The Forgotten Christmas Truce of 1914 and the Unlearned Lessons That Could Have Prevented the Century of War 1914 - 2014
December 18, 2014
It
was exactly 100 years ago this month when the Christmas Truce of 1914
occurred, when Christian soldiers on both sides of the infamous No Man’s
Land of the Western Front, recognized their common humanity, dropped
their guns and fraternized with the so-called enemies that they had been
ordered to kill without mercy the day before. As mentioned in last
week’s column, the truth of that remarkable event has since been
effectively covered up by state and military authorities (and the
embedded journalists at the time) because they were angered (and
embarrassed) by the breakdown of military discipline.
In
the annals of war, such “mutinies” are now unheard of. The generals and
(as well as the saber-rattling, chest-thumping politicians and war
profiteers back home) rapidly developed strategies to prevent such
behavior from happening again.
Christmas
Eve of 1914 was only 5 months into World War I, and the cold, weary,
homesick soldiers found themselves not heroes, as expected, but rather
miserable, frightened and disillusioned wretches living in rat- and
louse-infested trenches. Most of them had dreamed heroic dreams when
they had signed up to kill and die for King and Country a few months
earlier, and hey had been fully expecting to be home for the holidays.
Lower
echelon officers on both sides of No Man’s Land, who were suffering
right along with the troops, allowed a lull in the war – just for
Christmas Eve. Then they allowed the troops to sing Christmas hymns, and
many of the not-yet hardened soldiers started to recognize the humanity
of the demonized “other” that had been fingered as sub-humans deserving
of death.
And so the merciful spirit of the
season came upon them; and they disobeyed orders that forbade
fraternizing with the enemy by laying down their weapons and mingling
with them in the area between the trenches.
Unknown to the higher echelon
commanding officers – who were enjoying good food and drink in their
warm bunkers out of the range of the artillery barrages and machine gun
bursts – the grunts on either side of the battle line suddenly sensed
the stupidity of killing someone that was just like them and who had
never done them any harm.
Many of the men that experienced the
moment knew that something deeply profound had happened: a spiritual
experience of mutual respect and love that epitomized their mutual
Christian upbringing – and they refused to fight and kill when the war
was ordered to re-start.
Some soldiers were punished for their
disobedience and many of them had to be replaced with fresh troops that
had been in the reserve trenches the day before (corporal Adolf Hitler
was among the ones who did not experience the front line
fraternization.)
The Christmas Truce of 1914 had come
close to ending the futile and ultimately suicidal war that destroyed 4
empires and an entire generation of young men that had been bamboozled
into joining up.
The truce had occurred at various
places up and down the triple parallel lines of trenches that stretched
through France for 600 miles from Belgium to Switzerland. The vast
majority of the soldier that experienced the unauthorized truce did not
survive the war. Many of them had just experienced a bloody battle that
had killed tens of thousands of troops on either side, with essentially
no territory being gained by either side, and they now knew that they
were in for a long war of attrition. They would not be home for
Christmas.
<<<The Prelude to “The War to End All Wars”>>>
World War I was referred to in the
pre-WWII history books as “The Great War” or, naively and rather
laughably, “The War to End all Wars”. In the centuries before, warfare
as a means of settling disputes between nations was often regarded as a
noble undertaking that only involved professional soldiers. Wars in
those days were just larger examples of the common (and equally
barbaric) practice of engaging in “honorable” duels (sometimes to the
death) when a rival disrespected another with something as simple as an
offhand insult.
European
military officers came from the landed aristocracy. The careers of the
officer class were so familial that they almost seemed hereditary. Part
of the attraction of being a military officer in Europe was the
unquestioning respect that military officers demanded, not to mention
the impressive uniforms and the medals and ribbons that were worn on
them.
Military veterans in Europe were
universally honored as heroes, whether dead or alive, no matter if they
had participated in war crimes or acts of torture, rape, murder or
pillage. Military shrines, statues, cemeteries and holidays for “the
fallen” are regarded as normal all over the continent. The military
service of European veterans seems to have been regarded as worthy of
praise – no questions asked – even if the veteran himself felt unworthy.
What most prospective enlistees or
conscripts knew about war was what their fathers and the uber-patriotic
war literature had selectively told them and what they had learned from
the censored, palatable version of war that they read about in their
school history books.
Most of the enlistees were looking
forward to escaping the boredom of their day-to-day existence and
experiencing up close the exhilaration of playing real war games. These
unaware, wet behind the ears young men hadn’t been told about the
dehumanizing verbal and physical abuse that was to be meted out by their
drill sergeants in basic training or the beatings they would suffer
later for disobedience or disrespect.
Unbeknownst to the naive grunts on the
front line, the ruling elites had ulterior motives. (The kings, queens,
emperors, princes, nobles, kibitzers, veterans, the bankers that
financed the wars, the weapons makers and assorted other captains of
industry all felt that they would somehow profit from the war.) These
war profiteers, too old or influential to go to war themselves, knew how
much money could be made in wars, and, in addition, they had the
assurance that they would be far from the killing fields.
French and British schoolchildren had
been indoctrinated for generations in the belief that the German
emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm, was evil incarnate and therefore, if war were
to come, the German soldier who took orders from him was deserving of
death. German schoolchildren were taught the same about the French and
the English rulers and killing soldiers. And each of the leaders,
sensing that their honor was at stake, seemed to be spoiling for a
fight.
<<<The Powder Keg: Alsace-Lorraine>>>
Most of the civilians living in Europe
had very few direct memories of war. The horrors of war had been erased
from their memories but, to the professional warrior class, war was a
game that could advance their careers and pay grade. Times were
relatively good for many Europeans, but the military class was more than
willing to get into a good war.
Peace in Europe had actually existed
since Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo a century earlier, with the
exception of the relatively short Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The 1871
Treaty of Frankfurt that ended that war (with France surrendering to the
Germans) transferred the disputed territory of French-occupied
Alsace-Lorraine back to Germany. Alsace-Lorraine was a rich industrial
region located between France and Germany that had alternately been
claimed over the centuries by either Germany or France – depending on
which nation had lost the last war.
Before WWI erupted, Alsace-Lorraine
was a powder keg ready to be ignited. The two historical enemies “knew”
that Alsace-Lorraine was rightfully theirs, and they were willing to
kill for it or die trying – not to mention earning the right to spell
its largest city either Strassburg or Strasbourg.
<<<Authoritarian, Militarized Europe >>>
Most European governments were not
democracies. They were authoritarian, paternalistic and anti-democratic,
and there were enormous and often widening gaps between the haves (the
1%) and the have-nots of the lower 99%. Attempts at instituting
socialism or representative democracy had been brutally put down by the
conservative ruling elite’s obedient police and security forces.
Cruelty
in child-rearing (and basic training) was the norm in Europe, which
contributed heavily to the generational obedience to authority figures,
whether parents, school teachers, clergypersons, drill sergeants,
generals, corporations or political leaders. Most Europeans therefore
accepted the rule of the hereditary kings, emperors, princes, nobles and
military generals. And, as is also true of non-democratic institutions,
everybody was expected to be obedient to those above them in the chain
of command and to demand obedience from those below. Unconditional
obedience to authority makes it easy to develop efficient killing
soldiers for war departments and dictators.
<<<The Divine Right of Kings>>>
For centuries, most European leaders
felt that it was their divine right to colonize other nations and
enslave the inhabitants – by any means necessary – especially if those
inhabitants were of another color or religion.. Any territory that had
valuable natural resources to steal or workers to exploit, no matter
where in the world it was, was considered a legitimate target especially
if it was militarily weaker than the invader and as long as the
citizens of their home nation were uninformed, self-satisfied, arrogant,
uber-patriotic, distracted and/or apathetic.
The method of choice for the
subjugation of a people targeted for colonization – a la Christopher
Columbus – was always the use of overwhelming military force followed by
years of brutal occupation and the afore-mentioned systematic looting
of natural resources or labor. Killing, torturing, intimidating,
imprisoning, silencing, exiling or otherwise “disappearing” the ethical
opposition is the norm for empires. The intellectuals, altruists,
prophets, poets, artists, singers, songwriters, investigative
journalists and other truth-tellers or resistance movement activists had
to be silenced.
In the century prior to 1914, all
European empires had standing armies and military bases both at home and
abroad. Nations often negotiate treaties with potential allies that
promise that, if one nation was attacked by another treaty-signatory,
each would come to the other’s aid. This reality resulted in a very
complex web of treaties that was instrumental in starting World War I.
<<Living by the Sword/Dying by the Sword>>>
The
totally avoidable military madness of WWI resulted in the destruction
of four empires and the deaths of upwards of 20 million people, most of
whom were young naive patriotic men who had, in retrospect, stupidly
welcomed the chance to prove their manhood by engaging in what they
thought would be exciting war games. All sides had somehow trusted the
ridiculous assertion that everybody would be home by Christmas –
welcomed home as conquering heroes! That myth was propagated by the
press and foolishly believed by those of military age.
When Archduke Ferdinand, the
heir-apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was
assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the century of relative
European peace rapidly unraveled in a series of errors of judgment,
bureaucratic snafus, failures of communication and refusals to risk
dishonor by “turning the other cheek” or even negotiating in good faith.
Within days of the assassination, the saber-rattling heads of European
states began mobilizing for war.
Within a month the dominos fell, with
each nation honorably living up to their treaty obligations by declaring
war on one another. And on August 4, 1914, World War I began in earnest
when Austria tipped over the first domino by shelling innocent civilian
populations in little Serbia, an action that prompted the declarations
of war by Russia, Germany, Britain and France.
The chest-pounding of the deluded,
arrogant, out-of-touch leadership on all sides resulted in a war fever
that had unstoppable momentum. Their indoctrinated testosterone-laden
rookie soldiers soon found themselves, as always, to be the elite’s
dutiful trigger-pullers; and an entire generation of young men was
wasted in the trenches of the Western Front, either killed or wounded.
Most of those that survived bodily
were rendered insane, criminally psychopathic or otherwise
psychologically and/or spiritually disabled for the rest of their lives.
No one, especially the glory- and power-seeking militarists
at the top, had foreseen the coming holocaust or the intolerable
stalemates in a new kind of warfare that relied on shovels, machine
guns, artillery and poison gas. Heroic cavalry charges with swords drawn
were suddenly obsolete. Everyone, especially the out-of-touch generals
and the clergymen who were supposed to be in charge of the nation’s
souls, had been blinded by the propaganda lie that war was something
other than satanic.
As tantalizing as is the story of the
Christmas Truce, it is also a reminder of what could have happened if
there had been less obedience to authority and more organized opposition
to senseless war in the families, schools and churches.
If
the well-meaning Christian boys from England, France, Germany, Russia,
Austria, et al (who wound up helplessly suffering in that demonic war)
had been, in their childhoods, thoroughly exposed to the ethical
teachings of their Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, they might have had
the capacity to refuse the invitation to kill their co-religionists on
the other side of the battle lines. In fact, if they had really absorbed
the message of their all-merciful God, they wouldn’t have been able to
slaughter anybody at all.
That futile and suicidal war could
have ended before it really got up a head of steam if the righteous
mutiny had been more widespread, better organized and well-supported by
the chaplains at the front and the heavily propagandized, flag-waving
civilians back home.
Tragically,
the anti-Christic propaganda machine prevailed, thanks in part to the
censorship of the obedient press (that still persists today) by refusing
to do good investigative journalism by sanitizing the horrors of war.
What
turned out to be a mutual mass slaughter of a degree never before seen
in the history of warfare could have ended 100 years ago this Christmas
if every soldier had experienced the peace that was present in the
trenches and courageously laid down their weapons forever.
One
of the lessons of the Christmas Truce story is summarized in the
concluding verse of John McCutcheon’s famous song about the event,
“Christmas in the Trenches”:
“My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell.
Each
Christmas come since World War I – I’ve learned its lessons well:That
the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lameAnd on each
end of the rifle we’re the same.”
Check out the video of McCutcheon singing his song at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJi41RWaTCs and, for a good pictorial history of the reality of WWI’s trench warfare, check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTXhZ4uR6rs
The official trailer of “Joyeux Noel” is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXcseNVZGRM
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