The Christmas Truce of World War I | Hacker News Reader

The Christmas Truce of World War I

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29 pointsjacquesm28 comments

"The British heard the haunting sound of Germans singing Ã¢â‚¬Å“Stille NachtÃ¢â‚¬Â (Ã¢â‚¬Å“Silent NightÃ¢â‚¬Â)"

Few things sound more haunting than mangled text encodings.

For anyone who prefers the film version, watch Joyeux Noel. It's an 'inspired by true facts' type movie, but very watchable.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History has a great segment that talks about this event.

Somewhere in Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves writes that the regulars regarded the Christmas truce in no particularly sentimental light, but as a commonplace exchange of courtesies between enemies. I don't think that Graves was then in France; however, at that point in the war, the British forces would have had a higher proportion of regulars and mobilized reservists than later.

Grant in his memoirs tells of inspecting the lines in Chattanooga:

'When I came to the camp of the picket guard of our side, I heard the call, "Turn out the guard for the commanding general." I replied, "Never mind the guard," and they were dismissed and went back to their tents. Just back of these, and about equally distant from the creek, were the guards of the Confederate pickets. The sentinel on their post called out in like manner, "Turn out the guard for the commanding general," and, I believe, added, "General Grant." Their line in a moment front-faced to the north, facing me, and gave a salute, which I returned.'

I love this story, because it shows how much potential we as humans have for compassion, even in these kinds of circumstances. I love it too because of the cognitive dissonance that it creates. The whole first world war is, once you start getting into it, confusing. The more you research, the harder it is to see this particular war as anything other than stupid, stupid, stupid. Maybe there is an alternate universe where the soldiers just refused to fight on December 26th, and the war ended right then and there, in 1914, and WW2 never happened..

It is hard at this distance to see it otherwise than as a partially successful mass suicide of European culture. But it was very popular to start with in most of the major combatants, and it took until about 1917 for there to be mutinies and the disintegration of armies.

There's a Paul McCartney song about it too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ErrZ-ipoE

Yay for SEO spam at the bottom of it.

And sound. Wtf?

At least it wasn't written in list form by a 22 year old intern on medium.

That's nature's way of telling you to use NoScript. :)

We can change the URL if there's a more substantive source. If there isn't, the annoyances are tolerable.

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce#Christmas_1914

Wow, totally missed that or I would have found another source. Wonder how that made it in there, if the domain was taken over by SEO types or if it was placed there for a fee by the maintainer of the site.

Sorry about that. Can't believe I missed that when I first read it.

I bet some seo/ad firm paid them a few dollars to put it in.

Interesting article. I for one would not be coming out of my trench to fraternize with the enemy.

Spend several years in a trench and you might change your mind.

Possibly, but at Christmas 2014, the war was 5 months old, and trench warfare had been going on for around 3 months, tops.

For example, the first battle of the Marne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_the_Marne) in early September saw significant manoeuvring, and was followed by “the race to the sea”, which lasted till mid-October (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_Sea)

They're just dumb slobs, just like you. Both of you are being commanded to go off and die for your country by people very unlikely ever to be at risk themselves. You have far more common with the dumb slobs in the opposing trench than you'll ever have in common with the people who caused you to be in yours.

Yes, this. "The enemy" was just the men previously living normal lives and working normal jobs the previous year, just like you were, before they were bundled off to fight for their country.

War is incredibly destructive to the frontline soldiers in so many ways even beyond killing them -- psychological ruin, destruction of land, homes, livelihoods, infrastructure.... It's something that soldiers can be very gung-ho about -- in the abstract.

In non-desperate times, normal adults do not resolve conflicts by fighting to the death; when people do kill in anger, it's usually a matter of rash action, deeply regretted afterward.

Imagine a regular working class man in Germany, told "there's a family that lives a few hundred kilometers that way -- shall we go kill them, and take over their house & land?" What do you think he'd say?

But at a macro scale, it's somehow legitimized. And the soldiers are told whatever they need to be told to transform them from humans to game pieces -- we're under attack, or threatened, or disrespected, or we need to revenge some past wrong... Keep it abstract - here's your gun!

On the other side, micro-scale again, imagine hearing that a man and a few friends have the idea that you've harmed them somehow, and are coming to aggressively confront you. Should you... hide in the woods with a gun and shoot them on sight? Or assume it's a misunderstanding, and try to find a way to communicate and resolve it peacefully?

At human scale, it's obvious; violent death is awful, and completely final. We take it seriously.

The Christmas Truce is about some of the poor "regular folk" removing their blinders for a few days, and the tragedy of it is that the juggernaut didn't even really stumble; the soldiers that we're "weakened" by fraternization with the enemy -- e.g., doing what humans naturally do to resolve conflict -- were quickly shuffled out of the way (or in later cases, court-martialed), and the war went on.

And there is no Christmas Truce story in WWII.

Nor were there really any subsequent Christmas Truces in WWI. Quoth Wikipedia:

"In December 1915, there were explicit orders by the Allied commanders to forestall any repeat of the previous Christmas truce. Individual units were encouraged to mount raids and harass the enemy line, whilst communicating with the enemy was discouraged by artillery barrages along the front line throughout the day. The prohibition was not completely effective, however, and a small number of brief truces occurred."

It amazes me that the people in charge were so threatened by this truce that they did their best to ensure it couldn't happen again.

Well, for WWI there was a lot of volunteering.

Why not? Being in the trench in the first place was certain death.

But the enemy in this war was fellow Europeans, sharing the same civilization, the same laws of war, more or less the same religion and outlook on life. "Fraternizing with the enemy" is only a problem if you're a stuffy old archvillain like Haig or Ludendorff -- or if you're fighting against an enemy with whom you really don't have very much in common. (The Iraqi insurgents, for example, liked to wear plainclothes in battle, set up mortar plates in schools and hospitals, and fight while waving white flags.)

Then again both sides have their regular share of psychopaths.

If you have that 1/20 bad luck, the enemy guard might shoot you just to see your intestines spread on the snow. And at the end of the day he is war hero, you are corpse.

So the guys who really did it were either very empathetic, daft or had a death wish. I'm going to go with empathy, but would not have joined them.

Do you think they really liked to do all that?

If it let them win? Yes. Read _The Prince of the Marshes_, and read up on the nature of shame cultures.

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