On December 7, 1914, as the horrible, pointless, world-disrupting “War to End All Wars” was only five months old, Pope Benedict XV suggested a truce for the celebration of Christmas. The governments of the battling nations rejected the idea, but in the days leading up to Christmas and after, many of the soldiers in the trenches of this ugly conflict took the Pope’s advice.
On December 20, Germans soldiers in some areas took in British wounded from the no man’s land between the warring armies. A German soldier reported on December 22 that both sides had been heard singing Christmas Carols in the trenches. German troops arriving into the lines had begun bringing Christmas trees, and some men placed them on the parapets of the fire trenches. Then, on Christmas Eve, many German and British troops serenaded each other across the lines. Allied soldiers reported that sometimes their singing was accompanied by German brass bands. Then, Christmas Day, 1914, some of the German soldiers left their trenches and carefully approached Allied lines, shouting“Merry Christmas” in French and English. Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches, and shook hands with the men who had only recently been trying to kill them. Some even exchanged exchanged gifts of cigarettes and and food. There were even instances where soldiers from opposing sides played soccer: in England, one organization is holding a match next week against a German team to commemorate such contests.
Officers from both sides imposed discipline on troops for fraternizing, and soldiers were still killed. Yet the informal truce, though not universal, was widespread and continued right up to New Years day. After that, the war got more intense, poison gas was introduced, anger and frustration increased, and combat became more deadly and ruthless, as duty hardened into hate. There was no second Christmas truce.
What, if anything, can we learn from this strange historical event? Here are some thoughts:
- Christmas, as a cultural holiday that celebrates peace, love and good will toward all, is valuable, culturally beneficial, and worth preserving. Its enemies today are short-sighted ideological zealots who willfully ignore the holiday’s obvious and proven value that needs to have nothing to do with religion at all. If we didn’t have Christmas, we would desperately need to invent something like it.
- I can’t think of a better or more meaningful event to celebrate yearly, world wide, than the Christmas truce of 2014.
- The 1914 Christmas truce reminds us that we need to stop demonizing opponents, adversaries, rivals and foes. Increasingly, studies show, American won’t have dinner, socialize, or make Facebook friends with those who don’t hold compatible political beliefs. This is sad, foolish, unAmerican and dangerous. The combatants in the Great War were right: what we all have in common—humanity, families, the capacity to love— matters far more than our differences.
- War makes no sense whatsoever, and yet we cannot find a way to avoid wars that won’t result in something worse. The War to End All Wars should have ended all wars, because it was so destructive, accomplished so little good, and set the stage for so many horrors to come. If that didn’t teach us, I fear nothing will.
And finally, this:
There is always hope.
Merry Christmas!
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Sources: WWI; The Guardian
Ethics Alarms 
Wait wait wait… Are you telling me a grassroots transcendent Christian movement spurred on by a central spiritual authority was enough to oppose the brutal slaughter that seems to be an inherent quality of materialist secular authorities???
No.
No
Something’s not right about that. That isn’t what education taught me.
In the end it was ethical to fight on, though, for the Allied soldiers couldn’t ethically break faith with the Belgians, all of whose nation, save a narrow strip near the coast (where King Albert continued to lead his army personally) was occupied by the Germans, who, as isn’t widely publicized, but I learned this summer in Brussels, were only about 20% gentler occupiers in 1914 than they were 25 years later.
That said, I agree with you on all the points made regarding the value of Christmas and all it stands for as well as the fact that usually trying to avoid war at all costs results in something worse. Merry Christmas to you too.
“as the horrible, pointless, world-disrupting “War to End All Wars””
Pointless is a matter of perspective. For the Allies, stopping German hegemony over Europe, was not a pointless objective.
“War makes no sense whatsoever, and yet we cannot find a way to avoid wars that won’t result in something worse.”
Yup, yet Wars to stop bad people make plenty of sense.
“The War to End All Wars should have ended all wars, because it was so destructive, accomplished so little good,”
Huh? It wasn’t destructive enough. The chief perpetrator of the war – a unified Germany – WAS NOT DESTROYED. This is why the war accomplished nothing.
There can be no peace without victory.
(and there was no capital V victory in WW1)
Haha, one could write a term paper on this, but I’ll have to come back to it later.
This is all hindsight, though. Wilson’s kinder, gentler treaty might have precluded WWII. No Great War might have allowed the Middle East and the Balkans to develop naturally and less contentiously. Or France would not have been so shell-shocked that it couldn’t defend itself against Hitler. I’ve read four books about that war, and I still can’t say what it was trying to accomplish.
Is it hindsight? Blackjack Pershing called it while it was happened…that the lack of victory means the war didn’t end.
France put up a remarkable defense against Hitler given the results of his blitzkrieg in other countries.
The war was trying to accomplish for Germany a hegemony over continental Europe, as it realized mathematically it would never compete with England (and eventually the United States) on the Oceans. The war, from the Allied Perspective was to stop Germany, while from the specifically American Perspective was to stop any hegemony from being established in Europe over Europe.
I’ve read probably a dozen, and there was no one overarching goal on the allied side. Each nation that entered the war had its own reasons, some of them not so noble (Italy just wanted to grab some territory, and switched sides on the Germans and Austrians), some doing the right thing (the UK were honoring their treaty with the Belgians and the Portuguese were honoring their treaty with the UK), some idealistic (“The world must be made safe for democracy!” Uh huh).
However, most of the blame for everything that made the war spread as wide as it did, get as ugly as it did, and lead to all the later problems it did falls on Germany, though the Germans were as human as the rest of the nations. It was Germany who sowed the seeds of future conflict by pushing a tottering Austria-Hungary to where it feared becoming irrelevant and stealing Alsace and Lorraine from France in a war of aggression, setting up a long-standing grudge. It was Germany who planned a war that depended on sweeping through Belgium, whatever the Belgians’ feelings on the subject, and then did just that. It was Germany who delivered “the blank check” to Austria, making a local conflict into a continent-wide one. It was Germany who first used flamethrowers and later poison gas on the battlefield, breaking all the rules of war and making things that much more brutal. It was Germany who resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare, targeting civilian ships that carried neutral passengers. It was Germany who sent a telegram to Mexico asking them to stab the US in the back. It was Germany who smuggled arms to Roger Casement and his band of traitors, making the messy, ugly Easter Rising possible and touching off almost 80 years of bitter conflict that was Irishman against Irishman for the most part and set the pattern for modern terrorism. It was Germany that smuggled V.I. Lenin and his political pestilence into Russia, starting the process that would turn Eastern Europe into a giant prison for 50 years and set the world on edge for 40.
I don’t think the Germans started out the war trying to do any of this – they started it out trying to win yet another war and become the dominant power on the continent. Since they had defeated Austria, Denmark, and France in living memory and their army had become the best and best-equipped there was, they thought this would be relatively easy. They also thought that they’d have an easy time just walking through Belgium and could keep the UK out of the conflict with a warning.
Well, we all know how that turned out, and frankly after their defeat at the Marne and the end of the race to the sea, it might have been better to negotiate a peace that might have given them something. Instead, they turned to increasingly desperate actions that they thought would break the enemy… all of which ultimately failed. The assault on Verdun accomplished nothing other than to bleed them white in experienced NCOs, platoon leaders and company commanders. At Jutland they sank twice as much tonnage, but the Royal Navy’s line held. In the end they lost the race between their movement of men from the Eastern Front and the arrival of the Americans, who they had pulled into the war, in force.
In the meantime both the Turkish and the Austrian regimes fell to support this war of pride, leaving two more kings down on the chessboard and far too many pieces to run amok for the next quarter century. In the end it’s a cautionary tale of pride and its consequences.
To say nothing of an emotionally unstable Kaiser, emboldened by personal rule and a militaristic cadre of opportunists, determined to prove to his people, the world and, most importantly, to his English and Russian relatives how great he was.
(or to be clear, it had plenty of destruction, only it’s destruction was wasted on the trenches and frontal assaults)
On the other side of the coin, the whole thing was touched off by Serbia’s imperialistic designs on the old Austrian Empire. The Pan-Slavic movement was deeply embedded in the Serbian government who were thereby ethically at fault when the heir to the Hapsburg throne was murdered in Sarajevo. It can be said that Serbia, having had its responsibility for the tragedy broadcast to the world, attempted to redeem itself by agreeing to 19 of the 20 harsh demands placed on it by Austria. Had there been good faith leadership on either side, the whole thing might have been averted. The bitterness (and ambitions) of both sides set off a chain reaction that engulfed the world. The irony is that Serbia got what it wanted out of the war- Yugoslavia. The further irony is that it was conquered by Germany in 1940, dominated by communists after WWII and bloodily fell apart in recent times. Maybe if they had just left things alone and been content in the Empire!
That may have been the stated excuses for Germany to ramp everything into the global war it became. But it wasn’t the cause of the war. Germany was going to have a war any way it could. If it could justify the war because the Kaiser tripped on his shoelace they would have.
This goes back to the turn of the century – Germany strategists did the math and they saw the other countries militarizing and they knew that each passing year made a German victory less likely in a war they already decided HAD TO HAPPEN.