The war would be over by Christmas. That was what everyone said, when Britain, France, and Germany went to war in August 1914. Maybe that’s why, by the start of December, with no victory in sight, there was a pause in the fighting along parts of the Western Front stretching from Belgium through France. And maybe that’s why, when singing broke out in the trenches on Christmas Eve, soldiers on both sides decided to risk a walk up into no man’s land and even, in one recorded case, a soccer kickabout. Troops on both sides sang “Silent Night” as snow began to fall.
The truce was never formally declared by any power. Although Pope Benedict XV had called for a cease-fire earlier in the month, it had been rejected by all parties. France and Belgium had little appetite for a truce with an invading army. And in a war between global, multiethnic empires, there was little agreement about the timing or the meaning of a Christmas truce for soldiers who were Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Hindu, or Shinto. Even for Eastern Orthodox troops on the Eastern Front, Christmas would be a few weeks later.
German soldiers gather around a Christmas tree during World War I.HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Instead, there were spontaneous truces along the front lines. While both sides engaged in singing, many Germans had reportedly decided not to take any action from Dec. 25 to 27. In France, near Laventie, German soldiers started putting up Christmas trees along their trenches on the 23rd and their officers requested a meeting with their British counterparts. In their book, Christmas Truce, Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton report that the German officers “proposed a private truce for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day” that the British officers accepted. Similar informal arrangements were made up and down the front lines, with different results in different sectors.
The informal nature of the truce meant that not everyone participated. This is partly why the truce has now attained a mythical quality—many who were on the front did not experience it and so doubted that it had taken place. Even where peace seemed to prevail, officers worried that “the truce will probably go on until someone is foolish enough to let off his rifle.”
Across the Western Front, the Christmas truces came to an end at different points. By the 27th, rain had resumed and the soldiers were once again knee-deep in mud. Along some parts of the line, fighting resumed in January. But one soldier wrote home that part of the front near Ploegsteert in Flanders didn’t really see any action from the Christmas Truce until mid-March. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 definitively shattered the peace. Attempts for an Easter truce in early April were largely ignored.
The Christmas Truce that took place in the first December of World War I has transcended historical curiosity to become a feature of popular memory. Pop songs, TV shows, and even ads have all made reference to the events of December 1914. Why has it adhered in this way? What has it come to symbolize, more than 100 years on?
“Christmas Eve, 1862,” an illustration by artist Thomas Nast from Harper’s Weekly, January 1863 edition.Heritage Art/via Getty Images
Regular truces were a typical part of pre-modern warfare. Staged battles left time for clearing the field, burying the dead, and regrouping. Informal encounters between soldiers did not always lead to fighting, and impromptu Christmas truces occurred in the U.S. Civil War and the South African War in 1899. In a way, the Christmas Truce appeals because it seems to point to the last moment of an older form of warfare. Given the horrors of the war to come, it seems poignant in its innocence.
The popularity of the Christmas Truce of 1914—even though it was not repeated for the rest of World War I—was not just as a token of nostalgia, though. It was also responsible for creating something new: the idea that there should be a Christmas truce.
One of the enduring legacies of World War I was the shift from an approach to humanitarian principles and human rights that was “episodic, empathic, and voluntary” to, as one scholar put it, a “permanent, professionalized, and bureaucratic” responsibility of states operating in a transnational network. Alongside these developments in humanitarian organizing, truces moved out of the realm of improvised, informal agreements between soldiers. Instead, they were called for and negotiated by states and transnational peace organizations. And they did so with the Christmas Truce of 1914 as a model.
For instance, in 1965, in the midst of the escalating Vietnam War, the Viet Cong proposed a Christmas cease-fire. Meant to parallel the cease-fire that had accompanied the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations earlier in the year, it was embraced back at home and internationally by the peace movement. The truce was arranged with some skepticism on the ground. Even more so given the previous year’s Christmas Eve bombing of a hotel where many U.S. officers were staying. The truce was agreed to and formally communicated to both sides.
American soldiers set up a Christmas tree in a spare mortar pit at the Duc Lap Special Forces camp during the Vietnam War in 1969.Bettmann Archive/via Getty Images
A newspaper report from the cease-fire explicitly echoed the coverage of the 1914 truce. “It was quiet—the guns of war were stilled by a Christmas truce for the first time in almost a year,” the paper reported. “And from the top of the hill, the words of ‘silent Night’ wafted down” as the men rested their rifles on their foxholes and contemplated what the Viet Cong forces made of the song.
At the end of the 48-hour pause, both sides accused each other of violating the cease-fire. Radio Hanoi reported that “in complete disregard for their proclaimed Christmas truce, the U.S. imperialists Sunday sent many flights of aircraft.” The U.S. argued that these were reconnaissance flights, rather than bombing raids, and that the “Communists had launched at lease 60 small attacks.”
What the soldiers of World War I accidentally stumbled on was a new form of propaganda. Christmas cease-fires build morale among the troops, but also more widely. A key feature in the rhetoric of war is convincing your side that the opposing side is not just wrong, but bad. Truces and cease-fires play into this: The side proposing the cease-fire paints itself as humane. Violations of the cease-fire are fodder for arguments that the violators are inhumane.
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Soldiers on the Western Front in France welcome Christmas mail during World War I.IMAGO/piemags via Reuters Connect
In foreign policy, the Christmas Truce endured because it turned out to be good for both international and domestic public relations. But as a result of this realization, Christmas cease-fires also became more top-down. While the soldiers were responsible for organizing spontaneous truces along the front lines in 1914, the Christmas truces of the Vietnam War and other more recent conflicts have been ordered by leaders, often in response to international pressure. In Vietnam, despite suspicion among U.S. troops that the Viet Cong “took advantage of the truce” to rearm and resupply its forces in the south, the Christmas truce was often implemented. While this provided respite and a chance for point-scoring in the media, some U.S. soldiers were left asking, “What good would it do?”
And they asked that with good reason. Christmas—and other religious holidays—have been just as likely to mark the beginning of a campaign, taking advantage of the enemy’s hope for some respite. George Washington crossed the Delaware River on Christmas 1776, surprising the British-allied Hessian troops in Trenton. During the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong took advantage of the Lunar New Year in 1968 to attack while many of South Vietnam’s soldiers were on holiday leave. And then-U.S. President Richard Nixon broke the expected Christmas Truce tradition in 1972 when the U.S. launched its largest B-52 raid on North Vietnam in the course of the war. The Yom Kippur War in Israel began on the Jewish holiday in 1973. Operation Ramadan in the Iran-Iraq War launched to coincide with the holy month in 1982.
This explains the unease of the leadership in December 1914. In Laventie, one group of British soldiers was about to withdraw from the trenches on the 26th when a German deserter, taking advantage of the truce, crossed to warn them that an attack was imminent. The British soldiers fired artillery at the German trenches and then lay in wait for the attack. But it never came. And the Germans, put on alert by the artillery fire, similarly had spent the night in anticipation of a British attack.
In fact, while the 1914 Christmas Truce saw soldiers sharing tobacco and wine, Christmas puddings and songs at scattered locations along the trenches in Belgium and France, the Germans dropped their first aerial bomb on Britain, at Dover on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, the British used seaplanes to attack the Imperial German Navy, stationed in the harbor of Cuxhaven.
British and German troops pose together during a temporary truce on Christmas Day during World War I in 1914. Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
The 1914 Christmas Truce in particular has been read in popular culture as a moment when soldiers rejected their officers’ orders and rejected the nationalist propaganda that they had been exposed to, which demonized their opponents. The Christmas Truce appeals to the idea that ordinary people would get along if only they weren’t ordered to fight each other by their governments. In 1914, soldiers ignored officers and took risks to make human connections with people they were supposed to hate.
Christmas truces have subsequently become a regular prop in international diplomacy. In conflicts ranging from the Philippines to Colombia, Sudan to Ukraine, it’s hard not to see the Christmas Truce as having retained its mythical status precisely because of its usefulness as propaganda. Perhaps it would be better to remember the Christmas Truce as one poem concluded in January 1915: “God speed the time when every day/Shall be as Christmas Day!”