The subtitle of this book is "the remarkable 1914 Christmas Truce", and remarkable it indubitably was. Men from the confronting British and German trenches in Belgium, who only hours or even minutes before had been firing at one another with rifles, machine-guns and trench-mortars, or lobbing grenades across the small, corpse-strewn expanse of No-Man's-Land, spontaneously mingled with one another, exchanged cigarettes or drinks and even small gifts, sang Christmas hymns and songs, even played an apparently authenticated game of football. Some of the French joined in the fun, including troops of the Foreign Legion, known usually to be tough professional killers.
Then the honeymoon was over, and they were back behind their trench parapets, killing each other again and being killed. There was, of course, no repeat of the truce; high authority on both sides was infuriated by such a display of mutual goodwill. To fight well, it was reasoned, troops must first hate those on the other side. And in a war where mass propaganda as we have come to know it was virtually patented and became a powerful moral weapon, such hate did not prove difficult to engender. It was always, however, stronger among civilians than among the fighting men.
As Stanley Weintraub points out , the early months of the first World War were potent with myths. Thousands of English people swallowed stories about the Russians who had been sent to the Western Front via British ports, and who had been seen standing on railway platforms with the snow still white on their boots. Or the particularly dotty one about the "angels of Mons" who had covered the English retreat with their medieval bows, spectres from Agincourt and the glorious past. The Christmas Truce, however, is hard fact, and even the game of football, though accounts of it often got out of hand, seems to have taken place.
Part of its origin was probably the need to bury the dead, who lay about in various stages of decomposition in the shell-pocked, wire-strewn space between the armies. Men were not yet as battle-hardened as they became, nor as mutely accepting of mass killing as they were in the Somme or third Ypres.
The main impetus, however, came from the German love of Christmas, a festival which was particularly sacred to them - especially the ritual Christmas tree. The men concerned were mainly Saxons and Bavarians, not Prusssians - whose war code was much more rigid and harsh - and it began largely with the erection of illuminated trees over the trenches. Hymns began to ring out, including the inevitable Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, and soon gesticulating figures appeared and there were welcoming shouts for the British to come out and join in the fun. Which many did, and though few Englishmen and Scotsmen spoke or even understood German, a surprisingly large number of their opponents could speak English. They had learned it in England before the war, while working there as barmen, taximen, waiters and even barbers. (One ex-barber was recognised by a former customer, a Londoner, and when they fraternised he gave the Englishman a short-back- and-sides on the spot.)
In some cases, the truce extended into Boxing Day, or only began then, but the Top Brass on both sides was by now wise to what was going on. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, the local British army commander, was predictably furious and left his snug headquarters to punish those responsible; but cunningly, he had been directed to sectors of the line where fraternisation had scarcely taken place. Nevertheless, a dim view was taken officially, and various people suffered, directly or indirectly. One of them was a certain Maj Archibald Buchanan-Dunlop, whose photograph appeared in the Daily Sketch under the heading "Major who sang carols between the trenches". It was an exaggeration, but it probably cost him a DSO.
Stanley Weintraub has produced a relatively short book but a moving and unsentimental one, based strictly on factual research and not on hearsay or myth (there was plenty of the latter) and with some excellent illustrations. At the end, he speculates on what just might have happened had the whole thing snowballed into a full-scale truce, possibly bringing about an early end to the war and thereby saving Europe huge calamities. At that stage, however, all peace propaganda (including that of Pope Benedict XIV) was derided or attacked from both sides, nor did Germany realise yet that, after the Battle of the Marne, it could no longer win in the West.
Whether the Christmas Truce was merely an outbreak of seasonal sentiment by lonely men nostalgic for home and family, or a brief visitation of good sense amid almost universal wartime hysteria, scarcely matters now. It lasted for just one euphoric day, and then Flanders, its trampled turnip crops, choked dykes and ruined farmhouses, went back once more to being a killing field.
Brian Fallon is a writer and critic