December 23, 2024
Introduction: In this article, Melissa Davenport Berry wraps up her series about stories connected to Christmases past with this heartwarming tale. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.
Today concludes my “Memorable Events Connected with Christmas” series with one of my favorite stories, a magical moment in history never again to repeat itself: Christmas 1914 during WWI, when enemy troops left their trenches and made merry on the Western Front.
Sources say about 100,000 British, German, and French troops were involved in the informal cessations, and it was nothing short of a miracle.
It was a matchless moment – something like this video 1914 | Sainsbury’s Ad | Christmas 2014, created in partnership with the Royal British Legion.
The Christmas Truce: What Really Happened in the Trenches in 1914?
Harold Reginald Peat (1896-1960) served as a private in the 3rd Battalion of the First Canadian Contingent during World War I.
Below is a photo of Peat from his book Private Peat, published in 1917, showing him smiling though his right arm is useless. He had been fighting in the trenches for two years before being hit by an explosive bullet at Ypres, which destroyed his right lung and damaged his right shoulder.
Here is Peat’s account of the Christmas Truce:
…Then Christmas morning dawned. Christmas-bah! Bleak, black clouds, rain, mud, and mist, thick December mist, thick squelching mud, boots sucking in and out of the ooze, and men attached to the boots.
But there is light and hope in the souls of thousands of men, thousands of soldiers… poilus on guard at Soissons. A rifle cracks and a bullet whizzes by. Muscles are tense and eyes gleam through loopholes. This is a dangerous sector. It is suicide if one side or the other shows a head for one moment above the parapet.
Yet Christmas is felt even in this thick misty dampness. A young poilu does a foolish thing. Perhaps! He yields to the unforgivable impulse of dropping his rifle whilst on active service. The officers are astounded, his comrades surprised into inaction…
In full view of the German lines, he stands with arms akimbo. Bullets speed to right and left of him. Over his head there is a rain of lead, and bullets spend themselves in the heaped earth under his feet.
“Aha, mes enfants!” he raises his arm in salutation to the enemy. “Vive l’Allemagne!” His voice carries distinctly. Abruptly the shooting ceases in the immediate section.
A young German soldier, unarmed, springs upon his parapet, waves his hands, “Vive la France… Vive la France!”
Youth of France and youth of Germany suddenly find themselves looking into each other’s eyes. The onlooking troops are appalled. There is a silence so deep, so strange, so new that only to the men who will live until November 11th, 1918, is the unfathomed depths of it to be experienced a second time.
Then, as though hypnotized by the oddity of their position, the two young men move across no man’s land. They meet, stop, hand clasping hand. “Bon jour,” says the poilu; “Guten morgen,” answers the enemy.
Then a Christmas song…
The song rings out in husky tones of many men’s voices, then clearer as soldiers again and again jump “over the top,” unprotected by artillery, unguarded by bayonets.
French poilus and Germans fraternize, laugh, make jokes, sing. The hereditary and biological instinct towards Peace on Christmas Day holds the minds of men.
In record-breaking time French, German, British, and Belgian soldiers from one end of the line to the other, forgot war, forgot their new job of killing. As children on Christmas Day – on this Christmas Day of 1914 – they are happy, they are glad.
There is no hate, there is no thought of revenge. This day up at old Ypres where deadly gas has yet to work a new destruction, at Soissons, down in the Somme, along the Marne, whose waters had run red with blood of troops already gone, it was youth and Christmas and with one God there had come one belief. Christmas – good will – Peace.
Tersely the official communique of December 26th, 1914, read: “Yesterday, Christmas Day, near Soissons, after two soldiers had appeared unmolested in no man’s land, the troops of the Allies and enemy fraternized. Christmas greetings were exchanged. Firing ceased for the full length of the line and football games were enjoyed.”
This sculpture by Andrew Edwards commemorates the 1914 Christmas Truce football event near the hamlet of St. Yvon, Messines, Belgium.
Here are accounts of the Christmas Truce from the soldiers at Flander’s Field, printed in the Greensboro News & Record.
This article reports:
“Not a shot was fired,” Lt. Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxony regiment wrote with amazement in his diary that Christmas.
On the other side of the frontline Pvt. Henry Williamson of the London Rifle Brigade was amazed by the goodwill among his enemies. “Yes, all day Xmas Day & as I write. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
Frank and Maurice Wray of the London Rifle Brigade settled in to keep watch when they suddenly heard a German band in the trenches play songs “common to both nations,” they later wrote in an article “Quite understandably a wave of nostalgia passed over us.”
At dawn, a German called out, “We good. We no shoot,” and the Wrays noted: “And so was born an unofficial armistice.”
German soldier Werner Keil scribbled his name on a piece of paper and gave a uniform button to 19-year-old British Cpl. Eric Rowden of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles on Christmas Day 1914. “We laughed and joked together, having forgotten war altogether,” Rowden wrote.
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Note on the header image: soldiers from both sides (the British and the German) exchange cheerful conversation, an artist’s impression from “The Illustrated London News” of 9 January 1915: “British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches.” Credit: Arthur Cadwgan Michael, “The Illustrated London News”; Wikimedia Commons.
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