Christmas Past...Long Past

By the time most are reading this, it will be approaching Christmas 2024. It will be the 110th anniversary of a very significant and amazing Christmas of long ago, the Christmas of 1914. Perhaps this is very familiar to you. If it is not, you will be amazed by it. Even if it is familiar, it is worth reviewing. 

This Christmas was the first one during World War I. That war was a strange and tragic affair, even by the standards of wars. Until the conclusion of this war, the old monarchies still ruled the nations of Europe. By the time it was over, many of them were gone. Even if you don’t like monarchies, the things that replaced them were often as bad, if not worse, than the worst of them. 

What’s more, the monarchs of three of the major participants were closely related. Maybe that was part of the problem. The war was triggered by several almost ridiculous alliances between Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Czarist Russia, Serbia, France, and Britain. Because of an assassination in Serbia, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Then Serbia invoked its treaty with Russia. Then Russia invoked its treaties with both France and Britain. 

Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, had devised a plan for the anticipated eventuality that Germany would need to defeat France, but as Barbara Tuchman reminds us: 

The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” 

German philosophy, like German theology of the time, had corrupted most things it touched, including this situation concerning what governments are supposed to be and do. Schlieffen’s plan required that Germany violate Belgium neutrality. When it did so, Britain was clearly committed to the war. 

However, many did not think the war would or could last very long. The Kaiser famously told his troops, “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” That, of course, did not happen. The war, which began as a mobile affair as wars had been before, bogged down by October. German armies approached Paris but were at the last moment repelled by reserves brought from Paris in all the taxi cabs of Paris — the first time a military unit was moved into battle on individual auto-mobile vehicles. 

The now-familiar result was that armies on the western front (unlike the war in the east) turned into a long line of trenches, barbed wire, machine gun emplacements, and artillery. These trenches were often very close together, creating the famous “no-man’s land” in-between. From October to December, that area became filled with dead bodies of armies repeatedly attempting to charge the enemies trenches, and learning (but not quite learning) it was only a recipe for death and disaster. As Tuchman puts it: 

With the advent of winter, came the slow deadly sinking into the stalemate of trench warfare. Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front that was to last for four more years. 

In one of the most amazing and spontaneous events of modern times, something stunning began to happen as Christmas approached. According to Stanley Weintraub in Silent Night, a “truce bubbled up from the ranks. Though it was to become so widespread as to impact much of the front, no one was ever certain where and how it had begun.” 

It is more than well-documented. Major newspapers in the countries involved at first refused to publish the “rumors” of what was happening. As we might guess, officials and high-ranking officers didn’t like it, but many stories from individual soldiers from Germany, Britain, and France were published in their small home-town papers that were based on letters, and even pictures, sent home of the amazing events. 

On much of the western front at Christmas of 1914, the war nearly came to a halt. In many places it began when Saxon units of the German army raised candle-lighted Christmas trees from their trenches and began to sing songs of Christmas, like “Silent Night” and many others we still sing. The British and French were almost shocked that Germans wanted to stop fighting to celebrate Christmas. Signs began to pop up from the German trenches, such as “You No Fight, We No Fight.” Even though, at first, a few shots were fired—some of which were even deadly—the spirit of the Christmas truce was not extinguished. The British raised signs that said, “Merry Christmas.” 

On Christmas Eve, songs broke out from both sides, sometimes beginning as something like a singing contest, which then blended into antiphonal choruses. At first, sometimes joking insults and then friendly Christmas greetings were shouted across the trenches. As one participant remarked, “I stayed awake all night, it was a wonderful night.” 

By the light of Christmas morning, some brave souls on both sides began to show themselves and ask if there could be a truce for retrieving and burying the vast number of gruesome, decaying, and now frozen corpses in no-man’s-land. At many locations along the front, these truces were agreed to and exercised very cautiously at first, but as these burial details began their grim work, the sides began to intermingle and assist each other. In place of official war, a very unofficial friendliness was on display. 

Soon, on Christmas Day, and sometimes even a few days following, these soldiers just generally abandoned their trenches and met in that seemingly God-forsaken middle ground to talk, then to exchange gifts of rations (anything new seemed good to the ones who didn’t have that item), and then to pose for photographs sometimes. Eventually various gaming contests were arranged and conducted in no-man’s-land, soccer (“football”) being the most popular. 

For a very few days, these enemies even exchanged stories and souvenirs and got to know one another. It turned out that many of the German Saxons had lived in Britain and worked there before the war, sometimes for several years. As one British participant wrote, “a sudden friendship had been struck up, the truce of God had been called, and for the rest of Christmas day not a shot was fired along our section.” 

Another recalled, “I stood upright in the mud and looked over the parapet. No Man’s Land was full of clusters of khaki and gray pleasantly chatting together.” Another participant at another location wrote, “It was hard to think that we were at war with one another.” Stanley Weintraub sums it up in these words: “Christmas helped — at least for the moment … to bring together men who really, they recognized, didn’t hate each other. Their fraternization, dangerously unwarlike from the headquarters perspective, seemed unstoppable.” 

It was so unfathomable that some, away from these events, were reluctant to believe it, but there were thousands of witness-participants who reported these events, wrote about them, and talked about them the rest of their lives — if they survived the rest of that war. Why did all this happen? Many reasons, no doubt. 

Many of these men were probably just war weary. Although there had already been many deaths, it was still early enough in the conflict that the number of dead did not yet seem to preclude the possibility of peace — at least to these soldiers in the trenches. 

The participants, as noted before, had sometimes lived and worked together before the war. Christmas probably helped them remember that those people in the opposite trenches were not so different from themselves. Probably, in the end, many people who did the actual fighting did not care very much about treaties, and perhaps couldn’t see why this war was necessary. 

Another thing that cannot be discounted is the remnant of a common Christian worldview. Most of Europe was in some sense “Christian.” The idea of “cultural Christianity” is often discounted and attacked. In one sense, that is understandable. It is often such a distorted view of the Christian faith as to have almost no connection to any real idea of salvation from sin. 

One thing usually endured in this very general, watered-down version of Christianity that was loosely shared by Europe and North and South America at that time, was a culturally transmitted sense of decency and humanity. While that is not everything, it is also far from nothing. 

My conclusion is this: For a short time in a terrible war in the very early twentieth century, the thought of Christmas and the values that came even through a very truncated bit of the Christian faith, urged thousands of men engaged in horrible killing to stop and think more clearly. 

Perhaps we have sometimes been too quick to discount the value of “cultural Christianity.” While not the stuff of salvation or in any real sense the gospel, it perhaps does have the power to help people draw back from their worst impulses — even if just for the few days surrounding Christmas amid a horrible war. Even when watered down, the gospel does not lose all its power. 

EndNote: While this is not presented as research and has no footnotes, readers should know that it is drawn from the following sources: Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962) and Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night (2001). If you have never read Weintraub’s book, most would enjoy it.] 

Kent B. True is the alter ego of Harold N. Orndorff, Jr., a retired campus minister who has taught college and seminary courses in the fields of apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and logic. Lately he enjoys studying his grandchildren, who are very interesting one and all.