What The Christmas Truce Of 1914 Teaches Us About Loving Our Enemies BY: AUBREY GULICK for The Federalist
The Christmas truce of 1914 is a story many of us have heard, but it’s well worth revisiting. It’s almost too good to be true.
When the angels appeared to the shepherds outside Bethlehem on that night more than 2,000 years ago, they spoke of the great tidings of the incarnation and sang what has become the universal Christmas prayer of the centuries: “Peace on Earth and goodwill toward men.”
Perhaps those same Christmas angels were singing over the Western Front in 1914, when the guns fell silent.
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The Christmas truce of 1914 is one of those stories many of us have heard, but it’s well worth revisiting. It’s so unbelievable it’s almost too good to be true; it was a series of widespread, voluntary, and unofficial ceasefires between the Germans and English that occurred in the days surrounding Christmas.
World War I was a mere five months old, and soldiers on both sides had been promised that the war would be so short, they would be “home by Christmas.”
But by December, it became clear the war would be much longer and bigger. It had evolved into a stationary affair, where men shot at each other incessantly from muddy trenches and the sight of another man a mere 30 yards away was enough to open fire.
Back at home, English war posters portrayed the German enemy as an angry ape resolved to destroy innocent Englishmen, while German propaganda warned that British victory would mean an impoverished and ruined Rhineland. It was the language of total warfare; it was win or die in the minds of Europeans.
By the time Christmas came, it looked as though millions of men would spend their day knee-deep in mud, shooting at their fellow men, and fostering feelings of hate toward their faceless and nameless enemy.
