The Christmas Truce

Essay from the year 2003 in the subject History of Germany - World War I, Weimar Republic, grade: B+, Juniata College, course: Uncovering the Past, language: English, abstract: “But, however, looking back on it all, I wouldn’t have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything.”1 The English soldier Bruce Bairnsfather looked back on an event in which he had taken part. This small excerpt shows quite clearly that something extraordinary and unexpected must have happened. Bairnsfather talks about the Christmas Truce, which happened in 1914. After almost six month of war, soldiers fighting for the Entente powers and soldiers fighting for the “Mittelmächte” met in No Man’s Land and celebrated Christmas together. The soldiers exchanged gifts, sometimes addresses, and drank together. Often the truce started with a request to bury the dead comrades lying between the trenches. The Christmas Truce was a small peaceful episode in a cruel environment. Certainly, Bairnsfather’s statement is a bit too generalized because it did not occur along the whole frontline. Mostly English and German soldiers took part in the Christmas fraternization, but also in some cases French, Belgian, Austrian and Russian soldiers took part.2 In the following years the Christmas Truce was mystified as an act of humanity in an inhuman war. Jorgensen and Harrison-Lever published a picture book for children with the Christmas Truce as the background. A young soldier sees a nice colored small bird which was captured in barbed wire. He decides to leave his trench to free the bird, and no enemy shoots at him. The publisher’s text on the back introduces this book with the words: [...] 1 Bairnsfather, Bruce. Bullets & Billets, (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), 69. 2 Ekstein, Modris. Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, (Boston/New York: First Mariner Books, 2000), 109-114.