The Christmas Truce
One of my most beloved Christmas gifts as a kid was a record album with Christmas songs for kids. I played that vinyl LP on my little plastic turntable over and over; I think I must have worn the grooves down to nothing (along with my parents’ patience). My favorite song was “Snoopy’s Christmas” by The Royal Guardsmen. It was a bouncy tune about Snoopy going up in his Sopwith Camel on Christmas Eve to hunt down his old nemesis, the Red Baron. But Snoopy’s wings iced up, and the Baron forced him to land behind enemy lines. Snoopy thought it was the end, but in the spirit of the season, the Red Baron instead offered him a cup of holiday cheer and wished him a Merry Christmas before flying off. The church bells ringing in Christmas Day had softened the Red Baron’s heart towards his foe.
What I didn’t realize until many years later was that this song alludes to a real event in World War I. (I’m not saying that Baron von Richthofen engaged in aerial combat with a beagle on a flying doghouse!) I am talking about the Christmas Truce, which happened 99 years ago this past week.
In case you haven’t heard about this, it was a spontaneous ceasefire on both sides of a battlefield that stretched across 600 miles of trenches in France and Belgium. The truce was not called by the generals or the politicians, but by the men in the trenches. As Christmas approached in 1914, soldiers started celebrating informally, within earshot of the enemy. In one place, a German soldier sang “Stille Nacht,” the carol we know as “Silent Night.” The British soldiers were entranced, and soon they sang it back in English. The soldiers came out of their trenches, they met in No-Man’s Land, they exchanged greetings and Christmas wishes. They traded cigarettes and souvenirs; they played games of soccer; they used the truce to bury their dead who had been stranded between the lines. In at least one place, a chaplain conducted a Christmas Mass where soldiers from both sides received communion alongside each other.
This friendly behavior continued until the high-ranking officers on both sides became aware of situation. They were furious with their soldiers, and with the officers who allowed this “fraternization with the enemy.” They considered these actions to be treason. Some of the British officers were court-martialed. Many of the German troops who participated were shipped off to the Russian Front. Chaplains who ministered to enemy soldiers were relieved of duty and sent home in disgrace. And as future Christmas Days approached during the course of the war, artillery bombardments were order by the generals, just in order to stave off any softening of heart by the men in the trenches.
Why such a strong reaction from the top brass? Because they know that killing another human being is not something that comes easily to most people. There is something in most of us that makes it hard to pull the trigger, even when our own lives are in peril. On battlefields of the Civil War, it was found that many of the soldiers never fired their rifles even once, but just kept loading and reloading to give the appearance that they had fired. In his book On Killing, Dave Grossman reports that of the soldiers in combat in World War II, only 15-20% ever fired their weapons. After the Christmas Truce in World War I, some of the artillery units chose to fire at some spot where they knew there was nothing to hit, rather than take a chance of killing the friends they had made so briefly on December 25.
It was in response to these findings that the modern style of Boot Camp came into being, for the express purpose of breaking down a human being’s natural aversion to killing. The drill sergeant who screams in your face, belittles your ancestry, makes you do mindless tasks without end—he has the job of refashioning you into a killing machine. At the same time the Army stopped using paper bull’s-eyes for target practice and taught the recruits to fire at human-looking targets. For these reasons, firing rates went up to 90% in the Vietnam War—and along with it, the rates of mental illness among our soldiers.
To make a really great army, a really lethal fighting force, you have to do two things: you have to dehumanize the enemy in the minds of your troops, and you also have to, in some sense, dehumanize your own troops by acclimating them to kill their own species. What the Christmas Truce of World War I ruined was all the efforts of the propaganda machines of church and state to depict the other side as inferior types of humans, as innately evil. Once you heard the enemy soldier sing your favorite Christmas carol in his language, with tenderness and piety, with faith and love for God, it becomes a lot harder to point a weapon at him. Once you met him in No-Man’s Land and traded chocolates with him and shown each other the pictures of your sweethearts, he becomes just another one of the guys. And you don’t see the point any more of killing him—the Kaiser, maybe, but not Hans with that lovely tenor voice.
With every war, then, there is a desperate need for the saber-rattlers to convince the people of how awful the enemy is, how depraved, how cruel, how immoral, how sub-human. Al Qaeda does it to us, “the Great Satan,” as they call us; and we do it to them, as the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison prove.
With every war, there is a need for the policymakers to figure out how to turn off a little switch in the humanity of our soldiers. The modern military has retired the brutal drill sergeant and found an even more effective training tool: video games. What could be more realistic, more lifelike, than shooting animated humans in a video battle zone? What better way to desensitize normal people to the task of killing other normal people? It is no secret that “the armed forces took the lead in financing, sponsoring, and inventing the specific technology used in video games.” (Corey Mead, War Play) And now those same games are for sale to any adolescent who has a taste for adventure but doesn’t want to leave the house.
What is the point of this sermon? Simply this: the child who was born in Bethlehem taught us to love our enemies. What the men in the trenches did during the Christmas Truce of World War I may have been treasonous, but they were obeying a higher law, the law of God, the law of love. They were right to show kindness and mercy to their enemies, and they were right to try it again in 1915, despite the impediments that the generals devised to fraternization as this sort.
What, after all, does fraternization mean, except to treat another person as a brother? And is this not exactly how Christ taught us to behave? Surely on Christmas Day, we cannot pretend to honor the Feast while we ignore the central message of the One whose birth we celebrate.
We have a duty as Christians, a duty that will be harder and harder, perhaps, for us to carry out in this society. We have a duty to resist the dehumanization of human beings, whether they be the enemies of our nation, or our own fighting men and women in uniform.
There is another kind of dehumanization that goes on all around, and we should resist that one, too. It is the way that unborn babies are dehumanized in the national conversation about abortion. Advocates of abortion go to great lengths to avoid calling an unborn child a “child” or a “baby” or an “infant” or even a “person” and instead insist on words like “fetus” or “bodily organ” or “mass of tissue.” It is hilarious—almost—to watch them in broadcasts slip up, and speak of a woman carrying a “baby,” and how they stumble over themselves and correct each other when such slip-ups occur. But what is this except verbal dehumanization? My heart goes out to all the women who have been persuaded by this semantic shell game to give up what they later come to realize was their own precious and unique child.
The Gospel story we read after Christmas, about Herod’s murderous rage to find the infant Jesus, we call “the Slaughter of the Innocents.” What our Orthodox Church teaches us is that every slaughter—whether in war or in peace—is mostly a slaughter of innocents. For the most part, the men and women fighting on the other side of the battleline are there, not because they are fervent believers in some grand cause, but because they want to protect their loved ones and their home. If we stand for anything as a Church, let us stand for this: that we resist the devaluing of any human, of any race or creed or color or age.
We cannot truly celebrate God’s appearance in human flesh, we cannot truly celebrate Christmas, unless we honor and cherish that humanity that Christ assumed, wherever, and in whomever, we find it. Amen.