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In
Flanders' Fields The scene was very dramatic, and I
don't suppose In a progressive country change is
constant; and the question is not whether you All play means something. A C O R N E R O F A F O R E I G N F I E L D When Mrs. Packer of Broadclyst in Devon received a letter from her husband in the last days of December 1914, she was probably at first unwilling to believe its contents. She knew that he was somewhere at the front-- exactly where, she was not sure because the military censor forbade the disclosure of such details in letters-- and she no doubt believed that he was fighting valiantly for king and country. She had hoped that Christmas Day at least he might spend in billets rather than in the front lines, but when she began reading the letter she quickly realized that her wish had not been fulfilled. Her husband had indeed spent Christmas at the front-- as a member of A Company, 1st Battalion, Devonshire Regiment-- in position near Wulverghem to the south of Ypres in Flanders. But he had 95 spent most of the day not so much in the firing line as outside it. What a Christmas it had been! Instead of fighting the Germans, Corporal Packer, along with several hundred of his regimental, brigade, and divisional fellows in the sector and several thousands altogether along the British line in Flanders, had ventured out into no man's land between the trenches to meet and fraternize with the enemy. The Germans had appeared in equal numbers. Packer related, in his account of this amazing day, how in return for a little tobacco he had been showered with gifts: chocolate, biscuits, cigars, cigarettes, a pair of gloves, a watch and chain, and a beard brush! A remarkable haul! A ratio of giving and receiving this was which should have shamed a child, but Packer exulted in the experience, as did many of his compatriots. "So you see," he told his wife in his understated way, "I got a good Christmas present and was able to walk about safe for a few hours." Mrs. Packer was so astonished by the letter that she sent it off at once to the local newspaper, and it appeared on New Year's Day in Exeter's Western Times.1 Rifleman G. A. Farmer, whose 2nd Queen's Westminster Rifles were farther down the line that Christmas Day, could include in his letter home to Leicester a more articulate and exuberant comment: "It was really one of the most wonderful Christmas times I have ever spent." His family must have been flabbergasted. There was a war on, after all! Farmer continued: The men on both sides had the true sense of the season come over them, and with one accord they ceased fighting and took a different and brighter view of life, and we were quite as peaceful as you in good old England. For the highly literary and imaginative mind of Edward Hulse of the 2nd Scots Guards, in line farther south from Farmer, the incidents in his sector were "absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked!” For Gustav Riebensahm, commanding a Westphalian regiment across from some of Hulse's Scots Guards, the impressions were similar. Fighting an urge to disbelieve what he had seen with his own eyes, he noted in his diary on Christmas Day, "One 96 had to look again and again to believe what was happening, given everything that had occurred earlier." 4 Expressions of fascination, astonishment, and excitement surface in virtually every account of the fraternization that Christmas. "This sight I will never forget in my entire life," wrote Josef Wenzl of the l6rh Reserve Infantry Regiment. "Christmas will remain engraven on the memory of many British soldiers who were in our trenches as one of the most extraordinary days of their lives," insisted an officer of the Gordon Highlanders. "These have turned out to be the most extraordinary days we have_ spent out here -if not in my life," reflected Private Oswald Tilley of the London Rifle Brigade. That Christmas truce of 1914, with its tales of camaraderie and warmth between supposedly bitter enemies in the crater-scarred territory of no man's land, that bit of ground between opposing trenches whose very name appeared to forbid such intercourse, is a remarkable chapter in the history of the First World War and indeed of all war. While the highest incidence of fraternization took place along the British-German front, there were numerous similar occurrences between the French and Germans, Russians and Germans, and Austrians and Russians. The Christmas truce of 1914 reveals much about the social values and priorities of the opposing armies and, by extension, of the nations they represented. That such massive fraternization was never to recur during the war suggests, furthermore, that it was not the "guns of August" but subsequent events that shattered an old world. The "Edwardian garden party" did not end suddenly on August 4, 1914, as has been claimed.' W. A. Quinton, of the lst Bedfordshires, was to write a decade after the war: Men who joined us later were inclined to disbelieve us when we spoke of the incident, and no wonder for as the months rolled by, we who were actually there, could hardly realize that it had happened, except for [the] fact that every little detail stood out so well in our memory. R. G. Garrod, of the 20th Hussars, was one of those who consistently refused to believe that fraternization had taken place. He wrote in his memoirs that he had never actually met a soldier who had gone out into no man's land and consorted with the enemy that Christmas of 1914, and consequently his conclusion was that the Christmas truce was simply a myth, like the angels that were supposed to have aided British troops in their retreat from Mons in August 1914. Garrod's disbelief 97 and the expressions of astonishment at the truce are of course related. To many the truce, particularly its dimensions, came as a surprise. It was a surprise not because truces in war were unusual-- quite the opposite; they were normal-- but because the fighting in the first five months of the war had been so bitter and intense and had taken such a high toll in casualties. Moreover, from the outset propaganda played an important role in the war, and the Anglo-French campaign to portray the German as a barbarian beyond the pale, incapable of such normal human emotions as compassion and friendship, had by that first Christmas already taken effect. And finally, the attempts by various parties, including the Vatican and the American Senate, to arrange an official cease-fire for Christmas had been rejected by the belligerents. Hence, most combatants who had survived those first five grim months and, more notably, those-- and they were the majority-- who had come to the front recently, imbued with certain ideas about the enemy, had good reason to think that this was no conventional war and that the world was indeed in the process of being transformed by it. But what the truce revealed, by its unofficial and spontaneous nature, was how resilient certain attitudes and values were. Despite the slaughter of the early months, it was the subsequent war that began profoundly to alter those values and to hasten and spread in the west the drift to narcissism and fantasy that had been characteristic of the avant-garde and large segments of the German population before the war. G U N S O F A U G U S T The war had begun with movement, movement of men and materiel on a scale never witnessed before in history. Across Europe approximately six million men received orders in early August and began to move. The Germans shifted their strategy, aiming at a quick knockout blow in the west, into high gear on the sixth. Over the Rhine bridges moved 550 trains a day. The Hohenzollern bridge at Cologne would bear one train every ten minutes in the early stage of the war. Within less than a week one and a half million men were amassed for the advance. The French were equally assiduous. In a fortnight over three million Frenchmen were moved about in seven thousand trains. The Schlieffen plan, as originally 98 conceived, was to have the features of, in Basil Liddell Hart's analogy, a revolving door. As the push increased from the Germans entering the door on one side through Belgium and the north of France, the French, who were concentrating their attack to the south, would be drawn in and would add to the momentum of the door and thus of the northern attack. As implemented by Moltke, however, the plan was modified. The push in the north was not as hard as originally intended. A nervous Moltke decided first to strengthen his left flank in the south against the French. Then when the Belgian army retreated to Anrwerp, Moltke detached seven divisions from the attacking right flank to deploy them against the Belgians and prevent a breakout. And later in August he weakened the assault again by sending four divisions to counter the Russian advance into East Prussia. Then, in addition to undermining the thrust of the northern attack, he decided to allow Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who was commanding the Sixth Army in the south, to exercise his discretion as to whether he would attack the French or, as the Schlieffen plan dictated, draw them into a trap. Rupprecht, spurred by a desire to underline the importance of the Bavarian contribution, took the initiative and decided to attack, and the French, although pushed back in the area of Morhange-Sarrebourg, were forced by Rupprecht's action to consolidate their defenses instead of venturing into a more vulnerable forward position. German particularism thus played a role in the fate of the Schlieffen plan. Once again the reality of Germany-- its fragmentation and regional loyalties-- undermined the vision of unity and solidarity. The German move through Belgium was slowed by unanticipated local resistance. Then the right flank, under von Kluck, after clobbering the British at Mons, turned the corner earlier than initially intended, and the weakened German advance was finally halted at the Marne in the second week of September. There followed the German retreat to the Aisne, where the Germans began entrenching themselves against the Allied pursuit, and then the mutual maneuvering to the north-- the so-called race to the sea-- which was an attempt by both sides to avoid being outflanked. From mid-October through early November the Germans tried desperately to break through at Ypres, using great numbers of volunteers who had flocked to the colors in August, but the Allied line held despite enormous losses. After the first battle of Ypres, a battle some Germans would call "the children's massacre," the war of movement 99 was for the time being over in the west. The regular armies had been decimated. Stores of ammunition, for a war that was supposed to have been concluded by the time "the leaves fall," had been depleted. The machine gun, intended as a weapon of attack, had proved its deadly value as the supreme weapon of defense. Moreover, the terrain of Belgium and northern France, with its innumerable villages, farms, and fences, gave the defender an advantage over the attacker. From the English Channel to the Swiss frontier a bizarre scraggy line of trench fortifications appeared, the only response conceivable by the general staffs to the unexpected deadlock. After the defeat suffered by the Germans on the Marne, Falkenhayn succeeded Moltke, and in the wake of his failure at Ypres in October and November, he decided that the Schlieffen plan had to be scrapped. While still believing that the decisive front was in the west, he bowed to pressure from the "easterners"-- Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Conrad-- who argued that the Russian danger had to be dealt with urgently. Thus, German offensive concerns shifted to the east. The British and French military leadership meanwhile reluctantly accepted that they might, briefly, have to hold their positions until the manpower and firepower necessary for a knockout blow could be assembled. German and French casualties had been staggering. The Germans lost a million men in the first five months. France, in the "battle of the frontiers" of August, lost over 300,000 men in two weeks. Some regiments lost three quarters of their men in the first month. Total French losses by the end of December were comparable with the German, roughly 300,000 killed and 600,000 wounded or missing. By the end of 1914 virtually every French and German family had suffered some bereavement. Because of the appalling casualties in the early fighting, by the end of the year most of the French and German Western Front was manned by reserves. At Mons, Le Cateau, and then especially at Ypres most of the original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of 160,000 men had been wiped out. At Ypres alone losses amounted to 54,105. By December the Old Contemptibles, as the British regulars had dubbed themselves in response to the kaiser's alleged reference to the BEF in early August as "that contemptible little army," constituted little more than a fragile skeleton for the volunteer armies. As an example of the scale of casualties, the 11th Brigade had, by December 20, only 18 percent of its original officers left and 28 percent of its men. Within that 100 brigade the Somerset Light Infantry had lost 36 officers and 1153 men from other ranks, and of those who had embarked in August, so joyfully, only four officers and 266 men remained. The 7th Division, which arrived in France in October, started the Ypres affair with 400 officers and 12,000 men and ended it with 44 officers and 2336 men, a loss of over 9000 men in eighteen days. "To you from failing hands we throw the torch . . ." By the end of the year a million British men had enlisted, and the empire as a whole now had two million men under arms. By December most of the British troops in the trenches were volunteers. For military establishments that had been convinced that the outcome of a future war would hinge on one major battle, the stalemate in the west was impossible to accept. The previous century had been one of extraordinary technological change and movement. War, it was assumed, would reflect that movement. "Berthelot asked me," Major General Henry Wilson recorded in his diary on September 13, 1914, after the battle of the Marne, "when I thought we should cross into Germany, and I replied that unless we made some serious blunder we ought to be at Elsenborn in 4 weeks. He thought 3 weeks."' Kitchener, as British minister of war, had had the prescience to call for the creation of a mass British army at the very first meeting of the council of war on August 5-- "We must be prepared," he said, "to put armies of millions in the field and maintain them for several years"-- but his appeal met marked opposition and even cynicism within the British cabinet and general staff. Sir Edward Grey, the foreign minister, noted that Kitchener's estimate of the war's length "seemed to most of us unlikely, if not incredible." The New Armies, though approved, were in fact initially intended to secure the peace rather than win the war. Through November and December of 1914, and throughout 1915 and even into 1916, until the disaster of the Somme, the opinion ruled in the Entente armies that the offensive spirit was all-important and that, despite setbacks and other evidence to the contrary, one breakthrough, one decisive thrust, would move the stalled war machine. Victory would then come in weeks. By December l 914 the British staff had reluctantly agreed that that decisive thrust would have to await the arrival of the New Armies in the spring, but then the war of movement would return. The French, with a good part of their country occupied by the foreign intruder, were understandably even more resolute in retaining such 101 beliefs. Their argument by the end of the year was that with a little patience the Allies would gradually achieve superiority in manpower, munitions, horses, money, and supplies. Then at the appropriate moment the decisive blow would be struck. "General Joffre," stated an outline of what officers were instructed to tell their men in early January 1915, "has not given them [the enemy] a final blow in order to economize on French lives." The general in charge of the French Fourth Army insisted that all his commanders convince their troops that it was the Germans and not the French who were besieged. Even the shortage of shells and ammunition and the intolerable physical conditions of trench warfare in the west, as winter approached with its endless rain, turning the field of battle into an impassable muddy swamp, could not alter this basic preoccupation with offense. One month, two months, three at the outside: such was the general tenor of predictions. "As soon as we were supplied with ample artillery ammunition . . ." Douglas Haig, commanding at this point the British First Army, told the Times military correspondent on January 22, 1915, "we could walk through the German line at several places." In December the rain, which had been intermittent since early September, became interminable in Flanders, Artois, and Picardy. More fell there that month than in any December since 1876-- over six inches. The beautiful days of August had become the stuff of dreams. Rifle barrels clogged with mud and would not fire. In the wake of a British attack on December 18-19, the Germans reported that most of their wounds were caused by bayonets, because their opponents' rifles were jammed. Rivers flooded. In the vicinity of the River Lys the water level rose to within a foot of ground level. In the Somme sector conditions were similar. In their trenches soldiers stood in water up to their knees and on occasion sank up to their chests in mud and had to be hauled out with ropes. In a sector near La Bassee a dam burst and drowned men in their dugouts. Regimental war diaries often devoted more space in December to the war against the elements than to the battle against the human foe. Typical entries like "mud desperate" and "trenches impossible" only hint at the scale of misery and the problems confronting the fighting men. Water pumps, hose pipes, shovels, and pickaxes became more important than rifles or artillery as weapons. On December 24 a story spread that the Germans had turned a hose pipe on the British trenches opposite, in a sector near Bethune, in an attempt to flood them. And a few days later the command of the British 7th Division became concerned that the 102 Germans, who were reported to have closed the sluices at Comines, might be directing water toward the British trenches. Both rumors presupposed an ungentlemanly form of warfare that, so went the assumption, would not be at all out of character coming from the Germans. In many places even high breastworks did not suffice, and troops simply had to be withdrawn to dry ground, leaving only small observation posts or patrols to muck about. Communications and lateral movement proved impossible. Effecting a relief of front-line troops often took anywhere up to eight hours, whereas normally it was accomplished within an hour or so. "Brushwood parties" assumed greater tactical significance than reconnaissance parties, because brushwood, together with wire netting, at least afforded some protection against drowning in the mud. The nature of casualties in December and January reflected the nature of the new war: frostbite, rheumatism, and trench foot took a far higher toll than actual combat. "It is surprising that the whole battalion has not got pneumonia," noted one regimental diary. As the wet of December soaked through skin and bone, the British First Army reported its casualties for the second week of January as 70 officers and 2886 other ranks. Of these, 45 officers and 2320 other ranks were listed as sick. By comparison, only 11 officers and 144 men had been killed, and 14 officers and 401 men wounded. One corps commander reported soberly to his superiors in early January: "For the moment the condition of affairs resulting from the prolonged wet weather is the dominating factor in the situation." A week before Christmas, Frank Isherwood sent his greetings to his family: "Every good wish for a Merry Christmas. I never wish to see another if it's going to be like this."" He didn't. Exhaustion was the inevitable result of three or four days in the trenches. Percy Jones of the Queen's Westminster Rifles observed the 1st Royal Fusiliers leaving the trenches on the morning of December 23. They were tattered, worn, straggling, footsore, weary and looking generally broken to pieces. Hairy, unshaved, dirty-faced, and dressed in every possible variety of head dress, the men looked like so many prehistoric savages rather than a crack regiment of the British Army. The elements had no favorites. The Germans, French, and British all suffered, and neither side had better answers to the predicament. 103 There was, however, great curiosity about how the enemy was coping with this unexpected aspect of the war. The Germans appear to have been particularly envious of the goat or sheepskin jackets that were distributed in many parts of the British line late in the year and of the high lace-up boots the British wore, as opposed to the low rubber boots supplied to the Germans. The jackets became prizes the Germans sought in skirmishes in no man's land. One German regimental history admitted that after a British attack near Neuve Chapelle on December 18, the 13th Regiment plundered the British dead for booty, paying particular attention to the sheepskin jackets. Looting for spoils and for mementoes to send home to prove that one had seen action was common, especially at this early stage of the war. Everyone indulged in the practice. "On fallen Englishmen we found watches, gold, and Iron Crosses of German soldiers," charged Gustav Riebensahm. If the Germans admired British lace-up boots, the British were interested in the gumboots some Germans wore to try to cope with mud and water. To regard the opponent's gear-- uniforms, coats, boots, and other equipment-- as superior was natural, because nothing could be worse, it seemed, than one's own equipment, totally inadequate as it was for keeping out damp and cold. This presumably accounts for at least a good number of the reports in December and January that warned of subterfuge by an enemy reportedly dressed in one's own uniforms. "Artillery Observation Officer in left section of 17 B[riga]de reports that enemy have men wearing kilts," read an entry in the British 6th Division diary in mid-January. And yet, despite all the evidence that successful offensive action in such conditions was impossible, the army commanders, ensconced in warm and dry quarters, consistently emphasized the need to maintain an offensive spirit, to keep aggressive instincts honed for the coming decisive battles. Sniping and night raids should go on constantly; saps, or tunnels, should be driven forward; and spirited attacks tried repeatedly. Even if nothing of substance was achieved for the moment-- so went the rationale-- the effect on morale was important. The weather naturally gave sufficient cause for concern about the state of morale, but the commander of the British 2nd Corps, in an order of December 4, referred also to a "live and let live theory of life" that seemed to have surfaced in the front lines and that, he insisted, had to be stamped out forthwith. 104 His remark was elicited by extensive evidence of friendly interchanges by Allied and enemy troops. These incidents, which increased through November and December, provoked alarm among the "brass hats." To come to any private understanding, let alone to consort, with the enemy without permission was treasonous. The incidents were rarely reported in the official war diaries for fear of inciting wrath higher up, but the very fact that mention did occur with growing frequency toward the end of the year suggests that the unreported incidents were far greater in number. The practice of not firing at particular times of day, especially during meals, became common among units that had been facing each other for some time. Unofficial arrangements about sniping during a relief and about behavior while on patrol also existed. Charles Sorley described such understandings in a letter some months later: "Without at all 'fraternizing' we refrain from interfering with Brother Bosch seventy yards away, as long as he is kind to us." He noted the tedium of daytime activity, which consisted of rebuilding trenches and censoring soldiers' letters. During the night a little excitement is provided by patrolling the enemy's wire. Our chief enemy is nettles and mosquitoes. All patrols-- English and German-- are much averse to the death and glory principle; so, on running up against one another . . . both pretend that they are Levites and the other is a good Samaritan-- and pass by on the other side, no word spoken. For either side to bomb the other would be a useless violation of the unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards of distance of each other, who have found out that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for them selves. Often men in opposing trenches were within earshot of one another, and banter between the lines became natural, as did attempts at entertainment. Private Frank Devine of the 6th Gordon Highlanders related in a letter home on December 9 how one morning he had struck up the song "O' a' the airts," a sentimental Scottish song whose essence is love of home, and how a German opposite had replied with "Tipperary." 105 They shout to us every morning asking us over to dinner. One day they held up a bit of blackboard, and on it was written in big letters, "When are you Englishmen going home and let us have peace." They shout across at us that they want peace. The Bavarian 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment recorded that on December 18, near Ypres, as fierce fighting was going on farther south, a man from the Allgiiu, an alpine area in the southwest of Germany, got up on the breastworks and performed a fetching yodel for Tommy Atkins. The sense of humor in the midst of the misery was often sparkling. On December 20 at about 9:00 in the morning the Saxons who were facing the 2nd Essex shouted across to say that they were fed up and that they had half-masted the German flag. A member of the Essex riposted with an offer of rum and gin. The Saxons turned down the offer with the retort that they drank only champagne in the trenches!" Next to the 2nd Essex the Lancashire Fusiliers struck up a deal with their opponents: they would exchange bully beef tins for helmet badges.” “. . . bargain is complete," the divisional diary recorded, "except for the slight disagreement as to who shall come out of his trench first to fetch his share." Understandings, of course, took time to cultivate and were not always appreciated or honored by a relieving unit. Thus, the 2nd Essex got on well with the Saxons, but the Prussians who replaced the latter were described as "a surly lot, who will not answer when spoken to." In short, a certain amount of good feeling-- understandings and private agreements-- had built up between opposing trenches in the weeks before Christmas. It was to form the basis for the Christmas truce. The British command was not alone in worrying about the effect of this stalemated war on the morale of the lighting men. A week before the British orders against fraternization went out, General Falkenhayn had issued similar warnings to his officers: incidents of fraternization were to be "investigated carefully by superiors and to be discouraged most energetically." The mounting number of incidents indicates, however, that admonitions from higher-ups had little effect. Weather and trench conditions spurred the development of a friendly feeling between the warring parties, but the deteriorating relationship between officers and men, particularly between commanders behind the lines and men in the front lines, also contributed to the mood that produced 106 the events of Christmas. The unproductive and apparently senseless tactics of the general staffs on the Western Front caused a good measure of disgruntlement. For example, in keeping with the emphasis on the "offensive spirit," and in order to make the Germans feel that they could nor transfer any more troops to the Eastern Front without weakening seriously their position in the west, the British launched a major attack along the southern half of their front on December 18. The Indian Corps was the main instrument of the attack, but about two thirds of the British line was involved in supporting thrusts. The battles went on from Le Touquet in the north to Givenchy in the south until December 22, and from the point of view of British morale, if not strategy, the whole enterprise can be described only as a disaster. On the evening of the eighteenth, the 7th Division attacked the Westphalians and Saxons across from them near Neuve Chapelle and Fromelles with horrendous results, losing 37 officers and 784 men. The 2nd Royal Warwickshires alone lost 320 men, including their commanding officer. In one platoon of 57 men only one lance corporal and three other men came out unscathed. The 2nd Scots Guards, who captured twenty-five yards of opposing trench but, unable to hold the advanced position, were forced to retire in the morning, lost six officers and 188 men in their action. Only one officer involved in the attack returned physically sound. All along the line the results were similar. Any successes that were registered were temporary. The Germans experienced the same fate. They counterattacked at Givenchy on December 20 and made slight progress, but two days later the British riposted and cleared the Germans out of their new positions. Consequently, on the eve of Christmas, after five days of fierce lighting, the positions were virtually the same as they had been on the eighteenth, before the battle began. Such gestures of "offensive spirit" by their opponents did impress the Germans, and they did not thin out their western forces to the degree they might have liked to, but the dreadful and futile slaughter also aroused dismay among the British troops. On the nineteenth, the 1st Rifle Brigade and the 1st Somerset Light Infantry had attacked between Le Gheir and St. Yves in midafternoon in broad daylight. An artillery barrage was to have damaged enemy barbed-wire entanglements to allow the British to walk through. But just in case parts of the wire were 107 uncut, each man carried a straw mattress to lay over the wire! The Germans must have been astonished by the bizarre sight that confronted them as the attack began. Not surprisingly, the artillery had failed completely in the task as signed to it, and burdened with mattresses in addition to their normal gear, which weighed over sixty pounds, few of the British soldiers reached even the enemy wire, about 120 yards away, let alone the enemy trenches. The slaughter was outrageous. One of the officers commanding the attack, a Colonel Sutton, reported subsequently that the effort had "proved a complete failure." While the brigade commander behind the lines thought that the action had achieved a major objective-- to keep the Germans from transferring troops to the Eastern Front-- Sutton could not hide his profound sorrow and chagrin when he reported. From the Battalion point of view the only effects of the action were of a sentimental nature: firstly, pride at the gallant behaviour of the attacking companies who advanced without hesitation against an unshaken line of well-armed defenders, and secondly, grief at the loss of so many well-loved comrades, who could ill be spared. As in cases of fraternization, the official war diaries are reluctant to record evidence of disaffection, so any examples that do appear in the diaries can validly be read as mere hints of the magnitude of resentment. The querulous entry for December 23 in the 15th Brigade diary (5th Division) suggests profound emotions: "Ordered by GOC Division to take offensive and push on by bits-- but difficult to know where or how to do it." Along the Franco-German front there were similar attacks, initiated primarily by the French in Champagne, and similar disenchantment in the wake of the high casualties and lack of tangible success. Many expressions of hostility from troops and junior officers toward the higher command were to be heard in the midst of the camaraderie in no man's land on Christmas Day. A German letter of December 27, captured by the French, told not only of extensive fraternization but of an incident observed by the Germans some days before, when French soldiers shot their own officer because he did not want to surrender in a hopeless situation, where death would have been the only reward for bravery. They murdered their officer and then surrendered." 108 German soldiers groused too. Young Albert Sommer recounted in his diary how his "idiot" company commander forced men to go out on patrols on Christmas Eve to find out who was across from them. Firing broke out, and this provoked enemy artillery, thus destroying the peace of the evening. Sommer added bitterly that the commander remained behind in the trench and celebrated Christmas with drink while his men faced death. And yet, while weather, physical conditions in the trenches, and disappointment with the conduct of the war weighed on the minds of soldiers in the front lines, these concerns are not enough to explain what happened on and around Christmas 1914. The same disheartening factors would appear later in the war, often in more brutal dimensions, but fraternization on a similar scale would never recur. There was something in the motivation and sensibility of the front line soldier in December 1914 that was to disappear as the war progressed, a set of social values and a psychological disposition that were to be drastically altered by the course of the war. P E A C E O N E A R T H On Christmas Eve the temperature began suddenly to drop. The water-logged trenches froze. The mud became less of a problem, and that in itself lifted spirits. For Germans, Christmas Eve is the most festive part of the Christmas celebrations, and in most parts of the German line, as darkness fell, small Christmas trees, the traditional Tannenbaum, appeared, contravening official instructions, which for bade bringing trees into the trenches. For decorative effect many of the trees had candles, either real or makeshift. According to reports, the French-- for whom the Christmas tree was often something of a novelty-- and the British were puzzled initially by the strange lighting effect across the way, and thinking that it was part of a ruse, they opened fire at many points. "The first unusual thing happened," noted Percy Jones, "when we noticed about three large fires behind enemy lines. This is a place where it is generally madness to strike a match." Then lights appeared on the enemy trenches. "Our private opinion was that the enemy was priming themselves up for a big attack, so we commenced polishing up ammunition and rifles and getting all ready for speedy action." Then a German voice: "Don't shoot!" 109 "This was all very well," reported Jones, "but we had heard so many yarns about German treachery that we kept a very sharp look-out." All the general staffs had warned their troops to be ready for a surprise attack over Christmas and New Year. The German argument was that the French and British were too soulless and materialistic to celebrate Christmas in its proper spirit. The French looked on the Germans as pagans; the British regarded them as barbarians; so normal Christian behavior was not to be expected of them on Christmas Day. Still, while gunfire made the German trees disappear here and there for some minutes, they almost invariably reappeared when the shooting subsided. The Christmas spirit was irrepressible. After the trees had appeared, the singing began, on occasion raucous, more often quiet and sentimental. In the vast majority of cases the Germans, it seems, started the singing, and the effect on the opposing trench, as the tones began to echo across the frozen wastes of no man's land, was spellbinding. In many places "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht" ("Silent Night") or "Es ist ein' Ros' entsprungen" ("Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming") was intoned quietly in chorus. At one point across from the French a lone harmonica began in a moment of stillness to play "Silent Night," and the gentle, haunting tones, in the midst of complete quiet, mesmerized the French. Elsewhere, despite the cold, a German soldier played Handel's Largo on a violin. In the Argonne the 30th Wilmembergers were treated in their front line by the concert singer Kirchhoff. The French soldiers opposite were so taken by this performance that they climbed onto their parapets. They applauded and applauded until Kirchhoff gave them an encore. Emile Marcel Decobert of the 269th French Infantry Regiment, in the line near Carency, wrote home to his parents about French soldiers singing German carols with their enemy. Opposite the 1st Somerset Light Infantry the Germans brought up their regimental band and played the national anthems of both Germany and Britain, after which they gave three loud cheers and proceeded to sing "Home, Sweet Home." The British were most taken by such a cosmopolitan and gracious choice of program. Gradually firing ceased almost everywhere along the line that Christmas Eve. Men got up and sat on their parapets and shouted greetings across to the "enemy." Conversations began. Opposite the 110 Queen's Westminster Rifles a Saxon challenged the British to come across and fetch a bottle of wine. "One of our fellows accepted the challenge," wrote a private in a letter home to England, "and took over a big cake in exchange. That set the ball rolling . . ." Many officers were thinking of tactical matters when they permitted or even encouraged their men to go out to meet the enemy. They hoped, for instance, to find out who exactly was facing them and to get a good idea of enemy installations. Yet these practical considerations were usually a secondary feature of the fraternization. Most of the meetings were spontaneous initiatives that had no approval or military objective. The Christmas spirit had simply conquered the battlefield. When dawn came the next morning, the ground was frozen solid. In some areas a sprinkling of fresh snow lay on the ground. In Flanders the sudden freeze had produced a thick fog, which began to lift only gradually under the glare of a strong sun. The sudden change in the weather brought astonishment and cheer. In comparison with the monsoon conditions of the preceding month, the day was glorious. "A hoarfrost of magic and beauty" were the words Gustav Riebensahm used to begin his diary entry for Christmas Day. Then, shortly after stand-to, what had been isolated incidents of fraternization the night before blossomed, in many sectors, into wholesale camaraderie. Soldiers moved into no man's land, or in some cases even into each other's trenches, and celebrated. Some were shy. Others were more open. They talked, sang, and exchanged stories and gifts. As the morning wore on, confidence grew. Burial parties were arranged. The 6th Gordon Highlanders and the 15th Infantry Regiment, a Westphalian unit, joined in a moving ceremony for the dead. As Scotsmen, Englishmen, Saxons, and Westphalians lined up on both sides of a communal mass grave, the Reverend J. Esslemont Adams, minister of the West United Free Church, Aberdeen, and chaplain of the 6th Gordons, read the Twenty-third Psalm in English. A theology student then read it in German: ''Der Herr ist mein Hirt: mir wird nichts mangeln. Er weidet mich auf einer griinen Aue: und Uhret mich zum frischen Wasser . . ." The Lord's Prayer followed, sentence by sentence, in both languages: "Our Father Who art in Heaven. Unser Vater in dem Him mel . . ." 111 At many points mutual entertainment through song and hymn was normal. The second in command of the 1st Leicesters was Major A. H. Buchanan-Dunlop, in civilian life a teacher at Loretto school, in Musselburgh near Edinburgh. Shortly before Christmas he received the program of the end-of-term school concert. He rehearsed his fellow Leicesters and on Christmas Day they went out into no man's land and sang part of the school program for the Germans. The Germans replied with a selection of hymns. Elsewhere, behavior was more frivolous. In front of the 3rd Rifle Brigade, 6th Division, a German juggler performing his tricks drew a large and appreciative crowd. The main Christmas meal was dished out around noon, and the fraternizers returned to their own trenches to eat. As soon as they were done, the joviality in no man's land revived. On discovering that among their opponents was a barber who had worked in England before the war, some of the 6th Gordons asked him to set up shop right there in the middle of no man's land and give them a shave and a trim. The German complied! After the initial courtesies, a barter business sprang up. In addition to Christmas parcels from family and friends, brought in hundreds of railway cars, every British soldier had received from Princess Mary a gilt Christmas box containing, for smokers, a pipe, ten cigarettes, and some tobacco, and for nonsmokers, chocolates. Consequently, every British soldier had something to trade. The Germans and the French were in a similar position. Major von Der Aschenhauer noted that his troops were so overwhelmed by gifts from home that they hardly knew what to do with them. Percy Jones echoed sentiments on all sides when he wrote home on the twenty-fourth: "I am keeping well, in spite of the large number of Christmas parcels received," The surplus obviously dictated exchanges for something new and different. The Germans appear to have had a particular affection for British bully beef, which had less fat than German meats, and for British preserves. The 10th Brigade diary reported that the Germans "were seen to almost fight for a tin of bully." Samuel Judd, unable to comprehend what the Germans liked in old bully, came to the conclusion that they were not being fed sufficiently-- "they come up again for bully and jam!" Opposite the North Staffordshire Regiment the Germans wanted to exchange cigars for bully. The Cameronians, however, got what they regarded as the best bargain in this strange market '--- two barrels of beer for a few tins of bully! 112 All kinds of mementoes were sought and accepted. The very least that was exchanged was signatures. Private Colin Munro of the 2nd Seaforths sent his wife in Ayr a postcard with six German signatures. Newspapers and magazines were other readily available items. An officer of the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers exchanged Punch magazine for some German cigars. He mentioned this in a letter home, and his family promptly sent it off to the Daily Telegraph for publication; whereupon Owen Seaman of Punch wrote a satirical poem about his publication's having been devalued and degraded by being traded for German cigars! Various forms of tobacco were standard items of exchange. Virtually everyone in this war, it seems, smoked. But the quest for significant memorabilia could reach worrisome proportions: on the 4th Division front, according to one report, rifles were exchanged." Was a football match actually played? Despite many rumors of a match and much mention of a contest between British and Germans, no convincing evidence exists that such an event took place. The pervasive rumors, though, tell us a great deal about the wishes and mood of the front-line troops. The possibility of a match seemed to excite British imaginations most. Numerous accounts appeared in letters home of a game elsewhere on the line. There is sufficient consistency in the story of a 3-2 score involving the Saxons-- in most accounts they won; in some they lost -that a primitive game involving bully beef tins or something similar may in fact have taken place. But a full-fledged encounter with a proper ball is unlikely, if only because of the cratered terrain of no man's land. It must be noted, however, that peace and good will did not reign everywhere along the line on Christmas Day. At the northern extremity of the British line, near St. Eloi, held by the 3rd Division, sniping continued all day. The 3rd Worcesters there boasted that they had "bagged" four enemy snipers in the morning and two in the evening." In the south, near la Quinque Rue, on the 2nd Division front, the Germans launched an attack on the morning of the twenty-fourth. The 2nd Grenadier Guards lost the first line of trenches here and suffered fifty-seven casualties. On Christmas Day the mood was still bitter, and a new line of trenches had to be prepared. Nevertheless, even in these sectors Christmas passed relatively quietly. 113 Most of the friendly communication took place on the Anglo-German front in Belgium and northern France, where almost three quarters of the troops were involved to some degree. Elsewhere, quiet, if not open fraternization, was the norm. Fighting, even sniping, was rare on that Christmas Day. "Almost unsettling is the effect of the extraordinary quiet along the entire front," noted the diary of a German regiment facing the French near the Somme. If the British and the Germans were reluctant to go into detail about the incidents of fraternization in official dispatches, to French officers the subject was completely taboo. Still, evidence surfaces in numerous places-- German military records, private letters and diaries-- that Franco-German fraternization was extensive if less wide spread and less trusting than on the Anglo-German front. Tidbits of evidence appear even in the French official war diaries; in those, for instance, of the 1st Brigade in line near Foncquevilliers, of the 69th Division near Conde sur Aisne, of the 139th Brigade in Artois, and of the 56th Brigade on the Somme. The 56th Brigade's diary entry for the twenty-fifth is matter-of-fact: The day is quiet. A very spontaneous truce establishes itself in the entire sector, notably at the two ends where French and German soldiers come out of their trenches in places to exchange newspapers and cigarettes. No names are mentioned, no units. Yet the records of the 2th, 15th, and 20th Bavarian regiments indicate that at least twelve French regiments were involved in open fraternization in the vicinity of Dom pierre on the Somme-- the 20th, 22nd, 30th, 32nd, 43rd, 52nd, 99th, 132nd, 137th, 142nd, 1620d, and 172nd. In other words, the German documents indicate that any French mention of friendly relations barely suggests the extent of the truce. In places the truce continued to New Year's Day. In some cases it lasted well into January, even into the second week. And then, although a semblance of war reappeared, with some sniping and artillery fire, the rest of January remained remarkably quiet. The 1st Rifle Brigade diary noted on the last day of January 1915, "This has been a very quiet month and we have got through a lot of work owing to the enemy's disinclination to annoy us."
114 T H E R E A S O N W H Y Morale, though an issue, does not seem to have been the crucial motivating factor in the fraternization. Those who told the enemy that they were tired of the war usually said so as a form of salutation, an alternative to "Hello!" which somehow did not seem appropriate as a greeting. "Rotten affair this, isn't it?" was the gist of such a remark. What else could you say to men whom you had been trying to kill hours earlier? You couldn't apologize for shooting at the enemy; that would have been absurd. Saying that you wanted the war to end was the closest acceptable way of expressing such a sentiment. The press at home, when it got wind of some of the snippets of conversation, made a great deal of the enemy's supposed war weariness, but the soldiers at the front, while they may have recorded these statements in their letters and in regimental accounts of conversations, did not really give much credence to them. Noting evidence of war weariness was again a way of masking the feelings of guilt occasioned by participation in the truce. One had supposedly discovered some vital information about the enemy: he was fed up with the war; his morale was breaking. The purpose of the war seems at this stage, however, to have remained inviolate. Where a morale problem existed, it was caused more by the management of the war than by its stated purpose. The Germans in particular, sitting as they were everywhere on foreign soil, remained confident of their success. Some believed that they were a stone's throw from Paris. Others said that they had heard their fellows were in London or on the outskirts of Moscow. Victory was imminent. Captain Loder's account in the Scots Guards diary is typical: Their general opinion of the war was as follows. France is on her last legs and will soon have to give up. Russia has had a tremendous defeat in Poland and will soon be ready to make terms of peace. England is the nut which still has to be cracked but with France and Russia out of the way, Germany would be too powerful. The war they thought might be over by the end of January. This shows what lies are circulated amongst the German troops and the hatred which exists between Germany and England. 115 As one commentator put it later, "The few cases of war-weariness only threw into bolder relief the confidence of the many." What was true of the Germans was true in a quieter, less overt manner of the French and British-- On les aura! The soldiers do not appear to have seriously questioned the purpose of the war at this stage, yet for most the ties to family, friends, and home were extremely compelling. That large numbers of reservists were now in the line, many of them in their thirties and even forties, with wives and children, was a significant factor in bringing about fraternization. The thoughts of Christmas at home were simply overwhelming, and most men were disposed to enjoy at least one day of peace and good will. Evidence suggests that of the troops in the front lines the younger men were as a whole more aggressive and less inclined to friendly behavior. The evidence also suggests, however, that the British troops were the most active fraternizers. This begs explanation. The terrible conditions of warfare in Flanders and the north of France obviously played an important role in making Tommy Atkins receptive to the idea of a few days of relative peace. Moreover, the military threat posed by the Germans affected the British less directly-- after all, the war was being fought in Belgium and France-- than their allies, so again it was easier for Tommy to be inclined to take a breather. And yet perhaps the most important reason for British participation in the Christmas truce was the positive sense of Britain's purpose in the war. For the British this was a war not specifically to deny Germany a navy or colonies or even economic superiority, though German ambitions in these areas were clearly of grave concern. Nor was this a war simply to maintain a balance of power on the continent by not allowing any one power to gain inordinate strength, though, again, this was a long-standing British interest. No, for the British this was a war with a much broader purpose. This was a war to preserve a system of British order, national and international, that was seen to be under attack by everything that Germany and its introverted Kultur represented. By the beginning of the twentieth century Germany had, in the eyes of the British, replaced France as the incarnation of flux and irresponsibility in the world. Britain, on the other hand, stood for the reverse: stability and responsibility. Germany threatened not only Britain's military and
116 economic position in the world but the whole moral basis of the Pax Britannica, which, as the British argued, had given the world a century of peace, a respite from general European war not enjoyed since the Rome of the Antonines. The British mission, whether in the wider world, the empire, or at home among her own populace, was principally one of extending the sense of civic virtue, of teaching both the foreigner and the uneducated Briton the rules of civilized social conduct, the rules for "playing the game." The British mission was to introduce "lesser breeds," to use Kipling's words, to "the law." Civilization and law, then, were virtually synonymous. Civilization was possible only if one played the game according to rules laid down by time, history, precedent, all of which amounted to the law. Civilization was a question of objective values, of external form, of behavior rather than sentiment, of duty rather than whim. "It is only civilized beings who can combine," wrote J. S. Mill in his essay "Civilization." All combination is compromise: it is the sacrifice of some portion of individual will for a common purpose. The savage cannot bear to sacrifice, for any purpose, the satisfaction of his individual will. While priding herself on her social and political tolerance throughout the nineteenth century, having provided refuge for the likes of Louis Napoleon, Metternich, Louis Philippe, and Marx, among others, London remained a city, and England a country, that unambiguously espoused an ethic of moderation, of rational reform, and rational restraint. The law and parliamentary institutions were the social acknowledgment of such an ethic and such behavior. If Germany was the principal activist, and hence modernist, nation of the fin-de-siecle world, then Great Britain was the major conservative power. Germany's disruptive energy threatened the essence of Britain's accomplishment, which was the establishment of a measure of law and order in the world. That Britain showed on the whole comparatively little interest in the manifestations of modern culture does not require extensive documentation. Despite Virginia Woolf’s later assertion that human nature changed "on or about December 1910" and Ford Madox Ford's impression that the years 1910 to 1914 were "like an opening world," Britain in 1914 was on balance still thoroughly skeptical of innovative artistic endeavor. Ford complained that "the complete absence of any art" seemed to be "a 117 national characteristic of the British. British music: and theater were little attuned to European developments; painting and literature only slightly more so. In 1904 the National Gallery turned down the gift of a Degas. "Painting here is kept alive, a dim little flickering flame," wrote Walter Sickert in 1914, by tiny groups of devoted fanatics mostly under the age of thirty. The national taste either breaks these fanatics, or compels them to toe the line. The young English painter who loves his art, ends by major force, in producing the chocolate-box in demand. Even more strikingly than in the case of France, new impulses in the arts seemed to be imported from abroad. Whistler, whom Ruskin had accused of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," had begun the important American influence; he was followed in the early part of the century by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Jacob Epstein. If the Germans regarded the war as a spiritual conflict, the British looked on it as a struggle to preserve social values, precisely those values and ideals which the prewar avant-garde had so bitterly attacked: notions of justice, dignity, civility, restraint, and "progress" governed by a respect for law. For Victorians and even the mass of Edwardians, morality was an objective matter. ''Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall," Lord Acton declared in his Cambridge inaugural lecture in 1895, "but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity." The roots of morality might be traced in various ways, but that men, principally through education, were becoming increasingly aware of the difference between right and wrong was not in doubt. Liberty was not permissiveness; it was an outgrowth of social knowledge and discipline. Liberty was hard work. Liberty was not the right to do as you pleased; liberty was the opportunity to do as you should. Ethics was more important than metaphysics. "Hence," wrote J. S. Mill, "it is said with truth that none but a person of confirmed virtue is completely free."' English liberty was a doctrine not of rights but of duties. For Germans the focus of explanation for the war was directed inward and toward the future. Thomas Mann looked on the war as liberation from a putrefying reality. Of the old world he asked, "Did not vermin of the mind swarm about in it like maggots? Did it not ferment and stink of the decaying matter of civilization?" For Mann this war and his art were synonymous; both amounted to a struggle for spiritual freedom. For the British on the other hand the focus was social and historical. 118 Be you the men
you've been, For the British the war was a practical necessity, a sentiment captured by the slogan "business as usual." As one soldier put it in a letter to his parents in October 1914: We are just at the beginning of the struggle I'm afraid, and every hour we should remind ourselves that it is our great privilege to save the traditions of all centuries behind us. It's a grand opportunity, and we must spare no effort to use it, for if we fail we shall curse ourselves in bitterness every year that we live, and our children will despise our memory. For the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy. For the average British soldier there was no question of who was responsible for the war. Private Pattenden of the 1st Hants had landed in France on August 23, been thrown into battle three days later, and had then been marched about constantly so that by early September, feet swollen and blistered, he could no longer walk, only shuffle. Numbed by fatigue, thirst, and hunger, dazed by the horrors he had seen, and totally cynical about his officers, he took out his personal diary on September 5 and scribbled: They have told us our marches have been strategical, all lies it is nothing more or less than a complete retreat and for a fortnight we have had to flee, because we fear to be utterly outclassed and beaten and now if we are attacked . . . we could not run a dozen yards and the result would be a bloody slaughter. Yet, despite the fatigue and depression, the sense of purpose did not flag. During the battle of the Marne, Pattenden found a few moments to note: Oh this is awful, no one can imagine war till they are at it, every living thing suffers by it . . . The Kaiser may be accursed forever, may he never sleep peaceful again, the mad fiend, may he never find rest even after death , . . We must finish him, for if not, we shall never be safe. 119 This sense of purpose was not to be affected by the hardships of the next months, and the views at the end of December were very much the same: the Germans had to be defeated; otherwise civilization would be imperiled. What, then, brought the British out in such large numbers around Christmas to shake hands and laugh and exchange anecdotes and mementoes with the Germans? It was presumably the very same set of values that they were fighting for. Some saw the fraternization as a matter of time-honored courtesies. On a holy day one saluted one's opponent and paid one's respects. During the Peninsular War at the beginning of the preceding century the French and British armies had become so friendly one Christmas that staff officers chanced upon one large group sitting around the same fires, sharing rations and playing cards. The French apparently came to refer to the British as nos amis les ennemis (Our friends the enemy.) . This notion of probity and decorum, of playing the game-- leaving the enemy in peace on the holiest of holy days-- was a central part of the British sense of "fair play." The opponent was still an opponent rather than an enemy; only the implications of his effort were hated. Of course, exceptions to the rule-- some very striking ones-- did arise. In some sectors of the front the British, as we have noted, actually initiated action on Christmas Day. Moreover, the Admiralty sent out seaplanes on Christmas morning to bomb the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven-- a raid that was a complete failure because of dense fog. Yet generally the day was characterized by restraint, repose, and reflection. The sporting imagery of British social discourse has often been remarked upon. In the Victorian era the British did become obsessed with games, and translated the sporting ethic into guidelines for social intercourse as a whole. Sport, in Thomas Arnold's vision at Rugby, where games first became an integral part of the education program, would give a young man the body of a Greek and the soul of a Christian knight. The games cult spread from the public schools to the universities and then farther. In the second half of the nineteenth century football, rugby, and cricket became not simply pastimes but passions for the British. Coal miners, milt workers, and the laboring classes in general were particularly 120 attracted to football, or soccer, because all that was required was an object for kicking. The middle and upper classes developed a predilection for cricket, which, with its bucolic associations, proved to be a most apt vehicle for transposing many of the myths of Merrie England to the modern industrial land scape and also to the empire. Yet both games appealed to society at large. The Clarendon Commission of 1864 insisted that the cricket and football pitches . . . are not merely places of amusement; they help to form some of the most valuable social qualities and manly virtues, and they hold, like the classroom and boarding house, a distinct and important place in public school education. In the 1870s and 1880s schools began to hire professionals as coaches. At Marlborough cricket came to rival classics for the attention of both masters and boys; at Radley the playing fields received as much devotion as chapel. The headmaster of Loretto, H. H. Almond, insisted in 1893 that football would be "productive of scarcely anything but good." It would provide "an education in that spirit of chivalry, fairness and good temper." Sports, then, were to serve both a moral and a physical purpose; they would encourage self-reliance and team spirit; they would build up the individual and integrate him into the group. "Athleticism is no unimportant bulwark of the constitution," mused Charles Box, a cricket writer, in 1888. It "has no sympathy with nihilism, communism, nor any other 'ism' that points to national disorder." On the contrary, sport developed pluck, determination, and public spirit; sport, as the Times put it on the Monday after the English football final of 1899, was of great value "in the battles of life." By the end of the century the sports cult had reached all segments of society. Every conversation one heard during a walk around an industrial town in the evening seemed to involve a "piece of football criticism or prophecy." By Edward's reign crowds of 100,000 attended football finals at Crystal Palace. Interest in sports even over shadowed interest in politics for a great many. G. K. Chesterton quipped in 1904 that the cricketer C. B. Fry "represents us much better than Mr. Chamberlain." And a cartoon in Punch before the war showed a workingman pointing to his member of Parliament-- MP's began to be paid in 1911-- and saying, "The likes of Hus . . . 'as to pay him £400 a year. It makes me that wild to think as we could 'ave two first-class 'arf-backs for the same money." 121 Probably the most famous poem of the late Victorian and Edwardian era was Sir Henry Newbolt's ''Vitai Lampada," written in 1898: There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight - Ten to make and the match to win - A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. And it's not for
the sake of a ribboned coat, But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote - "Play up! play up! and play the game!" The next stanza transported the sporting mentality, along with the playing fields of Eton, to the outposts of empire. The sand of the desert is sodden red - Red with the wreck of a square that broke; The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke; The river of
death has brimmed his banks, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: "Play up! play up! and play the game!" "Play the game!'' That's what life is about. Decency, fortitude, grit, civilization, Christianity, commerce, all blend into one--the game! When Kipling, in his most bitter mood, frustrated by the war in South Africa and then by the death of friends like Cecil Rhodes, vented his spleen in that extraordinary about-face, "The Islanders," in 1902, he could find no imagery more appropriate for the scorn he felt toward the British than that of sports: . . . ye contented your souls With the
flannelled fools at the wicket At the end of July 1914, Henry James, anxious that "some awful brutal justice" might make the British pay for years of "materialized stupidity and vulgarity," was reminded of Kipling's lines. James wrote: If anything
very bad does happen to the country, there isn't anything like the French
intelligence to react--with the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied
oaf and tutti quanti,
representing so much of our preferred intelligence. 122 If the cynicism expressed by Kipling and James was not shared by many in Britain, the metaphors used to capture the essence of British character were. Rupert Brooke, that aesthete's aesthete, also resorted to sports imagery in his celebration of the British response to the war when it broke, likening youthful soldiers to "swimmers into cleanness leaping." In this spirit the British entered the war and in this spirit they continued it for some time. It was certainly in this spirit that most of the British participants joined in the Christmas truce. The war was a game, deadly earnest, to be sure, but a game nevertheless-- "all great fun," as Rupert Brooke and so many others kept saying in their letters home. One letter reporting the events of Christmas on the 6th Gordons’ front related how a hare suddenly burst into view: All at once Germans came scurrying from their trenches and British from theirs, and a marvellous thing happened. It was all like a football match, the hare being the football, the grey tunicked Germans the one side, and the kilted "Jocks" the other. The game was won by the German who captured the prize. But more was secured than a hare-- a sudden friendship had been struck up, the truce of God had been called, and for the rest of Christmas day not a shot was fired along our section. Here the sporting spirit is credited with producing the truce, and of course the suggestion is that were all men to play the game properly, there would be no war. Some of the Germans who had spent time in England-- and there were a surprising number of them-- clearly had acquired the British passion. Lance Corporal Hines of the Queen's Westminster Rifles reported that one German said to him in broken English, "Good morning, sir; I live at Alexander-road, Homsey, and I would see Woolwich Arsenal play Tottenham tomorrow." 123 Jerome K. Jerome, author of the enormously successful Three Men in a Boat, took the line that the sporting spirit was the essence of civilization and called on the Germans to treat the war as "The Greatest Game of All": Come, gentlemen, let us make an honourable contest of it, that shall leave as little bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believed that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both. But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all: the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be lasting. Let us call it a game. After all, what else is it? As Jerome was suggesting, the spirit of the game was the important thing. Winning or losing was secondary. If the spirit was right, the game would be a victory for everybody. In this very spirit, a British artillerist in a letter home described what he called "the greatest sight." It involved a single German Taube aircraft being chased by sixteen French and British planes. The most exciting part for the British gunner was that the German got away! "And we gave him a cheer, for the odds were against him, and he must have been a great chap." This letter was printed in Edinburgh's Scotsman in early January. As the war dragged on such sentiments would fade. If they did appear on occasion, they certainly never found their way into the letter columns of newspapers. Though there were incidents later of officers trying to rouse their men to bravery by dribbling footballs across no man's land during an attack-- the most famous example was that of Captain W. P. Nevill at the Somme in 1916-- these were isolated cases. Nevill, who was killed instantly within moments of kick-off on July 1, 1916, was remembered by one of his fellows as "the battalion buffoon." Roland D. Mountfort, who survived the fruitless attack on Pozieres on the first day of the Somme offensive with only a shoulder wound, recounted the events of the day to his mother and felt it necessary to add, "We didn't dribble footballs, neither did we say 'This way to Berlin, boys' nor any of the phrases employed weekly in the 'News of the World.'” As the war continued, the sporting spirit, if not the sporting vocabulary, which was so ingrained, would subside, but at Christmas 1914 that spirit was still strong. 124 The sporting cult could of course be taken to extremes, and then it could backfire. In Magdeburg five British officers who were prisoners of war were sentenced shortly after Christmas to eight days imprisonment for playing football with loaves of black bread. To the British, when they learned of the incident through the press, the behavior of their soldiers represented the indomitable spirit of Tommy Atkins; to the Germans, such antics were the height of insolence and, coming as they did from soldiers, even more disreputable than school boy bun-throwing and other such pranks. Gustav Riebensahm also felt that the sporting fetish reflected badly on the British. On December 26 he wrote in his diary: The English are said to have told the 53rd Regiment they are exceedingly thankful for the truce because they simply had to play football again. The whole business is becoming ridiculous and must come to an end. I arranged with the 55th Regiment that the truce will end this evening. Not only the Germans but the French scoffed at British attitudes at
times. The British simply did not take anything seriously. "They consider
the war a sport," complained Louis Mairet.
They are "too calm and inclined to a who-gives-a-damn
attitude." Even after the war the French were to recall the Brirish sporting spirit with anger and were to refer to
it as an expression of l'egoisme anglais. Not surprisingly, sporting organizations were important in recruiting volunteers. By the end of 1914 over half a million volunteers had come forward through such organizations. Even a Footballers Battalion, known officially as the 17th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, or "the Die Hards," was formed. Football stars were to set an example for British youth. The history of the 17th Middlesex provides an insight into the fate of the British sporting spirit in this war. Initially the battalion was kept in England to play exhibition matches around the country and to drum up recruits with appeals at half time to the patriotism of the spectators, but in November 1915 the unit was sent to France to play regiments there. The War Office had decided that the morale of the troops on the Western Front needed boosting. In France the battalion did receive some combat training, but at first it spent most of its 125 time playing football. However, in June 1916, because of manpower needs but also to serve yet again as an example, the unit was finally sent into action at Vilmy Ridge. Casualties there and later at Beaumont Hamel on the Somme were extremely high, and these decimated the battalion. In December 1916, in the final of the Divisional Football Cup, the 17th Middlesex, who usually trounced their opponents by scores in double figures, managed to beat 34th Brigade by a score of only 2-1, an indication of the toll on football talent the war had by now taken. In February 1918 the battalion was finally disbanded. At any given time earlier, over two hundred footballers had belonged to the battalion; now only about thirty remained. Many British soldiers with set views about the Germans, acquired largely from a press that had been strongly anti-German even before the war, would have regarded Jerome K. Jerome's appeal to a mutual sportsmanship as utterly futile. The German, portrayed as an insensitive, regimented brute, was incapable of playing the game. After all, even the Germans admitted-- so claimed a Sheffield paper before 1914-- that what football did for the British, compulsory military service achieved for the Germans. For the two peoples each activity was "the school of the nation." Given such an outlook, the British approached fraternization with a mixture of condescension and moral purpose. They would show the Germans what civility meant and what trust involved. The first actual encounter with the Germans produced a variety of responses, many of them expressing great surprise. Someone like Edward Hulse would continue to voice a muffled disdain for the Germans; others found the reality of the enemy an exhilarating revelation. W. R. M. Percy of the London Rifles could hardly restrain his enthusiasm. "They were really magnificent in the whole thing," he wrote of the foe, "and jolly good sorts. I now have a very different opinion of the German.'' Of his encounter with the Saxons Percy Jones commented: I spoke to
and shook hands with scores of the enemy. They looked very fit, well
uniformed and shod, but very young. They seemed un commonly cheerful and
friendly, and gave us a royal welcome. Most of them seemed a very good class
of fellows and appear, by the autographs we obtained, to be students at
Leipzig . . . Altogether we had a great day with our enemies, and parted with
much hand-shak ing and
mutual good wishes. They assured us again and again that they would shoot
high if we would but we had no opportunity of putting them to the test, as we
are now at Houplines opposite the Prussians. 126 From his own experience Private Dailing of the 1st Somerset Light Infantry concluded, "They are not all so black as they are sometimes painted." In the account he sent home Dailing repeatedly used words like "honourable" and "gentlemanly." Captain Loder of the Scots Guards had the impression that the civilizing mission involved in fraternization had made progress: "Both sides have played the game," he wrote in the battalion diary, "and I know that this Regiment [he was referring to Riebensahm's 15th] anyhow has learnt to trust an Englishman's word." Lance Corporal Hines of the Queen's Westminster Rifles had a similar response. He was sorry to be relieved on Boxing Day, "as we might have still further improved our good relations with the enemy."" In view of this remark and presumably similar sentiments among French soldiers involved in fraternization, the comment of a French propaganda manual published in 1915 takes on particular irony. Designed for home consumption, the manual played down the dangers of trench warfare and pointed to its comforts and pleasures, and in this context remarked that the poilus were reluctant to go on leave after their Christmas celebrations in 1914 because they had had such a good time at the front. In other cases the British civilizing mission obviously met with setbacks, setbacks associated primarily with Prussian units. The Saxons blamed the Prussians in several areas for breaking the truce by firing on the unsuspecting enemy. Opposite the Queen's Westminster Rifles the Saxons pointed out that they did not trust the Prussians, who, as the report in the Rifles' regimental diary put it, would not "play fair" in the same situation. Opposite the North Staffordshires the Saxons warned that the Prussians to the right were "nasty fellows." On Boxing Day one of the Saxon officers paid his respects to his counterpart with the North Staffs and requested politely that the British soldiers be made to keep their heads down after midday: "We are Saxons; you are Anglo-Saxons; word of a gentleman is for us as for you." Here was evidence that at least some of the Germans knew how to play the game. But others did not, and they had to be taught the rules of civility as if they were schoolchildren. The Daily Mail printed an extraordinary letter on the last day of the year relating an account of a snowball 127 fight between British and German trenches at a point where they were only fifty yards apart. It supposedly all started after a burly German tied a flag to the end of his rifle, waved it about above his trench, and, having attracted attention, shouted in stentorian voice, "Vas you as fed up vid za war as we vas?" "This led up to much chaff," the Daily Mail letter recounted, "the dinging of tobacco and chocolate at one another, and ended up with a snowball match." Relations, how ever, "became a bit strained" when a German "put a Stone in a snowball and hit a Tommy in the eye with it." Of course, in keeping with this schoolboy atmosphere, tearful protests and complaints followed, and finally the culprit apologized, "so all was well again."" V I C T O R I A N S Y N T H E S I S What we are suggesting here is that there was a frame of mind common to the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Of course, neither age was one of certitude, the latter much less so than the former, but both were ages seeking certitude. For all our attention to the movement and moral questioning that abounded-- and our view of the Edwardian age in particular has been dominated recently by this sense of transition-- we should not lose sight of the craving for fixities, the belief that experience should be subservient to order, that bridged the eras. That inimitable Victorian Samuel Smiles summed up the urge pithily: "A place for everything, and everything in its place." This was an urge that was no less strong in Britain after the turn of the century than before. Smiles's guidebook to moral rectitude and success, Self-Help, published in 1859, had sold over a quarter million copies by 1900. This frame of mind naturally involved a social code, a combination of social and ethical values. This code was not immutable, and to describe it as "bourgeois" or "Victorian" or "Edwardian" is to reduce it to a catchword that distorts. Yet to deny the existence of a prevailing social code or morality, which in one way or another involved the majority of citizens, regardless of class or station, to deny that experience was compartmentalized into categories and priorities of good and bad and right and wrong, is equally to distort. The social code was like an atom with its components in constant motion and in 128 an ever-changing relationship to one another, but it did, despite many prominent exceptions and anomalies, exist. Indeed, the exceptions and anomalies actually reinforced the power of the code by making the public more aware of the need for propriety. Without going back to the Roman conquest or the battlefield of Hastings, one can assert that the insular reality of Great Britain, the gradual centralization, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of political authority, the availability of moderately good channels of communication by sea and a network of navigable rivers, and the importance of London as a center of political, economic, and cultural authority, all this encouraged the emergence of a national sense of identity. As the systems of communication improved-- with the advent of the railway, the telegraph, the steamship-- and as urbanization proceeded, that sense of identity was passed on to wider segments of the population. But perhaps the most important influence in the development of a vision of social order based on commonly accepted values was the growth of Protestantism and of Bible reading, especially in the wake of the great revival in the early nineteenth century. By the end of that century a shared vision of social order was widely in place. This vision and its accompanying values were not imposed through social imperialism but grew out of the religious environment and, where this did not suffice, out of improved economic and social conditions. It is generally accepted that by the end of the Victorian era, most of the British population no longer had to struggle simply to subsist. A measure of comfort, however small, had been achieved in most cases. Consumption of meat instead of bread, of milk and eggs instead of just potatoes, was rising. In recent years, before the turn of the century, there had been a steady rise in real wages, a decline in family size, a drop in the consumption of alcohol, and the beginnings of social welfare provisions. Archdeacon Wilson, headmaster of Clifton College, remarked in a speech to the Working Men's Club of St. Agnes in 1893: Possibly a future historian writing the history of the English people in this period will think much less of the legislative and even of the commercial and scientific progress of the period than of the remarkable social movement by which there has been an effort made, by a thousand agencies, to bring about unity of feeling between different classes, and to wage war against conditions of life which earlier generations seem to have tolerated. 129 As Robert Roberts has argued in his memoir of working-class life in Salford, values associated primarily with the middle classes had, by the eve of the First World War, permeated the lower orders, which wished for, according to Roberts, "nothing more than to be 'respectful and respected' in the eyes of men." Respectability was perhaps the key feature of the moral and social climate of this period in Britain. Whether one was respectable was more important as a criterion of social acceptability than wealth or power. Prudence, earnestness, and moral fervor were necessary signals of respectability, and following the preachments of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, of John Wesley, Jeremy Bentham, and J. S. Mill, duty came to be included in the category of pleasure and virtue in that of happiness. Of course an Edwardian sense of crisis existed that was fueled by suffragette activity, labor unrest, opposition to the role of the aristocracy in the legislative process, and concern regarding the future of Ireland. In the agitation surrounding each of these problems many saw a challenge to the rule of law. Any reference in Britain to war in the summer of l914 was thought to be a reference to the possibility of civil strife in Ireland, not to British involvement on the continent. In late Victorian and Edwardian writing a sense of decline permeates the literary imagination. As a young boy trying out his pen, J. B. Priestley wrote poetry about disaster and annihilation without under standing why: "Tonight I think the world is dying."' Moreover, a considerable amount of intellectual excitement was created in Britain by the likes of G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, not to mention the titillation caused by the Aubrey Beardsleys and Oscar Wildes. Bur despite the premonition of doom and despite a measure of artistic and intellectual effervescence, conformity, complacency, and even smugness were far more firmly established in Britain than in France, let alone Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, or Russia. In values and judgments on issues of decency, the family, social and political order, and religion, the Edwardians were extensions of the Victorians. That there was a greater threat of change and a stronger sense of challenge afoot in the later era, that was the difference. After the start of the new century that threat of change came to be identified primarily with Germany. Germany represented the new, the different, the dangerous. In this role she had replaced France. The spate of invasion stories centering on the Germans chat became great literary and theatrical hits in the 130 first decade of this century-- notably the play An Englishman's Home by Major Guy du Maurier-- is evidence of this fear of change and the identification of this change with Germany. A parable, related in The New Statesman in 1913, told of a passenger, on an express train chat had made an unexpected stop at a suburban station, who decided that he would descend from the train. "You can't get off here," said the conductor to the passenger, who was already standing on the platform. "But," came the reply, "I have got off." "The train doesn't stop here," insisted the conductor. "But," said the former passenger, "it has stopped."' The critic and poet Gerald Gould used this story to illustrate his point about the privileged position of the artist in relation to morality, but an equally important point that might have been drawn from the story is that the rebel's fellow passengers failed to comprehend, much less follow, his initiative. That interpretation of the parable certainly applied to the British public. I S T H E R E H O N E Y S T I L L F O R T E A ? At the end of July 1914, Rupert Brooke, alarmed by the heightening European crisis, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh, "And I'm anxious that England may act rightly." But what did it mean to "act rightly"? Another letter, a few days later, in which Brooke described an outing into the countryside, hinted in a general way at his own response to this question: I'm a
Warwickshire man. Don't talk to me of Dartmoor or
Snowden or the Thames or the lakes. I know the heart of England. It has a
hedgy, warm bountiful dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the little
hills, and all the roads wiggle with pleasure. There's a spirit of rare
homeliness about the houses and the countryside, earthy, uneccentric
yet elusive, fresh, meadowy, gaily gentle . . . Of
California the other States in America have this proverb: "Flowers
without scent, birds without song, men without honour,
and women wichout
virtue" - and at least three of the four sections of this proveb I know very well to be true. But Warwickshire is
the exact opposite of that. Here the flowers smell of heaven; there are no
such larks as ours, and no such nightingales; the men pay more than they owe;
and the women have very great and wonderful virtue, and that, mind you, by no
means through the mere absence of trial. In Warwickshire there are
butterflies all the year round and a full moon every night . . . .
Shakespeare and I are Warwickshire yokels. What a country! 131 Aware of his sentimentality he went on to say, "This is nonsense," and yet when it came to locating some of the ingredients encapsulated in perhaps his most famous lines of poetry-- his reference to . . . some
corner of a foreign field it clearly was not nonsense. This England was one of honor and virtue and duty in which an aristocratic and middle-class view of the world had merged, in which empire and sport, honesty and social stability, were all part of an indivisible whole. This was a society for which the German adventure was a revolutionary threat, a threat to security, prosperity, and integrity. It was a threat to the Wessex landscape of Hardy's novels, to the Shropshire lad of A. E. Housman's imagination, and to Mr. Badger of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, who had built his house on the remains of an ancient civilization. . . . oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? Those lines from "The Old Vicarage, Granchester" Rupert Brooke had, ironically, written in Berlin in a cafe in May 1912. He was to die during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign on St. George's Day, the day on which both Shakespeare and Wordsworth had died. From the start for Britain the war had nothing to do with territory, either in the Balkans or in Belgium. The invasion of France was a much more serious strategic threat to the British than the invasion of Belgium and yet, publicly, it was over "poor little Belgium" that the British government declared war and mobilized sentiment. From the start this was for the British a war about values, about civilization, about sportsmanship, and especially about the relationship of the future to the past. As Lloyd George put it in his Queen's Hall speech of September 19, 1914: We have been living in a sheltered valley for generations. We have been too comfortable and too indulgent . . . and the stern hand of Fate has scourged us to an elevation where' we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation-- the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honour, Duty, Patriotism, and, clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. 132 A segment of the population, particularly the young, looked on the war as an adventure to be welcomed, and their reason for supporting the war was not dissimilar to that of the Germans: the war was a pathway to the future, to progress, to revolution, to change. A certain millenarianism was in the air in Britain as well. An element of this is to be seen in Rupert Brooke, Herbert Read, Charles Sorley, and other young aesthetes. But for most people in Britain this was a war to preserve and restore. Such then was the British background to the Christmas truce. From a practical standpoint there was good reason to postpone the war until the pitch became playable again, but, what was more significant, it was the broader ideal--that the British gentleman must show his mettle-- that brought the British over the top into no man's land. But why did the Germans join in in such large numbers? What must be noted first of all about German participation is that it was highest among non-Prussians, among Bavarians and Saxons in particular. We have seen the tension that existed between these men and the Prussians. The Bavarian and Saxon soldiers came from territories with a strong regional identity, for whom, as in the case of the British, history was not subservient to a vision of the future, as it was for so many Prussians. While Prussian regiments also joined in fraternization, they seem not to have been involved as extensively or enthusiastically as non-Prussian units. The German quest for modernity was led by Prussia. The Christmas truce of 1914 was, by contrast, a celebration of history and tradition. At home in all belligerent countries the news of the fraternization was greeted with mixed feelings. The British were by far the most open about it. The press in Britain freely published letters describing the events. The Daily Mail even published, on January 5, 1915, two pictures showing a French and German soldier filling buckets together at a well and then walking to their respective trenches. The headline at the top of the page read EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE UNOFFICIAL TRUCE. Some editors, by paying correspondents for letters describing trench life, may in fact have contributed to a measure 133 of hyperbole and in some cases outright invention. Newspapers certainly editorialized on the significance of the truce, and clergymen in Britain discussed its implications from their pulpits. The conclusion drawn in most quarters was that the war must regrettably go on. The German challenge must be met. The war revolved not around territorial questions but around values: one simply could not yield to German egotism. The French, by contrast, muzzled all mention of fraternization. The press was not allowed to print any accounts of the events, not even from foreign papers. Instead, a new degree of stridency appeared in the French press over the Christmas period. Maurice Donnay of the Academie francaise submitted an article over Christmas to Le Figaro which appeared on the front page on the last day of 1914. It was entitled "La Sainte Haine" ("Sacred Hate"). An article on the day before began with the words "No German can open his mouth or take up his pen without lying." How out of touch with events of the war the home front in France was becoming was indicated by the booklet La Vie de tranchee, published some months later. In its portrait of life in the trenches it included an anecdote about Anglo German relations in the front line. The British, it claimed, loved to sing in chorus in the trenches at night. The Germans were supposedly enthralled by this entertainment and would shout wunderbar schon! And then these pigs they want to sing too, and you should hear the sounds that greet them: dogs, cats, tigers . . . and their voices are drowned out, with lots of vigorous cries of "Shut up!" as well. Incensed by the insult, the Germans start firing. The English, in turn, laugh themselves sick. That's how nights at the front are spent, claimed La Vie de tranchee -in good fun! It was the same mentality that both produced this type of fiction and claimed at the same time that every German was a liar. The German authorities allowed the national press to talk about the truce for a few days. The socialist organ Vorwiirts was intrigued by the subject and published the most information on it. The Berlin liberal press also carried the odd item. But suddenly the military authorities forbade any further mention of the subject. Strict orders went out to troops in all armies that a recurrence of Trench Life. 134 Such incidents would have drastic repercussions; and since headquarters in each army pursued the matter for a time, seeking names and all available information, soldiers did become wary of further contacts with the enemy. Nonetheless, sporadic incidents of fraternization continued to occur throughout 1915. And in November and December of that year there were truces, although active fraternization at Christmas was limited to a very few cases, the most publicized being one involving the Scots Guards yet again. By then the mood was changing. "How many Christmases the war may last," Walter H. Page, American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, noted in a dispatch, "nobody's wise enough to know." In 1916 the incidents of fraternization dwindled to a handful, and in 1917 and 1918, despite mutinies in the French armies when remarks such as "We must make peace with the Germans and attack the British" were heard, fraternization on the Western Front was negligible. The enemy became increasingly an abstraction as the nature of the war changed. The gentleman too became an abstraction. And the hero lost his name: he became the nameless, faceless unknown soldier. The regimental history of the 6th Cheshires includes this laconic sentence: "On the 2nd September 1918, in our attack from Locon, we re-took the trenches in which we spent Christmas Day, 1914.” Presumably the author discovered this only later. It is doubtful that anybody in the regiment in 1918 had been in those trenches earlier, at Christmas 1914, or, what is even more significant, could have recognized them again four years later. The world had changed greatly in the meantime. 135 |