| A re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce performed in Ploegsteert, Belgium, in December 2014.Virginia Mayo/Associated Press |
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It’s harder this year to get into the holiday spirit after the past 10 months we’ve endured as a country. The United States is averaging more than 200,000 new coronavirus cases a day. On Wednesday, we surpassed 3,000 new deaths for the first time. At least eight million people have slipped into poverty since May. All over the country, I.C.U.s are starting to reach capacity and soon there may be no place for sick Americans to go. As for the holidays, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa will most likely be spent without our loved ones nearby. |
This harrowing moment we have found ourselves in had me thinking about World War I and the Christmas Truce of 1914. It is the well-known story of how the barrage of rifle fire and screams of death along the Western Front temporarily ceased, beginning on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches and commemorated the holiday together; exchanging Christmas hymns and small presents. The Germans lit Christmas trees in their trenches, and there was reportedly a soccer match between the two sides that the Germans won, 3-2. (Smithsonian magazine has a thorough history of the day that’s worth a read.) |
The Christmas Truce isn’t an inspirational story — what makes it so notable is the raging unprecedented violence it offered a small reprieve from. The unofficial cease-fire lasted little more than a day before the men returned to their trenches and began trying to kill one another once again. Before the conflict was over, roughly 20 million people would die. On that Christmas morning, many were already dead. |
I was digging through The Times archives to see if there was a correspondent on the frontline when this happened, and instead I found an essay written 20 years later by Valentine Williams. In 1914, Mr. Williams was a late captain in the Irish Guards and he recounted the events of the day in the Dec. 23, 1934, issue of The Times Magazine. |
I wanted to share some passages from his essay with you here. You can also read it in its entirety in the archives. It does not steer away from the brutal circumstances the men woke up to on Christmas morning. But it does offer a little humanity at a grim time in history, not unlike yet so removed from the present climate. |
Mr. Williams describes it best: “Viewed in retrospect 20 years after, the episode illuminates the blackest period in the tale of human suffering, like a lighted Christmas tree shining from a window along a darkened street.” |
The dead were everywhere; the dead of bygone months, the dead of last week, the dead of last night, poor, scarecrow figures, waxen of face and hands, smeared from top to toe with mud like their living comrades. There were corpses built into the parapets; they emerged from the quaking slime beneath men’s feet in the trenches; they strewed No Man’s Land. |
How British troops perceived the Germans |
They could still regard the foe, as they regarded the war, with a certain blitheness of spirit. Their attitude toward the man beyond the barbed wire resembled that of a London bobby toward a drunk: firm but paternal. Their nicknames for him were not contemptuous, like the French, but chaffing — they called him “Gerry” or “Fritz.” This standpoint became more evident as Christmas drew near. Notice boards put out by British patrols began to make their appearance in No Man’s Land, inscribed with sarcastic greetings to the enemy, and the gunners chalked on the shells they slipped into their pieces such facetious messages as “A Plum Pudding for Kaiser Bill,” or “Merry Christmas to Little Willie.” On Christmas Eve, the Royal Flying Corps at Bailleul dropped a carefully wrapped plum pudding on the German flying field at Lille, which evoked from their “opposite number” next day the gift of a bottle of rum. |
As though by common consent they came to a halt midway between the trenches. At first with suspicion, then with wonderment, Briton and German surveyed one another. For behold! Either body of men resembled the other strangely, grimed and unkempt and red-eyed as they were with nights of watching, even the distinctive khaki and field-gray all but effaced by the earth from which they had emerged, their very semblance of soldiers blurred by the extraordinary collection of garments, stocking caps and woolen helmets, leather coats and cardigan vests they had donned over their uniforms to ward off the rigors of the Flanders Winter. |
There were jokes about the war: The first seven years were the worst, the Tommies averred; “England kaput!” chortled Fritz. The Germans boasted of their victories against the Russians; the British were gently sarcastic about the failure of the German fleet to come and give battle. There was much singing. The Germans obliged with “Heilige Nacht!” and “O Tannenbaum!” and their enemy responded with “Good King Wenceslas.” |
Burying their brothers-in-arms |
In one sector, the British officer in charge asked permission to bury a score of British dead, killed in a local attack the week before. The German commander readily agreed and Britons and Germans, working side by side, dug the graves. When the task was done, the German officer, with tears in his eyes, gave the British subaltern his hand, murmuring in French, “Les braves! C’est bien dommage!” [The Brave! It’s a shame!] The Briton was so touched that, later in the evening, he sent the German captain a scarf he had received as a Christmas present as a slight acknowledgment of the other’s chivalrous behavior, and the German responded with the gift of a pair of warm gloves. Next day there was still no shooting, but neither side left the trenches. The morning after, the work of death was resumed. |
Lauren Katzenberg is an editor on The New York Times’s international desk. She previously ran The Times’s At War channel. |
Afghan War Casualty Report: December 2020 |
| Relatives carried the body of Malalai Maiwand, a journalist who was shot and killed by gunmen on Dec. 10 in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.Associated Press |
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At least 21 pro-government forces and eight civilians have been killed so far in December in Afghanistan. [Read the report.] |
Here are five articles from The Times that you might have missed. |
| Ethiopian refugees sharing a shelter in Hamdayet, Sudan, the first stop for new arrivals after crossing the border from Ethiopia. |
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“I didn’t expect in our life that our government would kill us.” Tens of thousands have sought safety in Sudan, where they gave accounts to Times journalists of a devastating and complex conflict that threatens Ethiopia’s stability. [Read the article.] |
“The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.” Chuck Yeager, the World War II flying ace and test pilot who was the first to break the sound barrier, has died at 97. [Read the article.] |
“Everything is shattered now.” More than 70 agricultural workers in Nigeria were killed by Boko Haram militants, who accused them of telling the authorities that the extremist group was in the area. [Read the article.] |
“It was disappointing that V.A. did not put their full force and focus on determining whether corrective action should be taken.” An inspector general inquiry has criticized Robert L. Wilkie, the secretary of veterans affairs, for a response that was “at a minimum unprofessional” after a female Navy veteran reported a sexual assault at a department hospital in Washington. [Read the article.] |
“Unfortunately, a ‘business as usual’ approach was taken by Fort Hood leadership causing female soldiers, particularly, in the combat brigades, to slip into survival mode.” More than a dozen Army officials have been fired or suspended as part of a sweeping investigation into the climate and culture at Fort Hood, a sprawling military base in Texas that has been rocked by a series of violent deaths, suicides and complaints of sexual harassment. [Read the article.] |
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