Truce flags summoned Christmas peace
It happened 100 years ago on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Soldiers from England, France and Germany, who had been killing one another in the trenches of World War I, stopped for a brief time. Hoisting white truce flags, they crawled over the tops of their trenches.
The spontaneous event is known as the Christmas Truce. A British lieutenant would later say that “there was not an atom of hatred on either side that day,” which was “just like the interval between the rounds of a friendly boxing match.”
But there was nothing friendly about the First World War. Millions of people, combatants and civilians, died as a result of the conflict. At Christmastime 1914, however, some of the warriors decided to celebrate together the birth of the Prince of Peace.
An American infantryman recalled that, on Christmas, the men who were huddled in opposing trenches started calling out to one another, wishing their enemies a Merry Christmas and asking for cigarettes. A German captain said he “shouted to our enemies that we didn’t wish to shoot and that we make a Christmas truce….And the British shouted, ‘No shooting!’ Then a man came out of the trenches, and I…did the same.”
It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 combatants, cold and dirty, followed the truce flag into the open. A corporal from Scotland recalled, “We shook hands, wished each other a Merry Christmas and were soon conversing as if we had known each other for years.”
In some places, the camaraderie led to pick-up soccer matches among men who had been – and would soon again – be shooting at one another. Now they were taking shots at a makeshift goal instead. Other shots were also taken as foes snapped pictures of one another.
“It was,” said a British officer, “the strangest scene you could imagine.”
Who could have guessed that such a thing would happen in the middle of a terrible war? The answer might be two people. A humor columnist for a Kansas City newspaper joked on Dec. 25, 1914, that “the armies should [wave] a flag of truce on Christmas in order to allow the soldiers to try on their new socks.”
The other was a pacifist who wished, on Dec. 9, 1914, that someone would call for a “Truce of God for this Christmas season.”
Ordinary soldiers fulfilled his wish.