Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 35 No 25
- When peace broke out
- Barry Gittins
- 17 December 2025
It’s a story often told this time of year, but bear with me, because it’s still deserving of our attention. On Christmas Eve, 1914, along a stretch of land that had seen men slaughtered by the thousands, soldiers began to climb out of their trenches. For months, thousands of these young men had lived oscillating between boredom and terror, constantly hungry, sick, and half-frozen, with the ever-present dread of being sent “over the top” into machine-gun fire.
For millions of these uniformed young men, many of them teenagers, they were aware that life in the trenches meant a high likelihood of a violent and painful death. They had spent months shooting at one another for scraps of frozen ground, a far cry from the patriotic promises of a glamorous and swiftly-resolved conflict that drew many of them there.
When World War I broke out in July 1914, many Europeans thought the fighting would be over by Christmas. By December 1914, the war had bogged down. After the Marne, the Aisne, and the so-called Race to the Sea, manoeuvre gave way to stalemate. By November, continuous lines of trenches ran from the North Sea to Switzerland. Both sides were short of troops and munitions, trenches flooded, and winter weather turned everything to slurry. In these conditions, natural lulls in fighting emerged. After five months of fighting, men expected the war to be over at any time.
This hope, alongside close proximity, bred informal habits of fraternization including shouted greetings where gaps between trenches were narrowest, evening pauses while rations came up, quick truces to retrieve the wounded or bury the dead, even the occasional exchange of newspapers and songs. Officers tried to suppress such drift toward informality, but the ‘live and let live’ instinct proved resilient at the edges of a mechanised war.
Leading up to Christmas, across Europe, governments tried to organise gifts and gestures of cheer for soldiers in the trenches. Holiday drives gathered parcels and prayers for the men in uniform. In Britain, each soldier received a small brass tin embossed with Princess Mary’s profile, and inside, a few comforts like chocolate, tobacco, and a note from the King and Queen wishing that “God protect you and bring you safely home.” German troops unwrapped tokens from Kaiser Wilhelm II. Pipes for the rank and file, cigarettes for their officers. French soldiers were sent gift packages with 1,200 bottles of wine. Even as the war deepened, Europe’s leaders tried to cheer their soldiers with a promise that home still remembered them.
On Christmas Eve 1914, German soldiers in some locations decorated the trenches with Tannenba¨ume and sang carols. British, French, Belgian troops likewise placed candles and small trees on their parapets and sang carols into the cold. Some brave men climbed out of their fortifications, laid down their weapons, crossed no-man’s-land and began to talk.
Private Marmaduke Walkington remembered that “on Christmas Eve we’d been singing carols; the Germans had been doing the same. A German said, ‘Tomorrow, you no shoot, we no shoot.’ And the morning came — and we didn’t shoot, and they didn’t shoot … we began to pop our heads over the side.”
Elsewhere, Grenadier Guardsman Colin Wilson recalled hearing O Holy Night, “in German, naturally”, across the dark. “They said, come and meet us … after a time, we was allowed — a limited number of us.”
“It began with the smallest gesture of defiance — a song shared across the mud — and a recognition that what joined them was older and deeper than what divided them.”
An anonymous British soldier recalled that “two of my section came dashing into the billet during the morning and said, ‘What do you know, the Jerries are out on the top; they’re walking about, they’re dishing out drinks and cigarettes — there’s no fighting going on!’”
It was a Christmas miracle of sorts, wrought by men under orders to fight, who briefly stopped obeying.
They swapped cigarettes, food, drink, and tunes. They buried their dead, shared photographs, shuffled cards, and, in a various spots across the front, played games of football (according to The Times on 1 January 1915, in one such game the Poms lost to the Germans, 3-2). British soldiers Corporal Albert Wyatt and Sergeant Frank Naden describe playing in Wulvergem, Belgium. Wyatt’s account was published in Thetford Times' article describing “kicking a ball between the two firing lines.” Another match occurred in Fre´linghien, France.
The artillery fell silent. In some places the truce held through Christmas night, into Boxing Day, and, here and there, it held toward the New Year.
For a strange brief time, these enemies recognised something much older than nationalism and much deeper than obedience. They saw a shared humanity under their uniforms, and remembered their shared faith traditions. They sung the same carols, said the same prayers, told the same story of a child born into darkness.
And it's tempting to treat the truce as an impossibly miraculous interruption in the course of an ordinary war; that it was both quaint and unrepeatable. But it was not without historical precedent. Similar moments had happened in the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War.
In this case, it was also aided by the ad-hoc, live-and-let-live arrangements that had grown as the stalemate drew on. Homesick soldiers tired of a war they believed would be brief, but who were yet to be completely hardened by the cynicism that would come to define it. Leading up to Christmas, the shouted greetings and ritual pauses in fighting had created an underlying understanding of restraint. The truce was also enabled by the trench system’s own warped ecology. The same proximity that made killing so mercilessly efficient also made it possible to hear the singing voices of the men in enemy trenches.
Predictably, the high commands did not approve of all this. Orders went out condemning fraternisation. Officers were warned of courts-martial if they tolerated ‘informal understandings with the enemy.’ The companies involved were switched out, replaced by troops who didn't know the names of the men they were shooting at.
In 1915 and beyond, bitterness hardened, casualties mounted, and seasonal pauses grew rarer and shorter. There were isolated disciplinary actions. A Scots Guards company commander famously reprimanded after a burial truce, but there is no evidence of mass punishment for ordinary participants in the 1914 ceasefires. Most men returned to their lines, and the war resumed its work. The truce did not alter the course of the conflict. It instead revealed something about human beings under arms, that even in a system designed to crush human initiative, a sense of goodwill can still take hold for a few hours.
The common faith in a Christ born at Christmas, the shared childhoods immersed in Christianity (however it may have been bowdlerised by the chaplains exhorting them during and after battles) allowed for this common cause.
For the Allied troops fighting the Turks in the Dardanelles, there was no such luck.
At Gallipoli in 1915, some of the men who were unlucky enough to spend Christmas Day on the front line cheered themselves up by singing carols. Arthur Wagstaff of the London Regiment described the day. ‘Christmas in the front lines was no joke, of course. Some of our boys who were off duty were in a shelter at the back of the trench singing carols. Two officers came along and one said to the other, Could you believe it: conditions such as these, and the boys were singing carols...’
The informal Christmas truces of 1914 have often been sentimentalised as a footnote to a wider slaughter, but in an age of obedience, it could be seen as an important act of collective defiance. The soldiers who climbed out of their trenches were not idealists, but were men who had seen unimaginable violence and still managed to imagine a better world. Their ceasefire was spontaneous and fragile, but it revealed that sometimes peace is an option even for those furthest from it, and sometimes it must break out before anyone authorises it.
Today, the trench metaphor is useful in capturing how easily conviction can harden into a sort of confinement. In politics, in faith, in culture, we are again living in an age of entrenchment where again, political tribes are dug in and fearful. Our front lines may be digital, our weapons rhetorical, but the logic is unchanged: hold your ground, return fire, never yield. The old habits of coexistence, of living and letting live, of pausing the fight long enough to see the person across from us, have become the first casualties of our certainty.
But it needn't be the case. The soldiers of 1914 remind us that even in the most fortified systems, humanity can still breach the walls. Their truce was not negotiated by diplomats or enforced by generals (quite the opposite). It began with the smallest gesture of defiance — a song shared across the mud — and a recognition that what joined them was older and deeper than what divided them.
This Christmas, it may be naïve to imagine carols sung across the weary and war-torn corners of the world today. Yet perhaps that’s the point. Peace rarely arrives by decree. It begins, as it did then, with small spontaneous acts of refusal to see the enemy as just that.
Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment