The day the guns of war fell silent
They called it “The War to End All Wars,” but history proved them very wrong. Still, for a few hours near the end of 1914, on the freezing landscape of Western Europe, the spirit of Christmas was able to, if not end World War I, at least stop it for a while.
The story of the Christmas Truce has been told so many times that it has become legend, making it hard to sift fact from fiction. But it did happen.
On Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day, British and German soldiers forgot about the uniforms their adversaries were wearing and saw the people beneath.
The battle lines in Ypres, Belgium, were close, at some points only 30 yards apart, and soldiers shivering in the freezing mud that winter would often call out to each other.
Then, German soldiers on Christmas Eve erected small, candlelit Christmas trees, and what happened next, at different points along miles of fortifications, can only be described as miraculous.
Shouts became songs. At one spot, Brits singing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” or “Silent Night,” depending on the telling, were joined by Germans across the way who sang in the original tongue. The first brave souls stood up, and gradually, men from each side climbed out of their trenches and walked across No Man’s Land to greet each other.
“Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!” Lt. Sir Edward Hulse, who fought for Britain, is quoted as saying in the book “Christmas Truce,” by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton.
There are accounts of Brits and Germans sharing food, cognac and cigarettes; helping each other bury their dead and praying together over graves, even playing soccer.
“I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” Alfred Anderson, the last living witness to the truce, who died on Nov. 21, 2005, told the London Observer the previous year.
“All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine gun fire and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted, ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt merry.”
Of course, the new friendships did not last long; this same land would be host to some of the most horrific scenes of the war.
“The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war,” Anderson told the British paper.
This Christmas, as with so many before it, we have young men and women overseas fighting in our name. We pray today, and every day, for the safe return of all our servicemen and women. And for an end to the suffering of so many around the globe caught in the horror of war.
There is suffering in our nation as well, a fact hammered home in so many different ways.
We pray for, among other things, an end to violence in our communities and hope in the coming year our elected leaders might find the courage to lay down their arms and engage with the other side for the benefit of all.
And if we expect better from others, then we must expect better from ourselves, must find greater depths of forgiveness, empathy and compassion.
On this Christmas, let’s try to start a period of good will that lasts longer than the miraculous truce that marked this day 105 years ago.