The
Christmas Truce, which occurred primarily between the British and German
soldiers along the Western Front in December 1914, is an event the official
histories of the “Great War” leave out, and the Orwellian historians hide from
the public. Stanley Weintraub has broken through this barrier of silence and
written a moving account of this significant event by compiling letters sent
home from the front, as well as diaries of the soldiers involved. His book is
entitled Silent Night: The Story of the World
War I Christmas Truce. The book contains many pictures of the
actual events showing the opposing forces mixing and celebrating together that
first Christmas of the war. This remarkable story begins to unfold, according
to Weintraub, on the morning of December 19, 1914:
Lieutenant
Geoffrey Heinekey, new to the 2nd Queen’s Westminister Rifles, wrote to his
mother, “A most extraordinary thing happened. … Some Germans came out and held
up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves
immediately got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The
Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to them and
they helped us to bury our dead. This lasted the whole morning and I talked to
several of them and I must say they seemed extraordinarily fine men. … It
seemed too ironical for words. There, the night before we had been having a
terrific battle and the morning after, there we were smoking their cigarettes
and they smoking ours.”………….
As night fell on
Christmas Eve the British soldiers noticed the Germans putting up small
Christmas trees along with candles at the top of their trenches and many began
to shout in English “We no shoot if you no shoot.” The firing stopped along the
many miles of the trenches and the British began to notice that the Germans
were coming out of the trenches toward the British who responded by coming out
to meet them. They mixed and mingled in No Man’s Land and soon began to
exchange chocolates for cigars and various newspaper accounts of the war which
contained the propaganda from their respective homelands. Many of the officers
on each side attempted to prevent the event from occurring but the soldiers
ignored the risk of a court-martial or of being shot.
Some of the meetings
reported in diaries were between Anglo-Saxons and German Saxons and the Germans
joked that they should join together and fight the Prussians. The massive
amount of fraternization, or maybe just the Christmas spirit, deterred the
officers from taking action and many of them began to go out into No Man’s Land
and exchange Christmas greetings with their opposing officers. Each side helped
bury their dead and remove the wounded so that by Christmas morning there was a
large open area about as wide as the size of two football fields separating the
opposing trenches. The soldiers emerged again on Christmas morning and began
singing Christmas carols, especially “Silent Night.” They recited the 23rd
Psalm together and played soccer and football. Again, Christmas gifts were
exchanged and meals were prepared openly and attended by the opposing forces.
Weintraub quotes one soldier’s observation of the event: “Never … was I so
keenly aware of the insanity of war.”……………
The last chapter of
Weintraub’s book is entitled “What
If— ?” This is counterfactual history at its best and he sets out what he
believes the rest of the twentieth century would have been like if the soldiers
had been able to cause the Christmas Truce of 1914 to stop the war at that
point. Like many other historians, he believes that with an early end of the
war in December of 1914, there probably would have been no Russian Revolution,
no Communism, no Lenin, and no Stalin. Furthermore, there would have been no
vicious peace imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, and therefore, no
Hitler, no Nazism, and no World War II. With the early truce there would have
been no entry of America into the European War and America might have had a
chance to remain, or return, to being a Republic rather than moving toward
World War II, the “Cold” War (Korea and Vietnam), and our present status as the
world bully.
Weintraub states that:
Franklin D.
Roosevelt, only an obscure assistant secretary of the navy — of a fleet going
nowhere militarily — would have returned to a boring law practice, and never
have been the losing but attractive vice presidential candidate in 1920, a role
earned by his war visibility. Wilson, who would not be campaigning for
reelection in 1916 on a platform that he kept America out of war, would have
lost (he only won narrowly) to a powerful new Republican president, Charles
Evans Hughes.
He also suggests another
result of the early peace:
Germany in
peace rather than war would have become the dominant nation in Europe, possibly
in the world, competitor to a more slowly awakening America, and to an
increasingly ambitious and militant Japan. No Wilsonian League of Nations would
have emerged. … Yet, a relatively benign, German-led, Commonwealth of Europe
might have developed decades earlier than the European Community under leaders
not destroyed in the war or its aftermath……….
The Great War killed over
ten million soldiers and Weintraub states, “Following the final Armistice came
an imposed peace in 1919 that created new instabilities ensuring another war.”
This next war killed more than fifty million people, over half of whom were
civilians. Weintruab writes:
To many, the
end of the war and the failure of the peace would validate the Christmas
ceasefire as the only meaningful episode in the apocalypse. It belied the
bellicose slogans and suggested that the men fighting and often dying were, as
usual, proxies for governments and issues that had little to do with their
everyday lives. A candle lit in the darkness of Flanders, the truce flickered
briefly and survives only in memoirs, letters, song, drama and story.
Weintraub concludes his
remarkable book with the following:
A celebration
of the human spirit, the Christmas Truce remains a moving manifestation of the
absurdities of war. A very minor Scottish poet of Great War vintage, Frederick
Niven, may have got it right in his “A Carol from Flanders,” which closed,
O ye who read
this truthful rime From Flanders, kneel and say: God speed the time when every
day Shall be as Christmas Day.
Read more at: When
Christian Soldiers Refused To Fight - LewRockwell
