World War I’s “Silent Night” Essay by Foreign Policy

FP has published an article noting that the mythical appeal of the Christmas truce evokes the idea that ordinary people would get along if not for their governments. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The war would be over by Christmas. That was what everyone said, when Britain, France, and Germany went to war in August 1914. Maybe that’s why, by the start of December, with no victory in sight, there was a pause in the fighting along parts of the Western Front stretching from Belgium through France. And maybe that’s why, when singing broke out in the trenches on Christmas Eve, soldiers on both sides decided to risk a walk up into no man’s land and even, in one recorded case, a soccer kickabout. Troops on both sides sang “Silent Night” as snow began to fall.

The truce was never formally declared by any power. Although Pope Benedict XV had called for a cease-fire earlier in the month, it had been rejected by all parties. France and Belgium had little appetite for a truce with an invading army. And in a war between global, multiethnic empires, there was little agreement about the timing or the meaning of a Christmas truce for soldiers who were Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Hindu, or Shinto. Even for Eastern Orthodox troops on the Eastern Front, Christmas would be a few weeks later.

Instead, there were spontaneous truces along the front lines. While both sides engaged in singing, many Germans had reportedly decided not to take any action from Dec. 25 to 27. In France, near Laventie, German soldiers started putting up Christmas trees along their trenches on the 23rd and their officers requested a meeting with their British counterparts. In their book, Christmas Truce, Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton report that the German officers “proposed a private truce for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day” that the British officers accepted. Similar informal arrangements were made up and down the front lines, with different results in different sectors.

The informal nature of the truce meant that not everyone participated. This is partly why the truce has now attained a mythical quality—many who were on the front did not experience it and so doubted that it had taken place. Even where peace seemed to prevail, officers worried that “the truce will probably go on until someone is foolish enough to let off his rifle.”

Across the Western Front, the Christmas truces came to an end at different points. By the 27th, rain had resumed and the soldiers were once again knee-deep in mud. Along some parts of the line, fighting resumed in January. But one soldier wrote home that part of the front near Ploegsteert in Flanders didn’t really see any action from the Christmas Truce until mid-March. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 definitively shattered the peace. Attempts for an Easter truce in early April were largely ignored.

The Christmas Truce that took place in the first December of World War I has transcended historical curiosity to become a feature of popular memory. Pop songs, TV shows, and even ads have all made reference to the events of December 1914. Why has it adhered in this way? What has it come to symbolize, more than 100 years on?

Regular truces were a typical part of pre-modern warfare. Staged battles left time for clearing the field, burying the dead, and regrouping. Informal encounters between soldiers did not always lead to fighting, and impromptu Christmas truces occurred in the U.S. Civil War and the South African War in 1899. In a way, the Christmas Truce appeals because it seems to point to the last moment of an older form of warfare. Given the horrors of the war to come, it seems poignant in its innocence.

The popularity of the Christmas Truce of 1914—even though it was not repeated for the rest of World War I—was not just as a token of nostalgia, though. It was also responsible for creating something new: the idea that there should be a Christmas truce.

One of the enduring legacies of World War I was the shift from an approach to humanitarian principles and human rights that was “episodic, empathic, and voluntary” to, as one scholar put it, a “permanent, professionalized, and bureaucratic” responsibility of states operating in a transnational network. Alongside these developments in humanitarian organizing, truces moved out of the realm of improvised, informal agreements between soldiers. Instead, they were called for and negotiated by states and transnational peace organizations. And they did so with the Christmas Truce of 1914 as a model.

For instance, in 1965, in the midst of the escalating Vietnam War, the Viet Cong proposed a Christmas cease-fire. Meant to parallel the cease-fire that had accompanied the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations earlier in the year, it was embraced back at home and internationally by the peace movement. The truce was arranged with some skepticism on the ground. Even more so given the previous year’s Christmas Eve bombing of a hotel where many U.S. officers were staying. The truce was agreed to and formally communicated to both sides.

A newspaper report from the cease-fire explicitly echoed the coverage of the 1914 truce. “It was quiet—the guns of war were stilled by a Christmas truce for the first time in almost a year,” the paper reported. “And from the top of the hill, the words of ‘silent Night’ wafted down” as the men rested their rifles on their foxholes and contemplated what the Viet Cong forces made of the song.

At the end of the 48-hour pause, both sides accused each other of violating the cease-fire. Radio Hanoi reported that “in complete disregard for their proclaimed Christmas truce, the U.S. imperialists Sunday sent many flights of aircraft.” The U.S. argued that these were reconnaissance flights, rather than bombing raids, and that the “Communists had launched at lease 60 small attacks.”

What the soldiers of World War I accidentally stumbled on was a new form of propaganda. Christmas cease-fires build morale among the troops, but also more widely. A key feature in the rhetoric of war is convincing your side that the opposing side is not just wrong, but bad. Truces and cease-fires play into this: The side proposing the cease-fire paints itself as humane. Violations of the cease-fire are fodder for arguments that the violators are inhumane.