A History of the First World War in 100 Moments: When the guns fell silent for Christmas.
The version of the Christmas truce of 1914 that has taken root in popular culture seem extremely far-fetched. In Michael Foreman’s children’s novel, War Game, the conflict is broken up so that soldiers may play a disorganised game of football, “their faces wreathed in smiles and clouds of breath in the clear frosty air”. In the 2005 film Joyeux Noel, soldiers carry Christmas trees into no-man’s-land, and listen together as an opera singer serenades them. And in Oh, What A Lovely War!, British troops dive for cover when a missile is thrown from the German trenches – only to find that it’s a boot filled with sausages and chocolate. These tales are almost unbelievable.
But they are entirely true to life. The mythical quality now carried by that extraordinary interlude is not the result of creative licence or revisionist sentimentality: it is rooted in the facts. The man who seems to have been the last surviving witness to those strange days, a Scottish infantryman called Alfred Anderson, died in 2005 at the age of 109. But the many contemporary accounts that survive tell an improbable and bottomlessly moving story. If the version we remember today falls short in any respect, it is this: it doesn’t go far enough.
The Christmas truce was not organised. But it was predictable, and it was predicted. A few weeks earlier, the commander of the British 2nd Corps, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, issued a warning to his senior officers. “It is during this period that the greatest danger to the morale of troops exists,” he wrote, warning that soldiers might slip into a “‘live and let live’ theory of life”. Divisionary commanders were told that “friendly intercourse with the enemy” and “unofficial armistices, however tempting and amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited” lest they “destroy the offensive spirit in all ranks”.
But it was no use. By the time Smith-Dorrien sent his memo, pockets of goodwill were already breaking out. The war was only months old, but with more than a million already dead, the gung-ho spirit that animated the first volunteers had already been sapped away. The front lines were barely moving; in places, they were no more than 60 yards apart, making it easy for shouts to carry back and forth. If these were mostly insults, they were, according to Rifleman Lesley Walkinton of the Queen’s Westminsters – quoted in Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night, an engrossing short history from which a number of other accounts in this piece are taken – mostly expressed “with less venom than a couple of London cabbies after a mild collision”. Elsewhere, the guns would go quiet during the breakfast hour, allowing men to get water and rations before getting on with the business of trying to kill each other. And on the morning of 19December, an impromptu ceasefire on one stretch of the line allowed men from both sides to come out and bury their dead.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/a-history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments-when-the-guns-fell-silent-for-christmas-9271460.html
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