Silent Night: Remembering the Christmas Truce of 1914

Christmas is often a time of memory and of retrospection, a moment replete with a certain reflective sense of achronicity and universality.

Perhaps, then, it is fitting to reflect on a Christmas celebration that occurred precisely one hundred years ago today during what was called, at its time, "The War to End All Wars." We call it World War I, of course.

The war was the final death knell of a long and dramatic European century since Napoleon's Waterloo, and it was the natal moment of the bloody and bellicose twentieth century in which many of us now alive were born. Admittedly, there is a certain romanticism inherent in the perspective that WWI was the end of an era...but then, I wholeheartedly like a bit of Romanticism. There's a beauty in the story we make of the past, and there's a real avenue by which supposed "romanticism" can actually call to mind the real good points of that past, and make a lost thing live again, perhaps even the more beautifully for its now existing slightly out of context and in the isolation of ideology, time, and space. Besides, Christmas is a time of miraculous and beautiful stories that contain a little more than the average round of this world's doings...

And it is in that spirit that I reflect this year upon the Christmas Eve truce of 1914.

My favorite account of the Christmas truce lies within one of my favorite books, Kate Seredy's The Singing Tree. Seredy penned this novel as a sequel to one of my best-beloved books on the planet, her work The Good Master. Both of these tales are loosely based on Seredy's own heritage, and both are rooted in the rural Hungarian plains of a bygone era. The Good Master himself is landowner Marton Nagy, the father and father-figure to the children on whom the stories center. During the First World War, Lieutenant Nagy of the Seventh Infantry is struck with a variety of amnesia or PTSD after his unit is destroyed, and he is sent home to recuperate and recover himself. I shall let Seredy continue...

Father (Nagy - the story is told from the children's perspective) had saved one story for Christmas Eve and told it while the candles were burning on the tree. The faint sound of village church-bells coming across the plains made his story of another Christmas Eve sound like a song of hope, hope that maybe kindness and love of peace would be strong enough to stop the war soon. For the first time, he spoke of things like offensive, march, trenches, shellfire, but the dark picture those words created was only a backdrop against which his story of human souls shown all the brighter. 

"Last Christmas Eve," he began, "we had received orders to be prepared for a surprise attack against the Russians. Our trenches had been under heavy fire for days; we had either to retreat or advance, and those who plan the moves of war decided on an advance.

"We had been waiting for hours, crouching against the walls of our trenches, when the word came: 'Go.'

"We crept out into the snow, countless silent dark shapes against the whiteness, and ran to the sunken road which lay between our lines and the mountainside where the Russian trenches were. Shells screamed overhead and burst behind us, drowning out all noise we might have made, and when we reached the road, whispered orders from the Captain scurried down the line like mice: 'Advance along the road. Don't dare make a sound or strike a light.'

"We tramped in knee-deep snow, skirting the friendly hillside that sheltered us from the fire, stealing toward the Russians. And then, just ahead of me I saw a boy kneel in the snow before a wayside crucifix and light a candle. It flickered in the still air, casting a feeble light on the image of Christ above it. 'O, Lord,' the man next to me sighed, reaching into his knapsack for a candle. Others had seen the glowing light, and as I looked around I saw that more and more candles were lighted all around. A whisper spread, like the order from the Captain from mouth to mouth, only this was not an order from the Captain. 'Light a candle for Christmas Eve,' men whispered and their very words seemed to turn into tiny stars as dozens and dozens, then hundreds of candles came forth from the knapsacks to be lighted and stuck in the snow. The hillside now was one glow of light and the crucifix was bright with an unearthly brightness. We were a target for the Russian guns, but we never gave it a thought. For a little while we were lost in prayer, until one of the men cried: 'They have stopped firing. Look!'

"Across the valley, on the hillside where the Russians were entrenched, a few small flames began to tremble, then more and more. Candles, hundreds of them, thousands, one for every gun that was now silent. Around me, men began to sing 'Holy Night, Silent Night,' and from across the valley the song came back to us a thousandfold. Behind the lines so facing each other, the guns had ceased to roar and no more shells were screaming between men and stars. Perhaps the Christ Child had walked between the lines and stayed the guns."

So closes Nagy's tale.

Although Seredy's work is fiction, it is an historical reality that, on December 24th, one hundred years ago, men of many nationalities saw fit to cease their fire and start to sing. Various reports exist, many in letters and other personal papers, and gradually the truce has entered European cultural mythology and memory. Many cases of spontaneous truce appeared along multiple frontlines, and almost all are said to have begun with the music of Christmas.

 "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht" emerged from German trenches, and men of other countries caught on and joined the song: "Silent Night." The recent movie Joyeux Noel depicts the story of a German opera singer, sent to the frontlines to rally troops, singing "Adeste Fidelis," Latin for "O, Come All Ye Faithful," and being joined in this universal Western language by men of Scottish and French armies. (The movie itself is only a mediocre depiction of the truce in general, and it much distracts from its real story by including an anachronistic female character and a half-developed love story, but it does tell parts of what we know as real events.) At some point along the lines, a polyglot football (soccer) game is said to have developed. Men were later cited by their superiors for having "fraternized with the enemy," which seems to me like one of the most Christ-like things that could possibly be said of a body, that he had loved his enemies on Christmas Eve, of all days.

In our late century, one wonders if such a pause would occur. Do men have enough respect for religion, we wonder? For one another? Would anyone even recognize a Latin hymn?

But yet, the power of the Christmas Truce is not humanity on display, but rather the display of that Spirit which the best parts of humanity are made to mirror. Sacred music stopped death; the silent night was filled with singing. A century ago today, the familiar notes of Christmas carols brought truth to men, and peace reigned on Earth in the middle of a most brutal battle for earthly dominance - a vanity of vanities.

Christ, born, crucified, and risen, walked between the lines and turned men's eyes and hearts to Him. In all centuries, the Lamb brings life, and light, stills death and conquers hatred, fear, and vanity.

Let us never forget that that Spirit is with us always, unto the ends of the age to come...

Merry Christmas, Peace on Earth, and Goodwill towards all Men.
1914-2014.