Remembering the World War I Christmas truce

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0:51In the months after World War I erupted, young men in Europe were killing each other by the tens of thousands. Yet on a frozen Christmas Eve in 1914, the guns briefly fell silent. The Christmas truce has become the stuff of legend, and the story of that day has been told again and again in film, in music, and on stage. For the 100th anniversary of the truce in 2014, the British supermarket chain Sainsbury's created this Christmas ad.

1:25The ad begins on Christmas Eve on a snowy night in a dark, damp trench on the British side of the front. Mail has just arrived. Jenkins. I'm clean. Night. Letters from home. Pictures of sweethearts. A thick chocolate bar in blue wrapping. And then, from far away, comes the sound of German voices singing.

1:53The British join in. All is calm. All is bright.

2:06All is Calm is an opera by Peter Rothstein based on the truce. The German and British soldiers face each other as they sing Silent Night, before eventually turning to face the audience as one.

2:28Silent Night has become inextricably linked with the tellings of the truce over the years. So has the striking visual of the first soldier to slowly venture out into no man's land, as John McCutcheon describes here in his 1984 song, Christmas in the Trenches. There's someone coming towards us, the front-line sentry cry. All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side. His truths flaked like a Christmas star shone on that plain so bright as he bravely strode unarmed into the night. In the 2005 film Joyeux Noël, the leaders of each side meet in No Man's Land. Good evening. Do you speak English?

3:17Yes, a little. Wonderful. We were talking about a ceasefire for Christmas Eve. What do you think? The outcome of this war won't be decided tonight. I don't think anyone would criticize us for laying down our rifles on Christmas Eve. Slowly, hesitantly, the field between the trenches fills with soldiers. And then, once every soldier recognizes his own fear and relief reflected in the faces that stare back at him, the festivities begin. Soldiers shake hands, introduce themselves, offer cigarettes and bottles to each other. That's good stuff, Jerry. Hey, thank you very much. Even in the 1969 musical satire of World War I, Oh, What a Lovely War, the truce is depicted with reverence, though they do get a few jokes in.

4:07Do you know when the war will end? After our spring offensive, I should think. In the music video for his 1983 single, Pipes of Peace, Paul McCartney played both a German and British soldier who exchanged photos of their loved ones in No Man's Land.

4:31But each reimagining ends the same way. War continues. distant blasts of gunfire bring the inescapable reality back into the impossible moment of peace sending the men scrambling back to their trenches soon daylight stole upon us and france was france once more with sad farewells we each began to settle back to war but the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night. Whose family have I fixed within my sights? In the Sainsbury's ad, a German soldier settles back into the trenches, looks in his pocket, and finds a chocolate bar wrapped in blue. Consider this as wars continue today.

5:25The idea of a Christmas truce feels as meaningful and as elusive as ever. Coming up, we'll reconstruct what actually happened on that Christmas more than a century ago through the words of the men who lived it. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

5:55It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. In 2014, Europe marked the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce. At the time, our former co-host Ari Shapiro was a correspondent in London, and he set out to reconstruct the events of that day using the accounts of people who were there. Here's that story. Of course, there are no longer any living veterans of World War I to tell this story, but we still have their words in letters and diaries. In some cases, we even have their voices. On Christmas Eve at noon, fire ceased completely on both fronts. These are oral histories that Britain's Imperial War Museum recorded years ago.

6:38That was German Army officer Walter Stennis. Here's British soldier Colin Wilson. We've added more recent recordings of the music. We heard a German singing, Happy Night, of course in German, of naturally.

7:02There was all sorts of Christmas greetings being shouted across. No man planned, there was. These Germans, they shouted out, well, what about you singing? How did you know it? Well, we had to go, but of course we wasn't very good at that.

7:29There's not one single story of the Christmas truce. There are thousands of stories from all up and down the Western Front. It was all done independently. William Spencer is a military specialist at the British National Archives. It was little bits and pieces dotted. It wasn't a blanket decision made, right, we will all get out of our trenches and fraternize with the enemy. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, life was miserable on the front lines. The weather was wet and frigid. The trenches were basically large ditches collapsing and filling with water. Alan Wakefield is a historian at the Imperial War Museum.

8:05So they do small-scale truces where they actually get out of the trenches and do repair work within sight of each other. Nobody's firing at each other because they're both just trying to make life a bit more bearable. This is the first chance, really, that you're getting to see the enemy because normally in a trench war you're under the ground. So that was mid-December, then Christmas arrives. While shepherds watch their flocks by night,

8:36We've asked our colleagues to read some of the letters and diary entries describing what happened next. A soldier named Ernest Morley writes home, saying his men decided to give the Germans a gift on Christmas Eve. Three songs, then five rounds of rapid gunfire. They started with the carol while shepherds watched.

9:05We finished that and paused, preparing to give them the second item on the program. We heard answering strains arising from their lines. Then they started shouting across to us. Therefore we stopped any hostile operations and commenced to shout back. One of them shouted, A Merry Christmas, English! We are not shooting tonight. Germans lit lanterns and put them up above the trench. Rifleman Morley says the British tried to outdo them. Opposite me, they had one lamp and nine candles in a row, and we had all the candles and lights we could muster stuck up on our bayonets above the parapet. On Christmas Day, the sun rises and all is calm.

9:43Lieutenant M.S. Richardson writes a letter to his family where he describes German soldiers cautiously emerging from the trenches. The situation was so absurd that another officer of ours and myself went out and met seven of their officers. They exchanged gifts in the area between the trenches called No Man's Land. One of them presented me with the packet of cigarettes I sent you. And we gave them a plum pudding. And then we shook hands with them and saluted each other. Some of the soldiers used the day to bury their dead. Second Lieutenant Wilbur Spencer watched many of his men fall a week earlier.

10:18On Christmas Day, he writes, it was strange to shake hands with the German soldiers who killed his friends. They carried over our dead. I won't describe the sights I saw, which I shall never forget. We buried the dead as they were. Wilbur took a photograph that day. At the Imperial War Museum, historian Wakefield shows me the black and white image. The photograph here shows four British soldiers in the foreground, beside a grave, a recently dug grave, and a mixed group of German and British in the background actually digging fresh graves for other casualties. The earth is flat and bare with a huge blank sky.

10:56A small white cross sticks out of the ground. Whenever the truce is portrayed in songs and plays, there is always a soccer match. So I asked historians to show me accounts of the game. We don't have any documentary evidence of that. This is Spencer from the National Archives. There's nothing recorded in the unit war diaries which say a football match took place between this battalion and this particular German infantry regiment. I thought maybe it was just a gap in his collection. So I asked Wakefield at the Imperial War Museum, who has written a book on the subject called Christmas in the Trenches.

11:27He said it's contentious, but ultimately... The idea of any organized football game doesn't stand up in the documentation. About 30 ,000 British soldiers were involved in the truce. Wakefield says maybe a hundred played organized soccer games against the Germans. In some places, the two sides held prayer services together. They exchanged mementos, like a small brass button that Wakefield shows me at the museum. He obviously took that button off his tunic to give it to the British soldiers. And the German soldiers put his name and his hometown, which is in Saxony. For war historians, bloodshed is a daily memory.

12:06So I asked Spencer how he relates to this one moment of peace. This is the human side of people in a dehumanizing environment. He says when commanders learned about the truce, they were furious. Various orders were sent down straight after Christmas in 1914 and heavily reinforced in December 1915 for this particular occurrence not to happen again. Germans were warned that if they staged another truce, they would be shot. British soldiers were threatened with court-martial. But many of the men who took part in the Christmas truce refused to fire on their opponents again until the day other soldiers came to take their place.

12:54That's the story Ari Shapiro, reported from London back in 2014 on the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce.

13:06It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Merry Christmas.