and
Captain Sir Iain Colquhoun of the 1st Scots Guards, did so ostensibly
to bury the
dead. The two sides mingled briefly and returned to their lines. For
the rest of
Christmas Day, Colquhoun said, "the Germans walked about and sat on
their
parapets. Our men did much the same, but remained in their trenches.
Not a shot
was fired".
A court martial was convened, and the two officers were reprimanded,
the mildest
sentence possible. So went the abortive 1915 truce. It is more than
possible that
Felstead's vivid memories traded upon the tales of his Welch Fusilier
comrades who
were in the trenches in 1914.
Such wartime truces as in 1914 are no longer likely. My late friend
Nigel Nicolson,
an army captain in Italy in 1943, heard the Germans ringing bells on
Christmas Eve
from a church high on a nearby hill. "Can we stop shooting?" he asked a
superior.
"Not on your life," he was told.
The more vast the cultural and ideological divide, the more improbable
such truces
become. There could have been no shared Christmases with the Japanese
in the
Pacific war between 1941 and 1945, nor now with Islamic combatants in
Iraq.
A Christmas truce seems in our new century an impossible dream from a
more
simple, vanished world. Peace is indeed, even briefly, harder to make
than war.
Stanley Weintraub is the author of 'Silent Night: the Remarkable 1914
Christmas
Truce' and 'Iron Tears: Rebellion in America' (both Simon & Schuster).
'Joyeux Noël' is in cinemas now
===================================================================
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Clean water saves lives. Help make water safe for our children.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/YNG3nB/VREMAA/E2hLAA/xYTolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
New Pacifica Working Group
http://www.egroups.com/group/NewPacifica
'Save Our Stations!'
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewPacifica/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
NewPacifica-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/