Modern World History-Honors Trench Warfare Assignment reading #2

Mr. Fisher Page 1

Christmas in the Trenches, December 1914:

(From Rites of Spring, Modris Eksteins, Houghton Mifflin, 1989, pp. 95-98).

A Corner of a Foreign Field

When Mrs. Packer of Broadclyst in Devon received a letter from her husband in the last days of December 1914, she was probably at first unwilling to believe its contents. She knew that he was somewhere at the front -- exactly where, she was not sure because the military censor forbade the disclosure of such details in letters -- and she no doubt believed that he was fighting valiantly for king and country. She had hoped that Christmas Day at least he might spend in billet rather than in the front lines, but when she began reading the letter she quickly realized that her wish had not been fulfilled.

Her husband had indeed spent Christmas at the front -- as a member of A Company, 1st Battalion, Devonshire Regiment--in a position near Wulverghem to the south of Ypres in Flanders. But he had spent most of the day not so much in the firing line as outside it. What a Christmas it had been! Instead of fighting the Germans, Corporal Packer, along with several hundred of his regimental, brigade, and divisional fellows in the sector and several thousands altogether along the British line in Flanders, had ventured out into no man’s land between the trenches to meet and fraternize with the enemy. The Germans had appeared in equal numbers.

Packer related, in his account of this amazing day, how in return for a little tobacco he had been showered with gifts: chocolate, biscuits, cigars, cigarettes, a pair of gloves, a watch and chain, and a beard brush! A remarkable haul! A ratio of giving and receiving this was which should have shamed a child, but Packer exulted in the experieince, as did many of his compatriots. So you see,” he told his wife in his understated way, “I got a good Christmas present and was able to walk about safe for a few hours.” Mrs. Packer was so astonished by the letter that she sent it off at once to the local newspaper, and it appeared on New Year’s Day in Exeter’s Western Times.

Rifleman G.A. Farmer, whose 2nd Queen’s Westminster Rifles were farther down the line that Christmas Day, could include in his letter home to Leicester a more articulate and exuberant comment: “It was really one of the most wonderful Christmas times I have ever spent.” His family must have been flabbergasted. There was a war on, after all! Farmer continued:

The men on both sides had the true sense of the season come over them, and with one accord they ceased fighting and took a different and brighter view of life, and we were quite as peaceful as you in good old England.

For the highly literary and imaginative mind of Edward Hulse of the 2nd Scots Guards, in line farther south from Farmer, the incidents in his sector were “absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked!” For Gustav Riebensahm, commanding a Westphalian regiment across from some of Hulse’s Scots Guards, the impressions were similar. Fighting an urge to disbelieve what he had seen with his own eyes, he noted in his diary on Christmas Day, “One had to look again and again to believe what was happening, given everything that had occurred earlier.” Expressions of fascination, astonishment, and excitement surface in virtually every account of the fraternization that Christmas.

“This sight I will never forget in my entire life,” wrote Josef Wenzl of the 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment.

“Christmas will remain engraven on the memory of many British soldiers who were in our trenches as one of the most extraordinary days of their lives,” insisted an official of the Gordon Highlanders.

“These have turned out to be the most extraordinary days we have spent out here -- if not in my life,” reflected Private Oswald Tilley of the London Rifle Brigade.

That Christmas truce of 1914, with its tales of camaraderie and warmth between supposedly bitter enemies in the crater-scarred territory of no man’s land, that bit of ground between opposing trenches whose very name appeared to forbid such intercourse, is a remarkable chapter in the history of the First World War and indeed of all war. While the highest incidence of fraternization took place along the British-German front, there were numerous similar occurrences between the French and Germans, Russians and Germans, and Austrians and Russians. The Christmas truce of 1914 reveals much about the social values and priorities of the opposing armies and, by extension, of the nations they represented. That such massive fraternization was never to recur during the war suggests, furthermore, that it was not the “guns of August” but subsequent events that shattered an old world. The “Edwardian garden party” did not end sudenly on August 4, 1914, as has been claimed. W.A. Quinton, of the 1st Bedfordshires, was to write a decade after the war:

Men who joined us later were inclined to disbelieve us when we spoke of the incident, and no wonder for as the months rolled by, we who were actually there, could hardly realized that it had happened, except for [the] fact that every little detail stood out so well in our memory.

R.G. Garrod, of the 20th Hussars, was one of those who consistently refused to believe that fraternization had taken place. He wrote in his memoirs that he had never actually met a soldier who had gone out into no man’s land and consorted with the enemy that Christmas of 1914, and consequently his conclusion was that the Christmas truce was simply a myth, like the angels that were supposed to have aided British troops in their retreat from Mons in August 1914.

Garrod’s disbelief and the expressions of astonishment at the truce are of course related. To many the truce, particularly its dimensions, came as a surprise. It was a surprise not because truces win war were unusual--quite the opposite; they were normal--but because the fighting in the first five months of the war had been so bitter and intense and had taken such a high toll in casualties. Moreover, from the outset propaganda played an important role in the war, and the Anglo-French campaign to portray the German as a barbarian beyond the pale, incapable of such normal human emotions as compassion and friendship, had by that first Christmas already taken effect. And finally, the attempts by various parties, including the Vatican and the American Senate, to arrange an official cease-fire for Christmas had been rejected by the belligerents. Hence, most combatants who had survived those first five grim months and, more notably those--and they were the majority--who had come to the front recently, imbued with certain ideas about the enemy, had good reason to think that this was no conventional war and that the world was indeed in the process of being transformed by it. But what the truce revealed, by its unofficial and spontaneous nature, was how resilient certain attitudes and values were. Despite the slaughter of the early months, it was the subsequent war that began profoundly to alter those values and to hasten and spread in the west the drift to narcissism and fantasy that had been characteristic of the avant-garde and large segments of the German population before the war.