At the end of 1914 the clashes caused by the First World War had already caused many deaths: hundreds of thousands. Deadly armaments such as machine guns made deep impressions and the armies on the Western Front were bogged down in an exhausting war of position.
In this scenario, a series of spontaneous episodes that went down in history with the expression of the Christmas truce occurred between 24 and 26 December. With variable degrees of participation, there was a series of interruptions in the fighting – neither ordered nor planned – which then allowed some soldiers, specifically the English and Germans, to talk and exchange greetings and gifts.
Many consider it the most beautiful Christmas fairy tale, comparing it to a miracle.
Christmas 1914: the time of the ceasefire
Between 24 and 26 December 1914 there was a spontaneous truce declared by the French, English and German soldiers, who came out into the open on the two fronts and met in no man’s land. They spoke to each other, shook hands, hugged each other, buried the fallen of the two sides.
After weeks of heavy rain, the ceasefire affected many fighters on the Western Front, especially in the sectors where the trenches were closer and the soldiers were more tired, mostly between France and Belgium.
The most remembered approaches took place on a clear but freezing night in the Belgian region of Flanders, near the town of Ypres, where groups of German soldiers illuminated the parapets of their fortifications with candles placed on small decorated fir trees, singing Christmas songs like Still Nightand then displaying signs with the words “You don’t shoot, we don’t shoot” (“You don’t shoot, we don’t shoot”), or “Happy Christmas!”.
The English sang Christmas carols in response, as The First Noeland after the mutual invitation to establish unarmed contact, meetings took place on December 25th, complete with the exchange of everyday objects, chocolate, alcohol and even uniform buttons.
Despite the language barriers, communication took place through manual gestures, the showing of photos or thanks to rare German interpreters who, having worked in England, knew a little English. The bodies of the fallen left on the ground in the so-called “No man’s land” were also buried: the unoccupied area in front of the trenches and made dangerous due to the constant risk of being hit.
Almost 50 km long, in about two thirds of the area controlled by the British Expeditionary Force, sent to France and Belgium to repel the German advance, there were similar cases, even if not the same and perhaps only for a few hours.
Many thousands of soldiers spent at least a day without having to shoot or be targeted, although it is very difficult to know how many actually encountered the soldiers from the opposing trenches. What happened near Ypres, however, was not an isolated event and French and Belgian soldiers also eventually took part in that unusual suspension of hostilities.
A brief respite between cigars, cigarettes and football
Some rather interesting sources are available today on the Christmas truce. The United Kingdom archive that collects documents of historical importance, The National Archives (TNA), has made available the transcription of an official report from a brigade command (5th Division, 15th Brigade). The author, addressing headquarters, described an “informal meeting” that took place on 25 December 1914 between around 200 British soldiers and an “even larger number of Germans”.
It read: “About 2 pm a German officer or non-commissioned officer appeared and approached our trenches holding up a cigar box. No fire was fired on him, and one or two of our men went to meet him. Others, German and English, joined in and soon there were numerous men in the space between the trenches, nearer to the German trenches than to ours, talking and fraternizing and accepting each other’s cigars and cigarettes etc.”
According to some reconstructions, there were also football matches between the Germans and the English. Events shrouded in an almost legendary aura, having not been fully verified by cross-referenced testimonies. In the following days, some reported last-minute sporting matches taking advantage of the less muddy ground than usual, with balls made of tied rags or kicking empty food containers.
The circumstances of 1914, mostly minimized or silenced by German and French newspapers, attracted the attention of the Anglo-Saxon, American and English press. News reports, comments and letters from soldiers sent to their families quickly appeared. In one of these, published on 1 January 1915 in Bedfordshire Times and Independenta corporal remarked, “Now, who would believe it if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes? It’s hard to believe even for us.”
What the Christmas truce tells us about the First World War
The military authorities, seeing the “fraternization” between soldiers as a great risk to discipline, were alarmed by what happened. The reaction was therefore harsh: non-hostile approaches were considered severely punishable crimes, such as treason, and circulating news was blocked or flatly denied. Some soldiers involved were moved to other areas, often distant, to fight against men they did not know.
From then on there was no longer anything similar to the truce of 1914 and the war – very different from the conflicts of the nineteenth century – shook the entire continent. In fact, with hindsight, that improvised ceasefire is not very useful for understanding what the First World War really was. It shows, if anything, what it wasn’t.
The historian Enzo Traverso observed that the First World War was the “birth certificate” of a European civil war that lasted for the entire first half of the twentieth century (until the Second World War). And on the “ephemeral truce” of 1914 he wrote: “In the following years these meetings would not be repeated. The war had transformed into a conflict between peoples, nations and civilisations; it now took on all possible meanings, except that of a clash between combatants respectful of each other”.
Furthermore, it should be remembered that, after 1914, chemical weapons began to be used, with the use of gases released into the air to create toxic clouds; and this despite two Hague conventions (1899 and 1907) having already prohibited such solutions for war purposes. In April 1915, in the town of Ypres, the German military leaders ordered the use of poisonous gas.
Thus on the Western Front, just a few months after the Christmas truce, the conflict also became a chemical war, forcing soldiers to use gas masks, terrorizing their contemporaries and further opening the doors to unprecedented violence, closely linked to Western modernity.
