By Sheldon Greaves
Many years ago PBS ran a wonderful Christmas special called “Simple Gifts” featuring a series of animated short segments based on several Christmas stories. They were all thoughtful, sometimes provocative, and emotionally rich. One of the segments was on the “Christmas Truce” that took place on Christmas in 1914, during the early years of World War I. I had vaguely heard of this event, but not enough for it to register. “Simple Gifts” was my first exposure to this amazing piece of 20th century history. Here is that segment, courtesy of YouTube:
It runs slightly over eight minutes.
This being the 100th anniversary of the First World War, it seems even more appropriate than ever to recall this astonishing, spontaneous moment when, all along the meat-grinder that was the Western Front, soldiers and officers from both sides decided that since they could not be home, they would gladly celebrate Christmas with each other–and the enemy. Consider that “fraternizing with the enemy” was a serious offence on both sides, punishable by summary execution. But goodwill, or early war-weariness, or the special cynicism regarding war that seems to be the sole domain of those who have lived through it apparently prevailed. What is so amazing to me is that this was not an isolated incident, and in quite a few cases the truce held until New Year. In fact, some units were so determined not to fire on their new friends that they had to be replaced by new troops who would follow orders.
My grandfather, Harry George Greaves (Grivos), as a young Greek immigrant joined up in 1918 and survived his tour “over there” as a young combat engineer with the 4th Infantry Division. By the time he showed up–by 1915, in fact, commanders on both sides had made it clear that such goodwill would no longer be tolerated. They had been thoroughly incensed by the truce; they had a perfectly good war going and these do-gooders were mucking it up!
It seem incredible now that such a thing could even happen, that trained soldiers in large numbers put aside their weapons, go meet their counterparts in no-man’s-land, and celebrate Christmas. It might be seen as an anomaly and as such things go in modern war, it was. But in earlier times there are instances of this kind of fraternizing. During the Crusades the Franks and the Saracens were known to entertain each other between bouts of mutual attempted murder.
We wrestle with the realities of World War I and its unholy brood of successors. We use words like “insane” and “senseless” to describe them, and yet many use it as proof that this is the nature of humankind, as though our intuitions to the contrary counted for nothing in the accounting. That tension between our revulsion towards and lionizing of that war and others hides a significant truth. It is possible, even likely, that we are not violent, bloodthirsty killers by nature, because when we do such things our nature is deformed, degraded, sometimes even destroyed. Prosecuting war demands conditioning, by appropriate training or a combination of other environmental factors before we can overcome our innate reluctance to kill.
On that subject, I refer you to an excellent read from truthout.org, titled “When Soldiers Say No to War” that gives more details on this incident (actually, you can find tons of good stuff on the web about this), with an interesting sequel about an experiment that brought together US veterans of Vietnam and Russian veterans of Afghanistan in an effort for both groups to find healing. I highly recommend it, particularly the questions it raises about war, human nature, and the question of whether we are truly condemned to repeat such prolonged exercises in waste and carnage.