Posted on 12/25/2017 2:08:58 PM PST by nickcarraway
On a frosty, starlit night, a miracle took place. In 1914, a melody drifted over the darkness of No Man’s Land. First “O, Holy Night,” then “God Save the King.”
Peeking over their trenches for what must have been the first time in weeks, British soldiers were surprised to see Christmas trees lit with candles on the parapets of the enemy’s trenches.
Then a shout: “You no shoot, we no shoot!”
The Christmas Truce was a brief, spontaneous cease-fire that spread up and down the western front of World War I. It’s also a symbol of the peace on Earth and goodwill toward humans so often lacking not just on the battlefront but in our everyday lives.
In that spirit, the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City has published an online gallery of hundreds of accounts of such Christmas truces — letters home from soldiers that were published in British papers.
Here, a sampling of these letters shows the variety and wonder of the Christmas Truce:
“This has been the most wonderful Christmas I have ever struck. We were in the trenches on Christmas Eve, and about 8.30 the firing was almost at a stand still. Then the Germans started shouting across to us, ‘a happy Christmas’ and commenced putting up lots of Christmas trees with hundreds of candles on the parapets of their trenches.” — Cpl. Leon Harris, 13th (Kensington) Battalion London Regiment
“At 2 am on Christmas morning a German band played a couple of German tunes and then ‘Home, Sweet Home’ very touchingly which made some fellows think a bit. After they played ‘God Save The King’ and we all cheered.” — Pvt. H. Dixon, Royal Warwickshire Regiment
“We would sing a song or a carol first and then they would sing one
(Excerpt) Read more at santafenewmexican.com ...
“It’s Monday morning quarterbacking, but I don’t care. You’re right. If Britain would have stayed out of WW I, she would have preserved her 1890’s children.
And Germany and France would have fought each other to exhaustion. ...”
And here I’d been thinking that this forum had plumbed every possible depth of moralizing condescension.
Stop confusing sports with warfare. Doing so leads to the assumption that rules of civility, legality, and morality can actually be applied to warfare. They cannot (vexingly, a large number of professional military members - from the highest flag-ranker to the lowliest enlistee - cannot break free of sporting/combat metaphors. Every one of them is out of date but the perpetrators of this mistake resist seeing it).
Second-guessing decisions made more than 100 years ago is unworthy. It becomes less worthy still, when the critiquer is in error concerning factual details ... historical accuracy is never good enough to afford confidence in conclusions re-drawn this way.
And times change; what was deemed “moral” (or “immoral”) 100 (or 200 or 500) years ago is now different. Whether it should be so is another issue; we may not want to admit it, but our reluctance cannot change the outcome.
France and Germany did fight to exhaustion in the First World War. The armies of every major combatant collapsed in 1917-1918, except the United States. Read the late Sir John Keegan’s single-volume history of the war, if you’re in a skeptical mood.
“..., my main point was that Germany and France had no real grudge against each other in 1914. ... there was no difference so great as to warrant an all-out, life-or-death struggle.
That such a struggle actually occurred is indefensible. ...”
The German government officials did not sit down and mull over reasons for warring or not warring. Neither did the French government. The German plans required that France be beaten before anything else; therefore, they attacked France. The French responded. Is anyone being serious in suggesting they should have simply stood still and refused to defend their nation?
Lost in the blamestorming here is any acknowledgement of what the Germans did to Belgium. They demanded access, to prosecute their march into France; when the Belgians refused, they invaded anyway. But they did not simply march across, they reacted to Belgian resistance with overwhelming force and gratuitous violence. And during their occupation, they pilfered the place (as they did everywhere else they marched) and brutalized the locals.
Britain did not have a formal signed treaty with France, but it was one of several signatories to the treaty mutually assuring Belgian neutrality. The Germans abrogated the treaty; such a violation was an indisputable cause for war. Whether going to war was a good idea or not, is another question.
On a technical and tactical level, none of the combatants believed they were running serious risks. Europe had not seen major conflict since Bonaparte was defeated in 1815. At that time, every nation was of necessity an agrarian society. They fought with flintlock muskets.
By 1914, all had changed. Industrialization, steam power, nitro propellants, cartridge guns, and high explosives were all in common use and fully exploitable by belligerents; electrical power, automotive vehicles and aircraft were coming into the picture. Electronic communications were routine. The chances of severe losses seem obvious to us now, deplorably so; but few senior officials in that day thought through the implications. There were a few hints and fears, mainly found in tactical operations manuals of the armed forces.
“Trade or not, we had no business being in that war. It wasn’t our fight. But Woodrow (KKK) Wilson actively wanted America in for the greater glory ...”
Repeating an inaccurate series of words does not cause them to become more accurate.
Neither President Wilson nor US government officials were misleading, secretive, nor surreptitious.
The United States had no choice. Britain’s Royal Navy commanded the sealanes; they stopped all vessels sailing to Germany, which was thus blockaded. America could not have forced the British to re-open trade: the US Navy was in no position to take on the Royal Navy. (it never was. For a long space of time after the US declared war, Americans were denigrated as a gaggle of lightweight, unseasoned amateurs.)
Early in the war, it may indeed have been better to remain neutral, but as time ground on, circumstances changed, causing neutrality to become a less tenable stance. The central dispute between the German government and that of the United States was over unrestricted submarine warfare.
Until early 1917, the German government itself was divided on the question. As Germany’s situation deteriorated, there were increased calls to use its technical resources more fully. Admirals of the Kaiserliche Marine estimated they could induce Britain to get out of the conflict by sinking a sufficient number of ships per month; inevitably, they killed American nationals aboard British merchantmen, and attacked some US-flag vessels directly.
The American government’s position was that such depredations against a neutral nation were not acceptable, as “laws of war” and international custom were then understood. Ample cause to declare war, which the US Congress did after President Wilson presented the facts to them.
There had been other provocations committed by Germany as part of its war effort: sabotage at the munitions depot on Black Tom Island near New York City was spectacular. And there was the “Zimmermann telegram” aimed at Mexico, to induce that nation to make war on the United States in return for US territory. Both easily characterized as acts of war.
What we modern citizens think was wrong or right these days does not matter. These concerns were of vital importance to the people making the decisions at the time. Critics today can give vent to all the opprobrium they wish, but the facts, and the interpretation laid on them by decisionmakers at the time, remain unchanged.
Had the United States declined to enter the war, or declined to trade with Britain (and France, Italy, Russia, and Japan) out of a sense of “fairness,” there was every chance that the Central Powers would have been victorious; Imperial Germany would have ruled Europe, from the Pyrenees to the eastern march of Poland. Possibly farther east.
Forum members must ask themselves this question: would they prefer to live in a world dominated by the German Empire?
> And here I’d been thinking that this forum had plumbed every possible depth of moralizing condescension. <
It’s a shame that you spent so much time on that post. Because I stopped reading at your first insult.
“It’s a shame that you spent so much time on that post. Because I stopped reading at your first insult.”
Each of us faces a choice: we can be moralistic, or we can be effective.
To choose the first is to negate the possibility of the second. And the ineffective don’t last long in the real world: that’s the one we lesser mortals have to live in. As opposed to our self-appointed moral arbiters - who inhabit a world they think our forebears lived in, before 1914 (give or take). A realm of fantasy.
One hundred years ago today, my late maternal Grandfather prepared to go into the trenches of France with his Infantry company in the 42nd Infantry Division. He marched with the Christian morals and values of his time.
You look at these times with your inherent over-valued beliefs in your moral and intellectual superiority. It was a different time, with different beliefs. I do not subscribe to the beliefs that just because we are viewing the past with 20-20 hindsight, we are morally or intellectually superior. Just more prone to baseless arrogance.
That being said, Santayana was right.
“One hundred years ago today, my late maternal Grandfather prepared to go into the trenches of France ...”
Redleg Duke’s grandfather earned my respect and admiration generations before I was born. As did a great number of other troops, in that conflict and later ones. Also earlier ones. My respect and admiration came about many years after the fact, generations later in some instances. I was unable to honor them and reward them directly, as they deserved.
I found their accomplishments and sacrifices so worthy of note that I deemed it was my duty to make the lot of their aftercomers better; thus, it fell to me to spend more than half my active-duty career of just over 24-1/2 years in the search for better ways to save the lives of current troops in combat, and to the testing of systems already in use, to gather accurate and objective information on how good such devices actually were - as opposed to accepting a poorly-vetted collection of anecdotes and “common sense” notions, and muddling along. If our forces, thus inexpertly served, could in truth muddle through instead of merely failing outright.
Moral notions - fervently believed in or otherwise - have no meaning, if we do not prevail on the battlefield and as a consequence fail to survive. Only after surviving could we indulge our preferences and actually practice morality. If we do not get the sequence right, we are guilty of not taking the situation seriously. Are ideas like these moral & intellectual arrogance?
George Santayana was right, and wrong. Cycles of history do repeat - in a broad, generalized fashion. It happens even when people have learned the various lessons from history e found useful. But from the viewpoint of the people caught in the horrors, blunders, and overall messiness of this or that particular cycle, it’s always different. Each round of suffering is inflicted anew, upon different victims. Earlier victims are already dead and buried, and thus beyond harming. Or helping.
If we’re going to make any claims that we are successfully learning from history, I submit that our first duty is to be accurate: in factual detail, in formulation of concepts, in analysis, in the drawing of conclusions, and in predictions. Determining what exactly did happen in past times (especially during earlier armed conflicts) is not quite so simple, not quite so straightforward, as many citizens have come to believe. Mouthing platitudes and imperfectly understood “home truths” does not measure up. But it is what a great many Americans do - on both sides of the political divide. Indeed, many of us cling to inaccuracies, folk wisdom, and nonsense, in preference to documented, tested, and verified realities.
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