Five months – a million deaths – into the Great War, the warring armies had settled into the deadly stalemate of trench combat. Bodies littered the No Man’s Land between the opposing trenches; any attempt to retrieve a fallen comrade was likely to be fatal. Modern weaponry, machine guns, artillery, chlorine and mustard gas all made for carnage as never before. The troops hunkered down in the muck and filth; even raising a head above the trough would present an inviting target for a sniper’s bullet from the facing trench.
On the cold and dank Christmas Eve, 1914, Allied troops heard Christmas carols wafting over from the German trenches. The British soldiers answered with songs of their own. In some areas, the trenches were as close as a hundred feet to one another. In places, German soldiers put up decorated trees on their parapets.
On Christmas morning, German-accented “Merry Christmas” floated across No Man’s Land. Tentative invitations from both sides were met with suspicion. Eventually a few brave souls ventured out with the promise of “You no shoot, we no shoot.” On that Christmas Day, along the Western Front, the opposing troops fraternized and exchanged gifts of food, cigarettes and buttons. Impromptu games of football, using improvised soccer balls, broke out. The pause in hostilities also gave soldiers a chance to tidy up their trenches and bury their dead.
As would be expected, military leaders were aghast at the possibility that conscripted soldiers might perceive other conscripted combatants as young men like themselves rather than as mortal enemies and might begin to wonder why they were trying to kill each other. An Allied general believed this to be “the greatest danger” to the morale of soldiers. The soldiers “in trenches in close proximity to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted to do so, into a ‘live and let live’ theory of life.” He directed divisional commanders to explicitly prohibit any “friendly intercourse with the enemy.”
The slaughter continued for another four years and 15 million more lives (7 million civilians).
In 1967, a forgettable band, the Royal Guardsmen, commemorated the short-lived truce with their record “Snoopy’s Christmas,” a follow-up to their million-seller “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.”
On the centennial of the Christmas truce, the British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s released a heart-rending commercial memorializing the brief interruption of fighting. The ad created instant controversy for its beautiful depiction of the misery of the First World War.
