“The Christmas Truce of 1914”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
December 24, 2009

            I want to tell you a story that happened nearly 100 years ago, something that happened on Christmas Eve of 1914.

            World War I had begun that summer. Like so many wars, it was a rather senseless war, its causes never clear. However, both sides had been eager for it, too eager one could easily say. Old wounds, hatreds and rivalries had been festering for decades. Like in so many wars, soldiers on each side believed they were fighting for God, family, and country, and even civilization itself.

            The first months of the war had been bloody, and more than a million people had already died. Both sides had expected the war to be short, but by that December 1914, it had already become a war of attrition, both sides stalemated in trench warfare along the Western Front - - Germans soldiers on one side, and soldiers from France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and even India on the other.

              The parallel lines of trenches ran for several hundred miles through Belgium and France. The “No Man’s Land” that separated the two sides was sometimes less than 100 yards wide.

            Being in the trenches was horrible. Autumn rains had turned them into a cold, stinking, filthy muck. Soul-jarring artillery barrages thundered overhead, and during the rare moments of quiet, sniper fire irregularly pierced the silence.

            Men who were eager for war only a few months earlier now were often cold, hungry, exhausted, homesick for wives, children, and the comforts of home, and demoralized by a war that seemed like it would never end.

            In human history, this is surely one of the examples of humanity at its worst, and human existence at its worst.

            Nevertheless, even amidst the brutality and banality of war, even in the living hell they found themselves, soldiers on both sides did their best to celebrate the holiday of Christmas.

            A mid-December frost had hardened the ground, making life in the trenches the slightest degree more tolerable, and packages of gifts arrived from families and friends as well as the governments of both sides. The German High Command even had diminutive Christmas trees shipped to German troops on the front, which were dutifully decorated in the trenches.

            Soldiers tried to make the most of their Christmas Eve dinners. Meager meals were supplemented with a few pleasures shipped from home.

            And then something rather miraculous happened.

            As part of their after-dinner celebrations, German soldiers placed their Christmas trees, decorated with lit candles, atop their parapets, where they could be seen from the other side. Many of the British troops were at first suspicious of this, suspecting it to be some sort of treacherous German ploy. Yet, to a few of the Indian troops, who were fighting along side the British, the lit trees reminded them of their own autumn festival of Diwali.

            Then the German soldiers began singing, and their voices drifted over the silent, foggy mist of No Man’s Land. While the words they sang were unfamiliar to most English ears  - - Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Alles schläft; einsam wacht - - the tune was a familiar one to them, and there were words to this tune that they knew too - - “Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright.”

            After the German’s finished singing, the British soldiers cheered, and asked for more, and the Germans responded, singing some more carols and songs. Then the British soldiers responded with their own carols and songs. So it went, not only in one sector and not in all sectors, but in many sectors up and down the front, more or less spontaneously, each side taking turns caroling the other side with words that spoke of love and peace.

            While it was mostly singing that went back and forth, other music did as well. In one sector, a French harmonica player stood above his trench and serenaded the opposing side. A German violinist stood atop his parapet to play the French Handel’s Largo.

            In the spirit of Christmas, each side sang songs that they thought would be appreciated by the other side. German soldiers sang a song with the same tune as “God Save the King” and English soldiers sang a song to the tune of Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Austrian hymn.” Both sides sent up flares as signs of appreciation for the others’ musical offerings.

            As the singing continued, each side’s willingness to take risks with the other side grew. After a while, some soldiers threw things back and forth such as cigarettes, candy, and cookies. Yet gradually, all up and down the front, a few individual soldiers emerged from their trenches, and began to walk tentatively toward the other side, where they were often met in the middle of No Man’s Land by those from the other side. In one sector, a daring German soldier risked his life taking a fully lighted Christmas tree all the way across No Man’s Land to bring it to French soldiers on the other side.

            At first, there was a lot of wariness, as men faced other men who had been trying to kill them only a few hours earlier, and who had killed their comrades. Language was initially a problem. Most of the British troops spoke not a word of German, and most of the Germans spoke only a few words of English. Yet when spoken language failed, the soldiers exchanged token gifts with one another, sometimes pieces of their uniforms. Then soldiers began showing one another photographs they carried with them of wives and children, reminding one another that they were not only soldiers, but also sons, husbands, and fathers.

            Eventually, all up and down the front, soldiers from both sides stood in the middle of No Man’s Land talking, singing, eating, drinking, and celebrating.

            To say that both sides were surprised by this turn of events would be an understatement. They were, in fact, dumbfounded. As the historian Stanley Weintraub writes in his book Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, because of the intense government propaganda on both sides, neither the British nor German soldiers believed the other could truly celebrate Christmas. “For most British soldiers,” he writes, “the German insistence on celebrating Christmas was a shock after the propaganda about Teutonic bestiality, while the Germans had long dismissed the British and well as the French as soulless and materialistic and incapable of appreciating the festival in the proper spirit.”

            However, as one soldier wrote home, “the festival of Christmas has momentarily united in the same emotion the enemies of yesterday and tomorrow.” A German soldier wrote in his diary, “I stayed awake the entire night, and it was a wonderful night.” A British soldier wrote in his, “The most splendid night of my life.”

            When dawn finally came on Christmas morning, many wanted to continue the truce that had unintentionally begun the night before. German troops held up crudely lettered signs in English, saying, “We no shoot. You no shoot.”

            The coming of daylight that Christmas morning, however, revealed what could not be clearly seen the night before, the bodies of the dead, some lying for weeks or months, that littered the No Man’s Land between the two sides. That morning, when many people around the world celebrated a birth, troops on both sides stood side by side each other for the purpose of burying their dead, often helping one another to dig graves. British soldier brought wooden crosses fashioned from Christmas biscuit boxes for the graves of soldiers on both sides.

            In one sector, after the dead were buried, a German chaplain and a Scott chaplain held a joint service, offering prayers in both German and English. “Vater unser im Himmel.” “Our Father Who Art in Heaven.”  “Der Herr ist mein Hirte, mir wird nichts mangeln.”  “The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not Want.”

            When this somber task was over, the soldiers on neither side were quite ready to return to their trenches, and so the fraternizing between the two sides amazingly continued. In one sector, German soldiers rolled several barrels of beer across the frozen No Man’s Land to the British trenches.

            The open land between the two sides, now cleared, suggested other possibilities as well, such as a football match, or a soccer match as we in the U.S. would say. In different sectors, some troops actually had balls with them but balls were also made of blankets stuffed with straw or with any other materials that were available. During the football matches, some Germans discovered for the first time exactly what Scots wore under their kilts.

            Sergeant Bob Lovell of the 3^rd London Rifles played one of the football games, and though his side lost, he wrote that the fact the match happened at all left him in awe. “Even as I write,” he noted at dusk, “I can scarcely credit what I have seen and done. It has indeed been a wonderful day.”

            Twilight came quickly that winter afternoon, and as the daylight began to disappear, there was much handshaking as well as expressions of regret.

            Two officers regretted at the end of the day that the whole war couldn’t be decided by a football match instead of shooting.

            “The Kaiser and the generals and the politicians in my country order us that we fight,” one German soldier sadly explained to a British solider.

            “So do ours,” the British solider replied.

            “Then what can we do?”

            “The answer’s ‘nothing.’ But if we do nothing…like we’re doing now, and go on doing it, there’ll be nothing they can do but send us home.”

            “Or shoot us.”

            Another German soldier told a British solider, “Today we have peace. Tomorrow you fight for your country; I fight for mine. Good luck.”

            Some troops worried that they would be court-martialed for their actions, but their colonel reassured them, “The top brass and government know damned well that the public at home wouldn’t stand for it, if people were court-martialed” since the public was a lot of “sentimental buggers” about Christmas.

            Of course, the truce and the fraternization between the two sides were not universally applauded by the soldiers in the trenches, especially career-minded officers. “Bad show! Disgraceful! Can’t interrupt the war for freedom just because of Christmas!” one English officer said.

            As troops on both sides returned to their trenches in the dwindling light of Christmas Day, they were reluctant to begin the fighting again. They had discovered, despite the best efforts of their governments’ propagandists, that they were more alike than different, that they were all more human than otherwise.

            The war did eventually begin again. In one sector, the British held up a sign that said, “Merry Christmas.” The Germans held up a sign that said, “Thank you.” The opposing company commanders stood across from each other own their own parapets, bowed, saluted, and descended into their trenches. The German officer fired two shots into the air, and the war recommenced.

            In other sectors, the truce lasted a little longer.

            The day after Christmas, one British captained was summoned to the middle of No Man’s land to meet with a German captain. After an exchange of compliments, his German counterpart told him that his colonel had ordered a renewal of hostilities a mid-day and “Might the men be warned to keep down, please?”

            In another sector, a high-ranking English officer was visiting the troops in the days after Christmas and ordered a heavy barrage of the opposing side. The troops deliberately avoided hitting any German soldiers, and after the officer had left, the English held up a sign saying, “All Clear.”

            One French warning to the Germans, read, “Be on guard tomorrow. A general is coming to visit our position. For reasons of shame and honor, we shall have to fire.”

            In other sectors prearranged signals either warned men back or confirmed the close of the truce, and in many sectors, opposing troops let the other side know when they would be replaced by other troops, who had no emotional commitment to the truce.

            During a House of Commons debate on March 31, 1930, Sir H. Kingsley Wood, who had been a major in the trenches during 1914 said, “If we had been left to ourselves there would never has been another shot fired. For a fortnight the truce went on. We were on the most friendly terms, and it was only the fact that we were being controlled by others that made it necessary for us to start trying to shoot one another again.”

            The war would last another four years. Millions more would die, and on future Christmases during World War I, high-ranking officers on both sides ensured there would be no more Christmas truces.        As a result, many say that the Christmas Truce of 1914 was an aberration, and that it made no significant difference in a long, terrible war. Perhaps this is so, and yet, I still find the story about it inspiring.

            Reflecting on the events in our world today, it is so easy to become cynical, about the goodness of humanity, about any hope for our shared future. Reading the headlines of any newspaper, it is hard to believe that the better angels of our natures have much sway and that ignorance, short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, indifference, meanness, hatred, and even violence are more dominant in human nature that our yearning for love, justice, and peace.

            Yet on one Christmas Eve many years ago, during the unlikeliest of times, in the unlikeliest of places, thousands of men discovered what was best within their hearts. They overcame the fear, mistrust, and hatred that they had been taught. They overcame the bitterness of losing brothers and friends who had died at their sides and in their arms. They took risks, put aside differences, and in the voices, the faces, the handshakes, and hugs of those they had not long before called enemy, they discovered a common humanity and the ubiquitous if not universal hope among all people that there one day will be peace on earth and goodwill toward all.

            On this, one of the longest, darkest nights of the year, when the world around us is cold and desolate, bleak and barren, let us too rediscover and celebrate what is best within the human heart - - our yearnings for a world of love and peace - - and may we work with others to make this world a reality, not only for one day, but for every day of the year and of our lives.

            So may it be. Amen.

My main source for this sermon was Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.