Christmas truce

War occupies a strange, hidden corner of our psyches: on the one hand it is a horrific place, where the worst instincts of human beings are allowed to roam free with the only purpose of inflicting as much damage as possible. On the other however, it is a weirdly desirable experience, capable of creating unusually strong bonds between people and of pumping so much adrenaline through their bodies to leave them both exhausted and addicted to the horrors of the battlefield. For obvious, and very good, reasons, war is a condition that our rational minds despise. But if it wasn’t also somehow sought by the darkest, most rejected bits of our guts, mankind would have stopped fighting altogether a long time ago. 

This is the irreconcilable contradiction that the soldiers of the Christmas truce experienced firsthand in the cold winter of 1914, in the proximity of Mesen, a small Belgian village in West Flanders. 

World war one had started earlier that year, on 28 July, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire shelled Belgrade following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Less than a month later, the major European powers had plunged the continent into the most destructive conflict that humankind had ever seen. And millions of men on all sides had enthusiastically volunteered to join it, pushed by a sense of adventure and excitement, with an eagerness that defies logic. Germany was quick on the offensive and almost captured Paris, before being pushed back and digging in to protect its territorial gains: Luxembourg, the vast majority of Belgium and a large chunk of north-east France. The infamous trench warfare of WW1 had begun. 

In Belgium, only a strip of West Flanders remained free of German troops, with the frontline brushing the city of Ypres and, south of it, the village of Mesen. Here, close to the hamlet of St. Yvon, something exceptional happened a few months into the conflict. On Christmas Eve 1914, German soldiers set up a Christmas tree and began singing. The British troops facing them a few meters away answered from their trenches by intonating carols. And on Christmas day soldiers from both sides dared to leave their dugouts holding white flags for an unofficial truce. After meeting in no man’s land, soldiers greeted each other, exchanged simple gifts, smoked each other’s cigarettes and organised a series of impromptu football matches. An episode of fraternisation with the enemy that officers of both sides would have harshly, although not always successfully, opposed for the rest of the conflict, to avoid undermining the fighting spirit of their men. 

War indeed requires the dehumanisation of the enemy, for there is no other way to stomach the mass killings it requires. But close to Mesen, soldiers who had already fought each other mercilessly, and would have continued to do so afterwards, decided to put a temporary stop to it, to forget their hate and anger and remember, even if for a few hours only, that in the end all men suffer in the same way, regardless of whatever seems to divide them. 

The truce of Mesen probably felt like a surreal experience to many of those involved. Here’s how Johannes Niemann, a German soldier, described one of the football games that took place on that Christmas: “A Scot produced a football (…): a regular game of football began, with caps laid on the ground as goalposts. The frozen meadow was ideal [to play on]. One of us had a camera with him. Quickly the two sides gathered together in a group, all neatly lined up with the football in the middle (…). The game ended 3:2 to Fritz”. 

Rifleman Frederick Mallard, a soldier in the British army, left an enthusiastic witness account of the truce: “On Christmas Eve (…) we were wondering if the Germans would agree to a couple days’ truce, and soon as it was dark we were surprised to see Christmas trees stuck the top of their trenches lighted up with candles, and men sitting on the trench. We got out our trench and exchanged a few cigarettes with the Germans, and invited them to come over and have a drink and smoke, but we did not like to trust each other first. After a while, however, three of our officers started to go over and meet German officers who were approaching them (…). It made a fine picture to see those six officers meet in the space between the two lines, shake hands, and smoke each other’s cigarettes”. Unfortunately, his destiny would have been much more bitter than his words, for he died fighting in Belgium a few months later, on 4 September 1915. That was his last Christmas. 

The extraordinary events of 25 December 1914 are now commemorated by two monuments: secular shrines celebrating the men that challenged their authorities to save their humanity. One is the Christmas Truce Memorial located in the centre of Mesen. It is the work of British sculptor Andrew Edwards and shows a British and German soldier shaking hands over a football. The other is just south of Mesen, where some of the actual football matches took place. It is a simple broken artillery shell rusting in the wind, lonely guardian to a field that once was a land of death and destruction. To this day, it is regularly visited by football supporters from everywhere, who compete to decorate it with their clubs’ scarves, tee-shirts and footballs. Over a century later, they continue to gather here to remember, as the inscription next to the monument says, all those that had the chance of experiencing the little peace during the great war.