In 1914, the world had erupted into the most terrible war yet fought, which would eventually claim almost forty million lives.  It was an accidental war.  Most nations had formed alliances with other countries for mutual protection.  One of the largest groups was the Triple Entente, with the three main allies being the United Kingdom, France, and Russia.  The other was the Triple Alliance, whose main members were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.  In June of 1914, a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.  Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.  Because of their alliance, Russia moved to defend Serbia.  In response, Germany and its empire went to war with Austria and Russia.  Then Britain and France, along with their vast colonial empires, went to war with Serbia and Germany.  The dominoes were falling.  Later, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria joined on Austria’s side, becoming the Central Powers.  And on Serbia’s side, Japan and eventually the United States would join, calling themselves the Allies.  Most of the world was at war.

Both sides thought they would win quickly, but the realities of modern weaponry in combat proved them wrong.  The industrialization of death, in the form of machine guns, immediately resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties.  And despite the staggering loss of life, battles were inconsequential.  The First Battle of Ypres resulted in a stalemate, and troops faced each other in miserable trenches only a few dozen yards from each other, shooting futilely at the other side with little hope of gaining even an inch of ground.

And yet, by December of that year, the true horrors of war had not yet commenced.  Men had not died, horribly, in the throes of mustard gas and other chemical weapons.  Death was staggering, but still, it was handed out by professional soldiers who saw themselves as good people doing their duty, against other good people who were also honoring their obligations.  They had not caused the war – Austria and Serbia did that.  So, despite centuries of European tensions, rivalries, and grievances, on balance, British and German and French forces still viewed their enemies humanely.

In December, it poured down rain on the Western Front.  The trenches were muddy, cold, and hellish, even before the frost came.  The new Pope, Benedict XV, had called for a truce, or at least a cease-fire, over Christmas; but the leaders of Europe paid little mind to the appeal.  Soldiers, however, had minds of their own, and they were worn down with this new kind of industrialized fighting.  They did not want to fight on Christmas Day.

Many were married, or had left families behind to come to this muddy patch of ground.  They had customs and traditions.  Many of the religious ones wanted to keep the day of their Savior’s birth free of bloodshed, seeing killing on Christmas as the act of a King Herod.  They decorated, as best as they were able.  The men in the trenches put up Christmas trees, sometimes decorated with candles, and sometimes bare (some had been sent by German emperor William II himself, expecting them to bolster morale rather than foster peace).  They sang Christmas hymns – the German carol ‘Stille Nacht’ was well known to British soldiers as ‘Silent Night’, and both could sing to the same tune.  Up and down the long trenches, soldiers shouted Christmas greetings across the field to each other.  And then, carefully, they put down their guns and went up over the edge, approaching each other in what had the day before been the death zone of No Man’s Land.

A number of Germans could speak English, particularly Saxons, and a handful of British, French, and Scottish soldiers could speak German.  It was enough to communicate; and men greeted each other, and started to exchange gifts – they didn’t have much of value, but they swapped food and chocolate, cigarettes and alcohol, and trinkets like buttons and hats.  More solemnly, they helped each other retrieve dead soldiers who were taken back to their own sides, and formally buried in the peace of Christmas Day.  These services were often held jointly; with Allied soldiers among the mourners of the fallen Central soldiers and vice-versa.  They also held impromptu joint religious services, again relying on hymns that every soldier knew the tune to, even if they sang with different words.  Some men engaged in horseplay; casually kicking around a ball (or some substitute) as if they were athletes playing a football match.

All told, more than 100,000 troops, over at least twenty miles of the Western Front laid down their arms and celebrated together.  Some just for the one day; others (in quieter parts of the lines) keeping it up through New Year’s Day.  They had no commands or official permissions to engage in a ceasefire, but their sheer numbers made it unwise for generals to object.  The Eastern Front had less truces, although it was a matter of scheduling rather than animosity.  Most Russians were Orthodox Christians; and the Orthodox Church celebrated Christmas in early January of 1915.  In some limited parts of that front, when Austo-Hungarian troops tentatively put up Christmas trees in No Man’s Land, Russian soldiers recognized the gesture and came across to celebrate Christmas early with their opponents, exchanging tobacco, alcohol, meat, and bread as gifts; with soldiers from both sides taking a second holiday to mark the Orthodox Christmas, as well.

For the most part, generals, high level commanders, and political leaders disapproved of the break in discipline, although junior officers celebrated the truce with their men.  Many leaders took steps in the following days to dampen their men’s willingness to see the humanity in each other.  The British general Horace Smith-Dorrien issued formal orders forbidding any future fraternization.  On the other side, a young corporal in the Bavarian Reserve Infantry named Adolf Hitler raged about it, as well; questioning the national honor of any German soldier who treated a Briton as a friend.  Still, no commander was foolish enough to punish anyone, or hold any courts-martial, over actions taken during the Christmas truce.  They did, however, try to keep it under wraps with a press embargo.  Still, at that point soldiers’ letters home were not being censored, and when word reach America, which had not formally entered the Great War, the New York Times felt no obligation to any such embargo, publishing articles on December 31 with titles like ‘Foes in Trenches Swap Pies for Wine’ and ‘Fraternizing Between the Lines’.

Political and military leaders tried slander to reduce the likelihood of future insubordination, painting the opposing side’s soldiers as horrific war criminals who committed frequent atrocities and genocides.  Then came more long months of endless mechanized war.  Then came the mustard gas.  With that terrible new type of death came more propaganda and demonization, along with the apparent proof for such assertions.  The notion begin to catch on that enemies were not merely equally respectable men caught up in a wrong cause, but monsters.  And slowly, men who preferred peace were convinced of the rightness of total war.  Some Christmas ‘truces’ were observed, in a limited fashion, in 1915.  Almost none were in 1916.  And the acrimonious terms of peace laid down by the eventual winners on their humiliated rivals guaranteed another, even more awful, war would come just a few decades later.  King Herod had his way, after all.

The library offers a lot of material for the study of World War I in general, or the Christmas Truce specifically.  Many articles in the Encyclopedia Britanica are linked above, and the library has books like Our Friends, The Enemy: The 1914 Christmas Truce by Alex Gwyther, Truce: The Day the Soldiers Stopped Fighting by Jim Murphy, and The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War by Terri Blom Crocker.  We also have films like Joyeux Noël, both on DVD and streaming.

Interested in learning more?  You can Ask Us at iueref@iu.edu!