Then Christmas in the trenches--we had glimpses of that, too. The people
who governed nations from their Parliament Houses might have doubts
about the peace-dream of the poets, the Utopia of universal brotherhood
which gleams somewhere ahead in the far future of humanity, but the
soldiers on the battlefields, even in the welter of blood and death had
somehow heard the call of it.
The appeal of the Pope for a truce to hostilities during the days
sacred to the Christian faith had fallen on deaf ears in the Cabinets of
Europe. In that zone of mutual deception which is another name for war,
neither of the belligerents could trust the other not to take an unfair
advantage of any respite from slaying that might be called in the name
of Christ, and, therefore, the armies must continue to fight. But
the men in the trenches had found for them-selves a better way. When
Christmas Eve came they began--German and British--to talk about
Christmas Eves which they had spent at home. Visions arose of crowded
streets, of shops decorated with holly and mistletoe, of churches with
little candle-lit Nativities, of Christmas-trees at home laden with
fairy lamps and presents, of children sitting up late to dance and laugh
and then hanging up their stockings before going to bed to dream of
Santa Claus, of church bells ringing for midnight mass, and, last of
all, of the “waits” by the old cross in the market-place in the midst of
the winter frost and snow.
Suddenly in one of the trenches some of the soldiers began to sing. They
sang a Christmas carol, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night.”
The soldiers in the parallel trenches of the enemy heard it, knew what
it was, and joined in with another Christmas carol, sung in their own
language. In a little while both sides were singing, each in its turn,
listening and replying, all along the two dark gullies that stretched
across blood-stained Europe. Then Chinese lanterns were lit and stuck
up on the head of the trenches, and salutations were shouted across the
narrow ground between. “Merry Christmas to you, Fritz, old man!” “Same
to you, Tommy!” And then next morning, Christmas morning, in the grey
light of the late dawn, some daring soul, clambering over the trench
head, marched boldly up to the line of the enemy with the salutation
of the sacred day. In another moment everybody was up and out, shaking
hands, and posing for photographs, friend and foe, German and British.
After a while they became aware that the ground they were standing on
was like an unroofed charnel-house, littered over with the bodies of
their unburied dead. So they set themselves to cover up their comrades
in the earth, never asking which was British and which German, but
laying them all together in the everlasting brotherhood of death--that
English boy whose mother was waiting for him in England, and this German
lad whose young wife was weeping in his German home.
My God, why do men make wars?