The Christmas Truce of 1914 - and Its Prologue

One of the most famous contests of WW I was a Rugby match played by British and German boys who had, only hours previously, been shooting at each other with Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles and 1898 Mauser rifles. I have known of this event for years, but I've never found out what the score was by the end of the game. I don't think anybody cared.

The war had been going since 1 August and had already shown just how nasty it was going to turn out to be. Jeff Cooper, an Historian, a US Marine officer, and a teacher of gun fighting skills, once referred to World War One (1914-1918) as "a considerable bloodletting." Considerable, indeed. It made all previous wars (that Historians knew about) seem pretty puny by comparison. By the end of the four year period 9,000,000 men had been killed. "Only" 115,000 of these kids were Americans. I don't know whether those figures included the Americans who had joined the armies and air forces of France and Britain years before America officially got around to declaring war. The truly incredible losses at that time were suffered by the Russians, the Germans, the British, the Austrians and the French, with Belgians and Italians also tossing tens of thousands of their boys into the equation.

One French soldier said that he saw an unheard-of sight on the day of Christmas Eve. "A perfect Boche" (an insulting French word for the Germans with whom the French had crossed swords before) simply climbed out of his trench and stood there, a perfect target. Then a couple of French kids did the same thing. Then boys on both sides began jumping out of their trenches. On the allied side, most of those who took this risk were Brits. Officers and non-coms had no control over their enlisted men. Hundreds of them simply walked into each others' arms and began communicating the best they could. Language barriers don't seem to slow down people of good will, I've noticed. The kids on both sides began to offer cigarettes, candy, and strange little collectibles to each other.

Then came the Rugby game. As with most examples of this game, the gloves were off and no quarter was shown by either side. However, the good will continued into Christmas Day. Still, said a man named Bairnsfather who was wounded the next year and became a successful cartoonist with his "Old Bill" character for the rest of his life, no one on either side lost for even a moment his determination to keep fighting when the time came and see the thing through to a successful conclusion for his side.

Finally, with regret, both sides shook hands or even embraced each other. Everyone shambled back to his trench and took up the same position in the freezing mud which he'd been occupying for months. Shortly before the shooting started again, the German boys held up a big sign written in English. "Sorry, friends."

One might wonder where the kids (and I militantly keep calling them that, because so many of them weren't out of their teens yet) of both sides got the idea to pull off a wonderful, insane stunt like this. I suspect they'd been listening to their fathers and grandfathers talk about an event just like it which had occurred 43 years to the day earlier.

It was called The Franco-Prussian War and it took less than two full years for the Prussians (northeast industrialized Germans; Germany was a place on the map in 1870, but it was still several separate countries) to conquer and occupy much of France. This war could be called a dress rehearsal for World War One. Like General Grant's siege of Petersburg, VA (1864-1865), the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) was a long, miserable experience for two armies living in trenches and often up to their knees in mud around the clock. As with the American Civil War (1861-1865,) the Franco-Prussian shootout was in many ways a precursor of World War One.

In the five years between the American "unpleasantness" and that between French and German boys, much had changed in the way of personal weaponry. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were shooting at each other with muzzle-loading rifles. But by 1870, cartridge rifles were being used. They were still loading those cartridges with black powder, but the action which locked the cartridges in place was a turn-bolt, very similar to what most hunters use today. except that they had no magazine and thus were not repeaters like the much faster firearms of WW I. In this war, as in the Siege of Petersburg and as in WW I, each side would occasionally run across "no-man's land" in an effort to push the enemy back a trench or two. This was an absurdly dangerous thing to try in the two nineteenth century wars, but absolutely ridiculous by 1914. All the nations were playing with new toys by then called "machine guns." Put those together with repeating rifles of small caliber and much higher velocity due to the new "smokeless" or "white powder," and you have a recipe for a whole bunch of guys having a very bad day.

Well, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian thing, Christmas came along as it has been prone to do for a long time now. During a lull in the shooting on the 24th, the German boys were amazed to see a young French guy jump up out of his trench and start singing "Cantique de Noel" which we of the English-speaking persuasion call "O Holy Night." He had no sooner finished than an inspired German boy sprang up in full sight of the French Army and sang a German Christmas Carol called "Von Himmel Hoch." That would be translated "From Heaven on High" if my two years of high school German don't let me down.

Anyway, the enlisted men could not be persuaded to do each other any harm until the Holiday (holy day) had concluded.

Of course, when the Prussians had actually conquered and occupied a big chunk of France, there was not much good will left. I think I've mentioned before in this little column how many of Guy de Maupassant's short stories take place during or after that war. He ought to know what it was like. He fought in it.