The Christmas Truce of World War I

[Ivan Seeking]

LONDON (AP) - Alfred Anderson, the last surviving soldier to have heard the guns fall silent along the Western Front during the spontaneous "Christmas Truce'' of World War I, died Monday at age 109.

More than 80 years after the war, Anderson recalled the ``eerie sound of silence'' as shooting stopped and soldiers clambered from trenches to greet one another Dec. 25, 1914.

...The informal truce spread along much of the 500-mile Western Front, in some cases lasting for days - alarming army commanders who feared fraternization would sap the troops' will to fight. The next year brought the start of vast battles of attrition that claimed 10 million lives, and the Christmas truce was never repeated.[continued]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5429989,00.html

You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench. It is the evening of 24 December 1914 and you are on the dreaded Western Front.

Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over the watch. Having exchanged pleasantries, your bleary-eyed and mud-spattered colleague shuffles off towards his dug out. Despite the horrors and the hardships, your morale is high and you believe that in the New Year the nation's army march towards a glorious victory.

But for now you stamp your feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. All is quiet when jovial voices call out from both friendly and enemy trenches. Then the men from both sides start singing carols and songs. Next come requests not to fire, and soon the unthinkable happens: you start to see the shadowy shapes of soldiers gathering together in no-man's land laughing, joking and sharing gifts.

Many have exchanged cigarettes, the lit ends of which burn brightly in the inky darkness. Plucking up your courage, you haul yourself up and out of the trench and walk towards the foe...

The meeting of enemies as friends in no-man's land was experienced by hundreds, if not thousands, of men on the Western Front during Christmas 1914. Today, 90 years after it occurred, the event is seen as a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One – a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians.

The reality of the Christmas Truce, however, is a slightly less romantic and a more down to Earth story... [continued]

http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/christmastruce.htm

 

[Astronuc]

How they could establish a truce, greet the enemy in Peace, and then go back to fighting is beyond me. They couldn't simply question the insanity of what they were doing and just not fight? They couldn't simply come to terms with the fact that they dying and killing for nothing but someone's vanity?

 

[scott1]

How they could establish a truce, greet the enemy in Peace, and then go back to fighting is beyond me. They couldn't simply question the insanity of what they were doing and just not fight? They couldn't simply come to terms with the fact that they dying and killing for nothing but someone's vanity?

War has a lot of weird stuff in it like that.WWI was fought primarly with Trench warfare which the hardest of all types of warfare.I think they came up with truce because it whould help imporve the moral on both sides moral so I think they there doing because that they could booth benfit from it.

 

[iansmith]

They made a film about the christmas truce. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/

 

[selfAdjoint]

How they could establish a truce, greet the enemy in Peace, and then go back to fighting is beyond me. They couldn't simply question the insanity of what they were doing and just not fight? They couldn't simply come to terms with the fact that they dying and killing for nothing but someone's vanity?

Nope. And this indicates how far civilian thinking is and always has been from soldier thinking. It doesn't make civilians better, for "Freedom is founded on the deaths of men" (Oliver Wendell Holmes).

 

[Ivan Seeking]

They say that just beneath the civilized skin lies the wild animal, but this makes me wonder if we're looking at things the wrong way. It would seem that in this case the wild animal was the system. The men just wanted to play ball and celebrate Christmas.

 

[motai]

They say that just beneath the civilized skin lies the wild animal, but this makes me wonder if we're looking at things the wrong way. It would seem that in this case the wild animal was the system. The men just wanted to play ball and celebrate Christmas.

Considering that state societies and the system in general have committed a remarkable amount of atrocities against itself, through methods such as conscription, firebombing, massacres, invokage of genocide, the use of tactical nuclear weapons, etc; that statement isn't far from the truth.

Unfortunately this means that even the most basic aspects of humanity (such as empathy and compassion) are nullified in the face of war, and soldiers (even though they are human themselves) are expected to repress it. This does not always occur, and we see incidents like the Christmas Truce arising.

 

[stev]

s

I think the Christmas truce simply reflects how world war one was anything but a peoples war. The soldiers were just the unquestioning pawns deployed by the pro-war elite and had no deep feelings of hate toward the other side.
Would we have done this with the Nazis?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A Christmas bump.

 

[ascapoccia]

The Christmas truce was not made by any of the military leaders of the war, but by those in the trenches. The fillm "Joyeux Noel" is a fairly accurate depiction of the thing. It occurred in 1914, when people still believed that the war would only last another couple of months. In later years, military commanders tried their best to schedule raids and bombings to coincide with Christmas so that these sorts of events owuld not happen again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

 

[TVP45]

The Christmas truce was not made by any of the military leaders of the war, but by those in the trenches. The fillm "Joyeux Noel" is a fairly accurate depiction of the thing. It occurred in 1914, when people still believed that the war would only last another couple of months. In later years, military commanders tried their best to schedule raids and bombings to coincide with Christmas so that these sorts of events owuld not happen again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

There was a report that the French were so outraged by the unpatriotic behavior of the troops that they executed the cat who made friends with the Germans.

 

[ascapoccia]

yep, they did do that. bloody french.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

This happened frequently, and not just at Christmas, in the American Civil War. Both sides traded coffee,sugar, tobacco etc and even shared meals. There were baseball games between Southern and Northern forces. They parted company with a "See you in hell Johnny Reb/Yankee"; and then they went back to killing each other with a fury that was often up close and personal. The Civil War remains the bloodiest war in American history with 600,000 soldiers killed. Based on the current US population, that would be equivalent to 6 million. To put that into perspective, the US losses in WWII were 400,000 when the US population was about half what it is today.

 

[trautlein]

To my understanding the truce ended on Christmas Eve with some over eager rifleman starting some shooting...
Really horribl.

 

[merrygurl]

The Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas of 1914, during the First World War. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides – as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units – independently ventured into "No man's land", where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing. Troops from both sides had also been so friendly as to play games of football with one another.