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Jim Carroll
Christmas 1914 and World War One
Many myths and legends surround World War One and Christmas - especially the first Christmas of the war in December 1914. The British public and the soldiers fighting in the mud of Flanders were given the impression by those in charge that the Germans, fighting possibly less than100 metres away, were blood-lusting psychopaths bent on destroying all in their way. Any form of friendship between the two sides fighting the war, would have been seen as detrimental to this impression. While the Germans remained the "evil Hun", the government and the military could justify their respective tactics.

However, the first Christmas of 1914 clearly broke the impression that those in charge wanted to portray. For many years - even after the war - the government wanted to maintain the image of the dastardly Hun and any references to any fraternisation between both sides was clamped down on. There were whispers here and there but no actual evidence. The same happened with the football match between the British and the Germans. The image that the German soldiers were just like the British and the French would not have worked for the Allies. But recent research by Stanley Weintraub has proved that there was fraternisation - improvised at the time in December 1914 but with some 'rules' quickly built in.

Weintraub has found that the first smatterings that something was not quite right took place in the trenches where the Berkshire Regiment faced the XIX Corps of the German Army. The XIX's were from Saxony. The Saxons started to put up small conifers on the parapets of their trenches - akin to our Christmas trees. The Berkshires could see many of them lining the tops of the XIX's trenches. Groups of the Berkshires and the Saxons met in No-Mans Land and officers from both sides turned a blind eye to this fraternisation which broke military law. In fact, the officers in these trenches agreed to an informal truce between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

During the next 24 hours, impromptu cease fires occurred throughout the Western Front. The British High Command - stationed 27 miles behind the trenches - was horrified but little could be done. A military directive had been issued which stated:




Abstract



That the British public thought that the First World War would be 'over by Christmas' in 1914 is such a common feature of war fiction, memoirs and histories that it has scarcely been questioned, let alone seriously examined. The phrase has become shorthand for naivety among a generation of young men who are supposed to have rushed to join the army rather than missing all the 'fun', the politicians and generals who sent them to the front and the journalists who cheered them on. This article investigates how common it really was and attempts to place it in the wide context of public reactions to the war, using newspapers, letters and diaries to uncover the feelings of the time rather than post-hoc reflections. As with former givens of 1914, such as 'war enthusiasm', what emerges is a more complex picture than simple naïve faith in the imminent success of British and Allied arms. Treating predictions of peace as part of a coping strategy for soldiers and civilians at war, we should not be surprised to find predictions of peace by various specific dates, and particularly by Christmas, throughout the Great War and beyond. This article questions the ubiquity of the idea of the war ending before Christmas in 1914 and the singularity of that year for optimistic predictions.