How to Stop a World War
A Christmas Story
Mr. Matthew Giambrone
On Christmas day, five months after World War I began its voracious consumption of Europe, a brief moment of peace broke out. Barring some future reversal of course, it was the world’s final occurrence of grand-scale chivalry in war. It is a well-known story, but one that bears retelling in our day. Leading up to it, on December 7, 1914, Pope Benedict XV entreated the warring parties to declare a temporary truce, so that they might honor Jesus’ birth and allow for the celebration of Christmas. Such holiday ceasefires had long been marks of graciousness — glimpses of humanity on the often-bloodied face of European history.
While thankfully our current era has thus far lacked a world war, in many ways 1914 was a time similar to our own. Seemingly stable relationships between nations were being swiftly disrupted. Evolutions in technology made life and war unrecognizable. Racial tensions were high. A pandemic would soon cut a tragic swath through the population of the world. In short, chaos had taken hold, an old order was in convulsive death spasms, and December brought desperate hope for a moment of respite at the end of a weary year.
But the battling nations declined the pope’s plea. Why?
Perhaps, in that milieu, any Christmas acknowledgment of the humanity of enemies felt too old-fashioned to be appropriate to the new way of things. Perhaps the generals foresaw the materialism of the new era they were ushering in and determined that chivalrous and human acts had no natural place in it. Perhaps the scope of the war imbued the air with a proud grandeur, choking out the place of pleasant trifles such as Christmas, which the smaller skirmishes of the past had made room for.
Perhaps the generals foresaw the materialism of the new era they were ushering in, and determined that chivalrous, human acts had no natural place in it.
Or, perhaps, the relentless new pace of mechanized efficiency impregnated a swelling sense of perpetual urgency. (And thus gestated the ancestor of our frazzled, twenty-first-century psyche.) The war apparatus could not afford the loss of a day of military “production” — its masters making themselves more scrooge-like than that word’s namesake (who, at least, begrudgingly gave Bob Cratchit a day off).
More likely, though, it was simply too risky: We become vulnerable when we expose our humanity. Danger awaits those who (literally or figuratively) let down their guard. Such acts require trust, if only briefly, in the humanity of the person on the other side of the field. The administrators of this first modern war possibly felt, possibly accurately, that gallant trust of the enemy’s honor was no longer prudent in the twentieth century. But whatever the reason, the powers-that-be rejected the historic call of Christendom to let light pierce the clouds of conflict.
Christmas, however, has a tendency to usurp the powers-that-be. Such was the case in 1914 — at least for a day. Although the generals rejected the supplications of Benedict, the soldiers whom they led were not ready to do so. Regardless of the fashions of the present, something visceral in the common man holds to the chivalry of the past. In a spontaneous uprising (and a true moment of subsidiarity made manifest) the infantrymen of both armies invoked their own Christmas truce.
It began in vigil on Christmas Eve. German and British troops started singing carols from their entrenched positions, across the expanse between the armies, each side serenading the other. There was the German rendition of “Silent Night” and the British chorus of “The First Noel.” A brass band was heard. As the first rays of morning sunlight spread over the battlefield, a group of German soldiers rose out of their trenches and stretched the very arc of their lives on the gamble that their counterparts were, despite being British, yet human enough to welcome an honest greeting with humanity and not with bullets: They crossed the “no-man’s land” divide and called out, in their best attempted English, “Merry Christmas.”
Seeing that the Germans were entirely unarmed, and deciding to trust that this was not a trick, Allied soldiers began emerging from their trenches as well. A certain Private Murker accepted a glass of whiskey and reported back that the Germans had said, more or less, “If you don’t shoot us, we won’t shoot you.” World War I is, perhaps, the most confusing of wars — despite its forty million casualties, its raison d’être remains somewhat baffling; it was a war that, by most accounts, did not need to happen. How simple peace can (sometimes) be: “If you don’t shoot us, we won’t shoot you.”
Eventually, more allied troops emerged. They shook hands with the Germans. Soon gifts were exchanged — cigars and plum pudding and suchlike. A Christmas tree was erected and lit. There was even a friendly soccer match between the opposing sides (one recalls, wistfully, older histories when by mutual consent the length of a war might be curtailed based on the outcome of some miniature, proxy contest). It was a surreal — and yet profoundly real — passage in the two-thousand-year-long story of Christmas.
In medieval Christendom, one of the rules of war was that there be no fighting on holy days (Treuga Dei —the Truce of G0d). Such a constriction is hard for us to understand, but it shows that in those days the totalizing, mechanized views of war had not yet swallowed up our humanity. War was a smaller part of a larger human reality. Despite all the horrors and misery with which man shackles himself, the explosive power of Christ liberates the earth. Humanity’s Redeemer appears between the armies, clothed with a gleaming Joy, which commands our allegiance more forcefully than generals, or armies, or nations. It was in this spirit that the troops of 1914 acted. Is this not a truer “true meaning of Christmas” than our modern, banal distillations?
Despite all the horrors and misery with which man shackles himself, the explosive power of Christ liberates the earth.
In the days following this disarming Christmas, a German lieutenant observed, “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.” Even the sedate Wall Street Journal felt moved to reflect, “What appears from the winter fog and misery is a Christmas story, a fine Christmas story that is, in truth, the most faded and tattered of adjectives: inspiring.”
We stand now, a century later, in our own winter fog. We should not be surprised. The great fog of the “Great War” never really lifted. World War II was but a continuation: the onerous burdens imposed by the Allies at the end of the first act set the stage for a monster to arise in the second; we have never entirely regained our equilibrium or established a stable new order. Still, the vast years spanned by this fog make it easy to experience the tale of Christmas 1914 as indeed inspiring, but anachronistic: the noble, final breath of a now-dead ideal. We can relegate it to quaint Christmas antiquity — a military Currier and Ives print. But if we do, we will forgo the true birthright of Christmas, which is ours, and which is worth more than all the modern world has bought with its squandered inheritance.
This year, let us retake the ground that was once held fast on that battlefield. Let us realize how little we actually risk in initiating a Christmas greeting to a stranger. Let us pity, not fear, the menacing spiritual forces assembled, which imagine they can suppress that which a World War could not. Let them rather fear — as they have always feared — Christ and his Church and his birthday. If we but hold to these, in sacred fealty, whatever the cost, then even the great horrors of war can for a time be stopped, and greater horrors destroyed.
We do not know what next year will bring, but we know with assurance that the sun’s rays will dawn on Christmas morning. By their light we can see that, behind the faces in fog, we are, each of us, eternally human — regardless of every other attribute or aspiration. So let us join those soldiers in dismissing the dictates of our self-anointed “betters” —our technocratic, transhumanist, Christmas-phobic “betters” — and cross the no-man’s land to wish friend and foe alike a truly Merry Christmas.
