Jocko Podcast - Christmas 1914

Episode Date: December 25, 2016

The story of the Christmas Truce of 1914Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

So, by early December 1914, the punishing advance of the Germans had been stopped by the Allies before the Germans made it to Paris. But it had been stopped at a great cost, a sickening cost. And now the armies had settled into the trenches. And we know what the trenches were. Hell. Not some metaphorical approximation of hell, but actual hell. Hell on earth. Artillery, mortars, machine gun fire, snipers, shrapnel, screams of the wounded and dying.

And on top of that, the environment, rain and sleet and snow and flooded trenches and freezing cold. And of course, death was everywhere, everywhere. And there seemed no end to the horror. But on Christmas Day, 1914, the horror did stop. If only for a short time, while men, for a moment, recognized the men they were fighting against, as other. men as other men with the same hopes and dreams and desires that they had themselves and the chief of all hope was peace and this is an excerpt of how the Christmas truce unfolded according to Henry Williamson the British army officer who is there and here's what he wrote for weeks

we had lived in flooded trenches. The Germans were 80 yards away. Our trench was enfilated. We lost many men. Shot by snipers. Night after night, since the tailing off of the Battle of Ipres, we had toiled in the parapets,

filling sandbag with clayy mud, squelched through muddy lagoons of woodland tracks, carrying rations, duck boards, pumps, and ammunition. We were volunteers, rushed out to help General French's shattered expeditionary force.

A few weeks before, we had been schoolboys, bank clerks, undergraduates, medical students. Now our lives were ravaged. Some of us, the young ones who thought of their mothers, were near to despair.

We were with us. hope, without horizon. At first, trench life had been interesting, even enjoyable. It was fun cooking our own bacon and making tea in the wood while shrapnel cracked overhead. Good sport stalking the wild geese in the marshes, satisfying to feel the soft hairs of our unshaven chins. The regulars were decent chaps. heroes of Mons

But the rains fell And the trenches filled Almost waist high After a few days We could scarcely move our legs Nor did we seem to need food At night we dragged ourselves out of the ditches And moved about

Uncarrying of bullets aimed at random in the dark All night we worked Carrying parties Pumping fatigues Peripet building At dawn we slid into water again And set ourselves to endure the gray daylight Even now

So long afterwards when I hear rain on the tiles overhead The ghost of that time makes me draw the blankets closer around my neck On Christmas Eve of 1914 we were in the support line About 200 yards inside the plogue steered wood It was freezing our overcoats were as stiff as boards our boots were too hard to move but we rejoiced as the mud was hard too also happy thought we would be able to sleep that night inside a new blockhouse of oak boughs and sandbags called piccadilly hotel no bed but the cold earth no blankets even but sleep

Sleep. Then came a message from brigade headquarters. Brought, I think, by second lieutenant Bruce Barron's father of the Warwick's. Wiring parties were required in no man's land all night. And there would be a moon. We would have to work only 50 yards from the German machine guns in the White House opposite the eastern edge of the wood. Two hours later, we filed out of the dark trees into the naked, moonlit terror of no man's land, holding our shovels besides our faces in hope of protection against the expected mortar blast.

The moon was high and white among the frozen clouds. We were visible. Someone slipped with a clank of a spade or rifle. We flung ourselves on our faces and waited. but the battlefield was as silent as the moon. For an hour, we worked in silence, in a most mysterious soundlessness. What had happened?

We began to talk naturally as we drove in stakes and pulled out concertiners of prepared wire. There was no rifle fire, either up or down the line, from way up north beyond Ypres to south. beyond Armentiras and the French army. At midnight, we heard laughing as we worked. We heard singing from the German lines, carols, the tunes of which we knew.

I noticed a very bright light on a tall pole raised in their lines. Down opposite the East Lank's trench in front of the convent, a Christmas tree, with lighted candles was set on their parapet. The unreal moonlight life went on happily. Cries of come on over Tommy, we won't fire at you. A dark figure approached me hesitatingly. A trap?

I walked towards it with a bumping heart. Merry Christmas, English friend. We shook hands tremulously. Then I saw that the light on the pole was the morning star. The star in the east. It was Christmas morning. All Christmas Day, gray and khaki figures mingled and talked in no man's land. Picks and spades rang in the hard ground.

It was strange to stare at the dead we had only glimpsed at swiftly from the trenches. The shallowest graves were dug, filled, and set with crosses. knocked together from lengths of ration box wood, marked with indelible pencil, for king and country, for fatherland and free height, fatherland and freedom. Freedom?

Freedom? How was this? We were fighting for freedom, and our cause was just. We were defending Belgium, civilization. These fellows in gray were good fellows. They were, strangely, just men like ourselves. How can we lose the war, English comrade? Our cause is just. We are ringed with enemies. The war was thrust on us. We are defending our parents, our homes, our German soil. A most shaking, staggering

thought that both sides thought they were fighting for the same cause the war was a terrible mistake people at home did not know this then the idea came to the young and callos soldier that if only he could tell them at home what was really happening and if the german soldiers told their people the truth about us the war would be over but he Hardly dared to think it even to himself. The next day was quiet and the next. Waving hands from the trenches by day, singing and reflected blaze of trench bonfires at night.

It was a lovely time. On the third afternoon came a message from the Germans. At midnight, our staff officers visit, and we must fire our automatic pistoles. But we will fire high. Nevertheless, please keep undercover. At 11 p.m., Berlin midnight, we saw flashes going away into the air. Two days later, an army order came from GHQ to the effect that men found fraternizing with the enemy would be court-martialed,

and, if found guilty, would suffer the death penalty. And again, in that place, the Vary light soared over no man's life. land at night and bullets cut showers of splinters from trees and sometimes human flesh and bone so hope sank into the mud again but did not die despite a withering anew as each poor human unit fell in machine gun and mortar blast and colossal reverberating rending of the shells of those four years, the years whose truth seems to be incommunicable. Sometimes, as one listens to what people say, here in the England a generation died for,

it seems like almost pre-war again. Can it be that we lack a maddenial, imagination to see the other fellow as ourselves and Henry Williamson continued to fight he was eventually wounded by gas then when he was declared unfit to serve in the army he then volunteered for the Air Force to see if that could get him back to the front but he didn't make it back to the front luckily because the war ended the war But not before 20 million were wounded and 17 million men were killed men just normal men So this holiday season please think of those men and women around the world in the trenches now

risking life and limb for what they believe in for freedom and think of the civilians trapped in those hellish places suffering in the merciless path of war and finally as henry williamson asked let us not lack the imagination to think to think of other men as men men men like ourselves men like us Merry Christmas to all and may there be peace on earth