The Christmas Truce

No Man’s Land

It's December, 1914.

The war has been going for about five months.

The fighting of 1914 would kill roughly three hundred thousand French soldiers.

France alone.

That doesn't include the German dead. The British. The Russians. The Austro-Hungarians. The other armies already losing men.

Christmas hasn't arrived yet, and the war has already swallowed an unimaginable number of lives.

Now put yourself in a British trench on the Western Front.

Your socks are wet.

They were wet when you tried to sleep. They're wet now.

You shift your feet, looking for somewhere better to stand.

There isn't anywhere.

Water collects around your boots. Rats move through the places where you eat and try to rest.

But the trench is offering you something the ground above it isn't.

Cover.

You're living in a ditch because standing out in the open can get you killed.

Look toward the German lines.

Between your trench and theirs is No Man's Land.

That name almost makes it sound empty.

It isn't.

Shell holes. Tangled barbed wire. Equipment abandoned where men fell.

And bodies.

The ground is watched by riflemen and machine-gun crews. Artillery can tear it apart.

During an attack, you have to climb out of your protection and cross it.

On foot.

With the other side trying to stop you.

Picture reaching the wire and finding a gap too narrow to get through quickly.

You're exposed.

You can't make the men behind you disappear. You can't make the bullets stop while you work out where to go.

And if you fall wounded, being alive doesn't mean somebody can reach you.

Imagine hearing a man calling from out there.

You want to help.

But whoever shot him may still be watching.

Going to get him could leave two men on the ground.

That's the kind of decision this place forces on people.

Now imagine knowing where one of your friends fell.

You ate beside him. Complained beside him. Maybe laughed at something stupid a few hours before.

Now you know where his body is.

But knowing where he is doesn't mean you can bring him back.

So he stays there.

You keep watch over ground that holds people you knew.

Tomorrow is Christmas.

Somebody at home is probably wondering whether you're keeping warm.

You'd settle for dry socks.

You picture the familiar room. The familiar voices.

Maybe your chair is still where you left it.

Meeting the enemy

Along parts of the front, German soldiers put up small Christmas trees and lights.

British soldiers answered with songs of their own.

Greetings traveled between the lines.

This wasn't the whole Western Front laying down its weapons.

Fighting continued elsewhere.

These were separate, local truces. Different men, in different places, taking an extraordinary risk.

Because a Christmas greeting doesn't make a rifle stop working.

By Christmas Day, soldiers were cautiously meeting between the trenches.

Imagine stepping onto that ground.

Yesterday, being seen out here could get you killed.

Today, you're walking toward the people on the other side.

You still know what uniform they're wearing.

You still know what they've been trying to do to you.

But now you're close enough to see a face.

Conversation takes some work.

You know a few words. He knows a few more.

Then he offers you a cigarette.

Well. There's something you don't need translated.

Soldiers exchanged tobacco, food, buttons, badges, and caps.

Picture your friend returning in a German hat.

You'd have questions.

Possibly starting with, "What the hell are you wearing?"

Photographs were shared too.

Imagine the man in front of you taking one out.

He points to the people in it.

You don't understand everything he says.

But you understand how carefully he holds it.

Somewhere, somebody is waiting for him.

Just like somebody is waiting for you.

You've spent days watching his trench.

You knew his uniform.

You thought that meant you knew him.

Now he's putting a photograph away, and you're wondering who those people are going to lose if he doesn't come home.

That doesn't make his army innocent.

It doesn't make yours innocent.

It gives you something much less convenient.

A person.

An ordinary game

And yes, there was football.

Soccer, as we call it.

The familiar version makes it sound like one organized match, with a tidy score and everybody agreeing on what happened.

The evidence is messier.

Accounts describe informal games and kickabouts in some places.

That's still an astonishing thing to picture.

Men chasing a ball across ground where moving had meant making yourself a target.

Yesterday, you watched that field for danger.

Today, you're watching to see who gets the ball.

Maybe somebody's laughing.

Maybe somebody's arguing over a kick.

For a moment, they have something ordinary to argue about.

Back to being enemies

Some truces ended on Boxing Day. Others lasted longer.

The war continued.

Senior commanders opposed fraternization, although some frontline officers allowed the meetings.

You can see the military problem.

An army needs its soldiers willing to fight.

What happens when they start wondering whether the man in their sights has children waiting at home?

He had those children before Christmas.

He had that home before Christmas.

He was a person before anybody shook his hand.

But now you've met him.

Now pulling the trigger might feel different.

That doesn't mean every soldier stopped fighting.

They didn't.

The armies didn't dissolve into friendship. The war went on for years.

That's what makes this story so uncomfortable.

Human contact happened.

And the killing continued.

Closer to home

Our arguments today aren't that battlefield.

But we know something about choosing sides.

We know what it feels like when the people around us have already decided who deserves our sympathy.

And we know how awkward it can get when our own experience refuses to cooperate.

You meet somebody.

They don't fit the description.

Now you have to decide whether to change your opinion or explain them away.

Sometimes we do update what we think.

Sometimes we get very creative about why we don't have to.

I'm not going to pretend one conversation fixes everything.

A handshake doesn't erase what somebody has done.

But neither does a uniform tell you everything about the person wearing it.