Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 291 - The Christmas Truce

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

Once upon a time enemies put aside their differences to collectively ignore their officers orders. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-real-story-of-the-christmas-truce https://www.history.com/news/christmas-truce-1914-world-war-i-soldier-accounts https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-the-christmas-truce https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-story-of-the-wwi-christmas-truce-11972213/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25206-2004Dec24.html Max Hastings. Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to a very special Christmasmas edition of the lions and bite donkeys podcast i am joe and with me trapped in this yuletide chamber of doom is tom i am desperately resisting the urge to just do the naughty holder it's christmas uh scream uh i feel like we could edit that in say it to save our beautiful pipes. You know, you don't want to get nodes or whatever it's called. Yeah, I'm sitting here still slightly moist because I decided, oh, I'm going to go to the gym. I

have like an hour and a half before we record and then looked at my watch by the time I got there and was like, oh shit, I have an hour including having to take a shower and get back. So I worked out so intensely i felt like my heart was about to explode it's good it builds muscles uh on your heart everybody knows a bigger heart is good for you i mean if if having a heart is necessary for human life having a bigger heart means you're healthier yeah i mean like if you are

listening to this on the either christmas day or the christmas period please know that i have consumed enough fat and salt to kill any lesser man so my heart is actually exploding yeah i from a combination of michigan family and entirely too much fat salt and uh probably a few other things drizzled in there um the good old michigan trio salt fat and crack cocaine the call it the drizzle uh that that way that way you don't have to identify things that are in the emulsified liquid thing yeah this is why you should never eat snow in michigan i mean where i live the snow almost always just turns gray uh that's because no one has any catalytic converters in their car that's right i have them all now they're all mine i'm gonna build a gundam out of catalytic

converters those were all your presents under the tree today it was just like a series of catalytic converters all wrapped up that's what i got everybody for for for christmas is just different catalytic converters sawn off from different makes and models of cars i mean like look by the law of averages for at least one person that's a great christmas present yeah my stepdad he had his catalytic converter stolen a little while ago uh last time i was in michigan uh uh earlier much earlier this year and uh he pulled up into the driveway in his car making just the worst fucking noise ever and you know he's a retired guy so his car is always like immaculately maintained because you know what else do retired people do and uh like man your car is making some awful fucking noises he's like oh man somebody stole my goddamn

catalytic converter again hey look you know it is the yuletide maybe uh you know tiny tim stole your cat your stepdad's catalytic converter he it's uh except it's the tiny Tim from Futurama because he needs the catalytic converters in order to survive exactly, by having a catalytic converter in your car and not allowing it to get stolen, you are depriving a poor robot of necessary

food, so think about that don't be Scrooge Scrooge diving into a vat of catalytic converters instead of money. Coming up just absolutely coded in Greece. Makes them slippery, hard to catch.

Now, Tom, today is interesting because it goes down, I believe, in podcast history. For the first time, we've planned ahead and had an episode on the actual day it occurred it's happened before but it was always an accident yeah the uh the last time this happened for me while working on the show was when the bloody sunday episode of the trouble series

accidentally came out on bloody sunday because we had to delay it yeah um i mean another time i guess that kind of happened was the Easter Rising episodes. And the only reason why that became a problem is because of a terrorist attack, which thankfully has not yet happened in any other episode that we've covered. So far, the world is a spicy place. place um and that's because today we are talking about on christmas day well for at least most of the christian world it's christmas day we are going to be talking about the christmas truce of world war one fuck yeah we're having a game a little bit of kick about a little bit of a fucking game of footy you know what mate i i mean everybody is vaguely like this is never like so top have you ever heard of the christmas truce like everybody is vaguely like this is never like, so Tom, have you heard of the Christmas truce?

Like everybody is vaguely familiar, at least the Christmas truce, especially. I mean, you have lived in the UK for quite a few years. I'm sure it's a bit of a thing in Ireland as well to talk about it. It's one of those things that's like just ubiquitous history that the vast majority of people have at least heard of i would be shocked if this is the first time somebody listening has ever heard of this um yeah it's one of the it's one of those like canonical events in history like you know like d-day stuff like that it's just one of those things that like if you are even vaguely familiar with history you've heard about this yeah and i i think people are much more familiar with like a very romanticized

version of it um which is fair because the event itself is kind of easily romanticized it's incredible um and it's the kind of thing that you probably just won't see ever again um i mean the reality of war has certainly changed world war War I was like the last hurrah, if you will, of like adventurism and war divorced from political ideology. I mean, I'm not saying there wasn't political ideology involved in World War I. Of course I'm not.

But like in comparison to the things that have come afterwards, the motivation of individual soldiers and states was very, very different what you see you know let's say a few years later um also as well like kind of the one of the last instances of like really proximate warfare like where soldiers are fighting like very very closely to each other yeah and i mean and there is situations where such combat has occurred we've talked about it that happened afterwards but it was so steeped in fucking hatred that it this kind of thing just didn't happen um now this is an event that most people like i said are vaguely familiar with the christmas truce is one of the weirdest things to

have happened in the annals of modern warfare as we know it. A time where two groups of people, trapped among the worst human meat grinders ever created by the inbred idiot power brokers of Europe, decided to put aside murdering one another if only for a day or two to allow a single glimpse of their own humanity to shine through it all. But of course, to get to that point, we kind of have to frame why this happened. Because it's not like these guys were plopped down the trench for like three or four days and then decided to go have tea with the Germans. To make a very long story short, World War I starts in June 14th, 1914. And because this is this show, it's the only time I could say to make a long story short.

And I begin with the start of World War I. I'm guaranteed there's going to be someone arguing with you. It's like, no, World War I actually started on this date. Right. Sure. And you know what? If that's you, write to Tom. Or as a lot of angry people at the podcast seem to believe, Nate, who is apparently my supervisor.

Hey, listen, if you're angry, do you know what you do? Put on your replica pith helmet and go run out of wall i encourage you to go dig a trench in your backyard and just sit in it for months hey listen i understand the inherent masculine urge to dig a hole so anybody who's ever been to a beach is a is a qualified world war one soldier because they have dug a hole for no reason other than the drive to do so. Yeah, the real hauntology of World War I is the fact that small children still, when gifted with a bucket and spade at the beach,

will try and dig a trench. This is why I encourage you to do a full-scale replica of a Western front trench and just stick your children in it. Hey, listen, it worked for the, the vast majority of Europe. Hey,

digging it and using a trench is so easy. A child can do it. And they often do. Hey, listen, if you are having, if you are listening to this on Christmas day and you're shying away from your family,

cause they're insane or they really annoy you, why don't you go into the back garden and dig a trench and hide out there and listen to this episode. Listen to this episode while you're digging the trench. Make sure to string out some razor wire, plant some landmines, really keep that family at an arm's distance.

Hide the Christmas turkey behind landmines. Now, I'm not going to go into the reasons that World War I had started. I've actually done that a few times on this show, and I'm not doing it again. You've heard of it. Things happen.

Tens of millions of men from around Europe and the rest of the world and colonies are mustered into armies and marched out in order to destroy one another. As we've discussed on this show before, nobody knew what kind of reality had just been created. War was a normal thing. It was a mainstream, romantic, and adventurous idea for many men. Of course, a lot of that had to do with the fact that media propaganda and the government messaging at the time made it that way.

Imperial governments tend to benefit when their populations don't see or conceptualize war for what it is. It's like how 9-11 led to the rise of the killers. What? I'll save it for an episode in the new year. We'll talk about it. Joe

has his head in his hands. I can always tell what I'm about to say something that really piss you off because you lean away from the mic fuck you tom happy christmas there had been a lot of autobiographies written about war up until that point taking place in some of the most awful things to have happened throughout history up until that point the the gruesome violence and the pointless of pointlessness of war was nothing new however in the like chauvinist imperial idea of war that was roundly seen as some pussy ass shit war was seen as a masculine duty and one

you should not only be happy about but look look forward to. So soldiers marched away from their homes. They had laurels hung around their necks by civilians. Bands struck up sick beats. And it wasn't a worry or a concern that people had of this coming conflict. It was joy, happiness, and eagerness. Or as one civilian said, quote, we have no idea what war will be like. There are flags and all the houses in town, just like if we're having a festival. Sure. Yeah, this is truly like the death of the Western chauvinist ideal of war as like this kind of noble and virtuous thing. It resurges in World War Two, but like for different reasons. But yeah, like the idea of the adventurous pursuit of like oh you know go off and find glory

and like go become like a weird pervert like t.s elliott or not no not not t.s elliott t.e lauren sorry i'm getting i'm getting my uh writers confused t.s send t.s elliott to the front line see what he does people believed what would become world war, the war to end all wars, would be over in a few days, a few weeks, or at most a few months. The Germans said the war would be over before the leaves had began to change on the trees, while the British were slightly more subdued in their optimism, insisting that it would all be over by Christmas. All right, we'll have our boys back for christmas dinner yeah and any point you have a job or someone hands you a gun and tells you that you'll be home by christmas you should just assume you're going to die horribly is that what they told you no uh maybe yeah the world in afghanistan will be over by christmas in 30 years no they gave you a 12 pack of rippets and told you to

fuck off yeah go over there and hate yourself for a year and come back home here's a porta potty you can go wanking shut up and do what we tell you well i mean they have my two most favorite things so it's fine what rip-its and wanking in a cubicle hobbies are important tom you wouldn't understand some young men were worried that the war would be over so quickly that they wouldn't even get a chance to seek combat if they didn't hurry down to the recruiter's office and enlist. And I call them all fucking suckers. Joe Armstrong of the North Lancashire Regiment said, quote, Well, I thought the same as everybody else. Everybody said it'll be over by christmas and you've got to go out soon otherwise you won't see anything yeah like part of this is also the fact

that like up until kind of like world war ii there was like very little actual like visual representations of war like people didn't like you knew about war but you didn't know what it looked like and this is like i suppose obviously it's called the World War for obvious reasons so it was like the first real mass mobilization from like multiple different nations coalescing in like essentially one battleground in Europe

and like yeah I think a lot of people signed up and didn't realize that yeah these new things called automatic weapons are semi-automatic weapons can do a lot of damage well there was a pretty you know visceral ideas of war like the the the wars in south africa for example in uh england were not that not that uh far away like that there's veterans of it hanging around they're still alive hell i believe there are still american

civil war veterans alive at the time but like this sheer number of fucking casualties that they're about to experience like um like for example like the first battle of the marn the frontiers ipra they're gonna pump out more casualties in a few days and most of these countries have absorbed an entire wars. So it's like soldiers and commanders, civilians, everybody. We're just completely aghast at the realities that were being presented to them. And like we've talked about before, these things shouldn't have been unknown to them. The Russo-Japanese War is like 10 years ago at this point.

But Europeans were like, that is the man of the East here. We will not experience casualties like that. Pretty much, yeah. That's exactly what happened. Yeah, they thought, I mean, they thought that it was shocking that the Japanese, you know, an empire of Asian people

defeated the Russians, but then couched it in like, well, the Russians are fucking stupid. So they deserved it. So, I mean, mean like you saw mass use of machine guns you saw mass frontal assaults on duggan infantry you saw indirect fire all kinds of every single thing that you'd see in in world war one just in a smaller scale and everybody's just like yeah but i'm built different why did you sign up to war i'm simply built different yeah anyway i'm bleeding out of my own lungs and drowning on it because of poison gas this sucks yeah hence built different because your lungs are now on the outside of your body it's fine that's fine uh on the outside there's

more room for them to expand it gives me more cardiovascular capabilities gives me more space to inhale more mustard gas that's why captain Captain America's lungs just dangle out of the side of his throat as he runs. For example, the Battle of Mons thousands were killed and Mons was just a smaller part of the larger Battle of the Frontiers which included over 1 million casualties.

Jesus Christ. It was hundreds of thousands in direct combat on top of sickness, injury, all these other things. And neither of these battles did fucking anything. They were meaningless, and everybody learned that pretty quickly. Like, wow, we just murdered so many of each other, and we have moved nowhere. Cool. The romantic adventurism of war was quickly destroyed under a hail of artillery and machine gun fire.

Entire units were destroyed in ways that nobody ever thought possible before, faster than ever before. One British veteran of this phase of the war said, quote, We hadn't gone many yards before machine gun bullets peppered around us, and they came at us almost like a hailstone dropping at the sides of you. I can't remember everybody but they were all screaming and everybody that was in charge was laying down and moaning and groaning and then there was silence. But like that's

it's something like when you read like a lot of, because like after World War I there was obviously like a kind of resurgence in like writing of poetry and a lot of literature from former soldiers a lot of war poetry and like a very consistent theme that goes throughout it is like the especially even like from people who had fought in other theaters was like the sheer difference in sound and how war sounded like the the dichotomy between like the ear shattering like noise of like machine gun fire you know planes bombs going off and then just the silence in between charges yeah i think one of i mean

ernst junger is a deeply fucked up individual um but uh he wrote a book storm of steel about his time in world war one and i think his is the only memoir you're going to read where he's like, this shit ruled. I wish we did it for longer. Yeah, if you read anything else, it's like, this shit sucked. Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting read. I'm not saying don't read it. It's also very short.

But he has probably one of the most visceral descriptions of being under artillery bombardment ever of like, you're tied to a pole. You cannot move. And someone is swinging a sledgehammer at your head and you can do nothing to dodge it for hours, for hours and hours and hours, sometimes days and weeks at a time.

Now, another soldier said, quote, the Germans had retired to positions they had held in 1870 and they had all the artillery on this position. So they knew the range to an inch before we set off the officer made us clean our buttons actually you know our brass buttons we had to clean them so in that sunshine we must have been a beautiful target mustn't we they were laughing

and singing and joking all the lot of them and in the twinkle of an eye, I was the only one left alive out of 400, dead and dying all around me. Like, there's just the sheer destructive ability of the new weapons that were deployed in World War I. Like, has that just, like, reality-defining effect? It's like, in a blink of an eye, you're the only person left. Yeah, I mean, it's not the first time in military history that military weapons vastly outpaced innovations and tactics for at a lesser extent this kind of happened in the u.s civil war as well where suddenly artillery and rifles could fire much further and more accurately than people were used to but they're still marching directly up next to one another like it was in napoleonic

era because that is how they learned that's how they learned how to do it it's like ah fuck it it's the same yeah like warfare becomes asymmetrical when one side has the supremacy of violence when like one side just has way better weapons i know what you said i'd rather be on you want to be the guy firing the cannon yeah now within a few weeks the brutal killing of world war one turned into what we know it as, trench warfare. Various armies realized that mobile warfare was not working. Casualty lists expanded faster than anybody had thought possible, and Western Europe was transforming into a series of trenches, some only a few meters away from the other side, while the killing continued. By December 1914, the war had been going on for months and had barely moved. Hundreds of thousands were already dead. So, no matter what reality you put a soldier in, they're going to do soldier shit. And that is their lives will continue in one way or another, and they will go about it in the path of least resistance, which is also common with humanity.

There's oftentimes, whether it be in modern wars, the ones that are going on at the time of recording, or ones hundreds of years ago, a couple decades ago, doesn't matter, is that life goes on. It doesn't matter the stress that a population is under. They're going to continue living their lives the best way they possibly can. It's going to look incredibly strange from the outside because human beings are actually incredibly resilient, assuming they have food and water for the most part. The trenches were so close to one another, it wasn't like soldiers didn't occasionally run into one another and talk to the other side.

Soldiers knew that shooting each other at every possibility that came up was completely pointless and would just make their lives even worse. Even before December, kinds of unofficial live and let live situations were incredibly commonplace. This normally surfaces as a kind of agreed upon handshake, high five type situation where men from either side could go out in the middle of no man's land and retrieve their dead and dying without fear of being shot at at an agreed upon hour normally at night there was also an unofficial agreement that the two sides wouldn't try to kill one another if they

saw you taking a shit so that's kind of nice that's that's courtesy like that remember almost everybody has fucking diarrhea so they're always just shit and fire so you gotta like if a sniper ranges you in and you're you know pants around your ankles wishing you were dead because you have trench dysentery leave them alone the sniper also has dysentery like everybody has remember we're like 50 years

away before the world's first solid shit but like yeah like it it's this weird kind of as well like i don't know holdover of like honor on the battlefield which will like very soon disappear but it's yeah it's like a weird holdover of like a time that was like about to pass yeah and you know you put soldiers in a bad enough situation and especially remember this is generally not counting French soldiers. French and German soldiers fucking hated one another. And for good reason. France had been fucking invaded. They were not happy that the Germans were there.

Same with, say, Belgium and other places. But the British and other foreign soldiers had no skin in the game. They had no personal hatred especially at this point because remember the war's only been going on a few months they think even with all this shit it's still probably going to end soon they don't know they have several years of this shit in their future so like they're they don't have any skin in the game most of them at this point are definitely wondering why the fuck they're there so there's no point of murdering people at every turn meanwhile Meanwhile, virtually none of these

things, other than the occasional ceasefire to pull dead and dying out of no man's land, had anything to do with the French and the Germans. Of course, this didn't happen everywhere, and none of this is a monolith or a blanket term. There were certainly elements of the British military that also did not take part in this. There's elements of the French army that did take part in this. Soldiers are not a monolith, regardless of orders. But in some places, it was much more formal. In one stretch of land between the French and the Germans, for 30 minutes in the evening, at the same time, every day, when the sun went down, the two sides were completely free to go out. In a lot of situations, casual greetings were exchanged and soldiers would trade newspapers and books with one another. Other times when the weather got particularly bad, they would agree to leave one another alone so they could tend to their

flooded out trench lines and not be shot at while they tried to dig out the water. In some British sectors, things got even friendlier. Soldiers would be posted on schedule at the same time, at the same place, and soon they would get to know the guy on the other side. Many of them made small talk, learned about each other's names, their family back home, their jobs, their life. And they just agreed that without orders from their officers explicitly saying to go on the offensive, they would just ignore one another and let each other live. There was no reason to make each other's lives even more miserable if five seconds of peace could be reasonably found. During many nights, a side would start singing for the entertainment of the other. Sometimes this would turn into slight taunts and slight shit-talking,

but nothing offensive or insulting. For example, the Germans liked to sing Deutschland über alles, while the Brits would answer back with God save the king and then both sides would laugh about it. In some cases, the British would sing Deutschland über alles as a joke. Won't be the last time the Brits sing Deutschland über alles. This turned into something of a game for the both

sides and see who could play the best music, both vocal and instrumental. With one British officer saying he was going to organize the best Christmas band he could in order to show off to the Germans. Saying he was going to, quote, give the enemy every conceivable form of song in harmony. Which sounds like a weird throw.

Hello, my darling. Hello, my ragtime girl. He's just like, anyway, guys, I call this Skrillex. And that's why the war went on for three more years i mean that'd be more terrifying you you i know people go on about like i was showing like a victorian child 100 gex imagine being a german soldier in a trench and you hear bangarang starting the first german imperial soldier her dubstep just puts his mauser in his mouth and pulls the fucking trigger now this is very common knowledge throughout the ranks and while some officers accepted it as simply the reality of the situation and hardly an outlier in the history of war others were fucking furious though this mostly fell like i said to the french you could probably

understand as we talked about they were not very happy with this entire situation and they were pretty they were especially pissed that the british were doing it i could really imagine so as christmas neared the governments involved in the war attempted to send what could be considered christmas gifts to their soldiers which only actually pissed them off more about the life that they found themselves living. Their German empire sent, quote, packages of bad cigars, indifferent chocolate, and

wool of problematic usefulness. I don't know how bad chocolate has to be to be described as indifferent. It's because it didn't have meth in it yet. The panzer chocolate hasn't been invented. They didn't have pervit it yet. Yeah, the Panzer chocolate hasn't been invented. Yeah, they didn't have Pervitin yet. Yep.

This upset the German soldiers and only actually made them more homesick. One officer saw the plummeting morale in his ranks and wondered if it would be better if nobody even acknowledged Christmas and just pretended it didn't exist. And hopefully the men would just forget about it. Now, the British had something of a tradition going back to their wars in South Africa of sending Christmas gifts to their soldiers. These were like small tins addressed from Princess Mary that included tobacco, chocolate, and a greeting

card that said, quote, May God protect you and bring you home safe. Alongside a badly copied version of the king's signature. Like the Germans, the shit inside kind of sucked, and it only made the British feel more sad.

Like, opening a tin and like the tobacco is just like stems and seeds and shit. The chocolate is half melted.

Yeah, the tobacco's like super dry, you can't really roll with it. Like, how bad does the chocolate have to be

that it makes you sad? I don't know. Like how bad does the chocolate have to be that it makes you sad? I don't know. Like the Germans are describing as indifferent. Yeah, like I could be indifferent about chocolate, but like seeing chocolate and it making you feel sad, it must have been so shit. Personally, I'm quite indifferent towards chocolate. I don't really have a sweet tooth,

but I've never once have I tasted chocolate and felt nothing. Like, I don't really have a sweet tooth, but I've never once have I tasted chocolate and felt nothing. I don't know. This is a special military recipe because it's the military. Nate has joked on this show before that the military will take things that you love and strip all the fun out of it. And they stripped the fun out of chocolate. Congratulations. They've done it. Now, as Christmas Eve got closer, the soldiers in some sectors of the line simply stopped shooting at one another. In other circumstances, when an officer told someone to shoot, they would, but they had purposefully aimed straight up into the air and then apologized for being a bad shot after missing on purpose. Now, like I said, other sectors were not so friendly.

In one situation, a full German brass band began playing, serenading the British, and the British promptly dropped artillery directly on top of them. Just imagine the screams of pain and horror but being funneled

through a tuba. Jesus Christ. Oh no, they're honks of pain. Fritz, toot three times if you're gonna die. Obviously, the men wanted a few days, or hell, a day where they didn't have to murder one another. Like, they're a little more than cannon fodder, and they weren't alone. a day where they didn't have to murder one another like they're a little more than cannon fodder

and they weren't alone. There was the so-called Open Christmas Letter written by British suffragettes addressed specifically to the women of Austria, that would be Austria-Hungary in the German Empire. Because of wartime censors though, they couldn't publish it and they had to send it to the US who was not in the war yet

and therefore had no censorship laws. A letter called for peace over the Christmas holiday and it was answered in the same way and therefore had no censorship laws. A letter called for peace over the Christmas holiday and it was answered in the same way by a group of German women. Unfortunately, none of this mattered because they were women. It was the 1900s and the empires of the world didn't give a single fuck about them. Yeah, like, people weren't really listening to women at that stage. It's what, like, the 1910s? Yeah, it's 1914. Things aren't great for women anywhere in the

world now pope benedict the 15th also offered a ceasefire of the christmas holiday he called the war the european equivalent of suicide and wrote that quote that the guns may fall silent at least upon the night that the angels sang no it was the wasn't the 1500s anymore. Nobody to listen to the fucking Pope. So they told him to kick rocks. Yeah, for once the Pope is trying to stop a war. Yeah, I think he offered preemptively to smuggle Germans to Argentina for some reason. But he's a couple decades early. Yeah.

With all the powers that be insistent that fighting would continue, pointless though it may be, it fell onto the soldiers themselves to decide what would happen next. And here's actually the interesting part. As far as what happened next, nobody actually knows how exactly it began or how it spread or how many people it included. Though it is generally agreed upon through oral histories and diary entries that it all began with one side singing Christmas carols and the other side kind of finding it fun and joining in. Yeah, I mean, like, Christmas music does slap. Like, I enjoy a sleigh bell. I enjoy a song in the key of B flat.

I just assume that German soldiers climbed to the top of the trench and just began singing the Mariah Carey song. All I want for Christmas is you. And then someone promptly shooting him in the fucking chest. Everyone knows the best Christmas song is Wham's Last Christmas. That's all I'm going to say. Also, I'm going to correct myself before someone gets annoyed and says it to me. I meant B major. You're going to get the music heads on you

yes yes i know music theory okay i know my phrygian and mixolydian modes you know like all theory i refuse to accept it now in flanders at least in one sector it began the same day and in the same area that the british gunners had previously obliterated the German brass band. According to the British soldiers, Christmas trees, fully lit up with lights, appeared over the top of the German trenches. Alongside the trees, German soldiers sat up on the top of their trenches in full view of the British. Someone on the British line opened fire, taking out a few of the trees and sending the Germans ducking for cover.

Though after a few minutes, they simply climbed back up, fixed their trees, and sat back up there. After this, the British in the area climbed atop their own trenches and began singing with them. Slowly, the lit up trees spread down the German lines and more and more men climbed up and completely exposed themselves to enemy fire. The Germans began to sing traditional English songs, and a few of the Brits returned the favor, singing in German. And we don't know who the first person to finally just say fuck it and start walking across no man's land was, but we do know that the officers are outright horrified. Soldiers...

Yeah, I can imagine a fucking officer being like, oh my god, what are they doing? They're getting out of the trenches. They're going to put up trees. Because like, imagine what thoughts could be going through the officer's mind. Like, are my fucking soldiers just surrendering without orders?

Like what is happening? No, nowhere in the top 9 million things could they think of in this situation? Like, Oh, they're just going to go hang out. Yeah. Like,

listen, as time is long, the worst thing that an officer can imagine is someone not listening to them. Yeah, pretty much. A-Cob, all commissioned officers are bastards. Soldiers walked across no man's land, checked out where each other lived, exchanged cigarettes, cigars, and uniform items like hats, buttons, and patches,

and turned around and went back home. In other places, the Brits were, again, very suspicious. They opened fire on Christmas trees, only to be greeted by German soldiers singing, God Save the Queen, and then yelling, Englishmen! Englishmen, don't shoot! You don't shoot, we won't shoot.

And that is how the night of Christmas Eve passed. Then came Christmas morning the germans kept their trees up then in one sector private frank richards of the welch future leaders painted the words merry christmas on a wooden board and stuck it above the trench i see me and frank have the same christmas decoration habits what my boards is merry christmas on it fuck you i decorated habits. What? My board says Merry Christmas on it? Fuck you. I decorated. He thought the Germans would take a shot at it, but they didn't.

So, Frank and a couple other soldiers said fuck it, climbed above the trench line, arms raised, and unarmed. Slowly, the Germans on the other side did the same thing. Everyone around them looked on in horror as two British and two German soldiers climbed up and out of the trench and began walking towards one another. After a few tense seconds, the two sides shook hands.

I assume with the sexual tension thick enough to be cut with a knife. As thick as a rope. Several ropes, in fact. Yes. Then the two sides, seeing that these guys were just chilling, emptied the fuck out.

Hundreds of soldiers, possibly thousands, climbed out of the trench and began walking into the middle of No Man's Land to greet one another. And I should just paint you a picture of what

No Man's Land fucking looks like here. It has been shelled and machine gunned to piss. There is easily, conservatively, hundreds of corpses out there

just laying in the open and they're like let's go say hi just steppering over your buddies like going over like oh sorry sorry sorry oh there's pete let's take his buttons make sure they're shiny first yeah they're shining the buttons on the corpse the welsh commander tried to get his men to stop, but everyone simply ignored him. The commander was nicknamed Buffalo Bill for his habit of pointing his sidearm at his own men and threatening to kill him whenever he got stressed out, and I assume not tucking his dick between his legs

and singing Pretty Horses into the mirror. Oh, that movie's so problematic. It's so good. Especially if you look too far into it. Yeah, don't read too much into it. Yeah, sounds very much like the behavior, like both pointing a gun at your soldiers and pretending to be Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.

That's actually how you get commissioned in the British military. You tuck your dick between your leg and dance in front of a mirror. Would you commission me? I'd commission me. I'd commission me so hard. I mean, like, very much Sandhurst behavior. Like, have you read anything? Like, look at T.E. Lawrence.

You know, I wouldn't want one of these German soldiers to whip me. I wouldn't want anyone to, you know, hit me with their rifle. I'll volunteer to lay across the razor wire and you can run over me. How would you like to decorate me like a Christmas tree? Now, every, like, lower level officer looked at their commanders like, you know, if the soldiers are doing it, fuck it, I'm going too, and joined with their men, walking out into no man's land and hanging out with the German officers.

Upon meeting a few German-speaking Brits and English-speaking Germans, they began talking about how sick of the fucking war they were, and then they traded cookies. I mean, everybody likes cookies, especially if it's chocolate socks. Who's making the cookies? Maybe they're made out of mud. They're mud cookies. I mean, everybody likes cookies, especially if the chocolate sucks. Who's making the cookies? Maybe they're made out of mud. They're mud cookies. I've made for you the finest mud pies in all

of Bavaria. The Bavarian mud pie? Sounds like something that's on Urban Dictionary. Some officers began to panic, calling back to their superiors and asking what the fuck they should do because their men seemed to be completely in the middle of a mutiny. One captain, George Painter, was told that under no circumstances

was he to fraternize with the Germans and to control his men. But seeing that all control was lost, he turned to his subordinate officer and said, Well, come on, Alan, show me the Huns. And then they joined their men. In some areas of the line officers are very suspicious instead of joining in took the time to reinforce their badly damaged trench lines now that they weren't going to get shot at while doing it and one the brits joked that the germans probably would have helped

them build their trenches if they just would have asked yeah like imagine how annoyed you'd be if like you see other soldiers like over there like having fun fraternizing and your ceo is like no you have to nail up boards you just you have to dig like come on man they're playing football and drinking whiskey no you dig as the hundreds of men hung out in the middle of no man's land a german officer thought it'd be a great idea to break out the stores of their wine cellar and soon he appeared carting along a massive christmas tree and 50 crates of wine to share with his new friends fuck yeah that sounds like a good christmas yeah one german soldier who refused to join on the celebration was a 25 year old lance corporal in the 16th bavarian reserve infantry unit named Adolf Hitler.

Nein, I do not celebrate Christmas. Actually, that's exactly why. It wasn't that he What? Yeah, it wasn't that the idea that he hated the British

that much. He just didn't like religious celebrations. Folks. Yeah, I mean, he did. They should have known.

They should have known. He did like later say that it was like a slight to the like the his soldierly honor or whatever to fraternize with the enemy but pretty much everybody agrees it's only because he hated christmas shut up shut up adolf you're too shit to get into art school you little fucking bitch

go sit in the trench and read books you nerd we're gonna go drink beer with the fucking brits and play football imagine Imagine Adolf Hitler playing a game of football and not immediately getting pushed over and crying in the mud. Why do I always have to play goalie? Then some German soldier kicked out a football and began kicking it back

and forth. Now there are stories of actual organized football matches being held behind German lines, but we don't know if that actually happened. What we do know is that a British soldier made plans with a German officer to put together teams and play the next day, which is Boxing Day in, I assume, most British countries, right? Or Commonwealth nations.

It's not something we have in the US. It's Boxing Day here at St. Stephen's Day in Ireland and I assume most Catholic countries. I was pretty disappointed to learn that Boxing Day is not the day you just fight your family. I mean it's how much a lot of people drink on Christmas Day

I'd say it is. But that match never happened. It was actually cancelled due to artillery fire which is a hazard I assume. that match never happened. It was actually canceled due to artillery fire, um, which is, you know, a hazard. I assume like, I'm sure FIFA would still host a world cup in a place that was under the

immediate threat of artillery fire. So it's not that uncommon. I mean, uh, yeah, yeah. 20, 36 world cup Somalia.

Though on Christmas day, according to a letter from a British officer, they tried to play a game in no man's land, though it didn't amount to much due to all the damage and the terrain didn't make the whole thing flat for a game of football. Instead, they just kind of kicked the ball back and forth, though one magazine later reported that in a different sector, a group of German soldiers beat a group of local British doctors 3-2. In another area in Belgium, a football match between the two sides was reportedly soundtracked by some sick bagpipe tunes supplied with the local Scots unit. Fuck yeah. Private Ernie Williams later remembered a story from his local trench football match. Quote, the ball appeared from somewhere. I don't know where, but it came from their side. It wasn't from our side because I don't remember having a football in the trench they made up some goals and one fellow

went for a goal and it just kind of as a general kick about i should think there was a couple hundred people taking part all at once i had to go with the ball i was pretty good back then at 19 sure thing buddy everyone everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves there's no sort of ill will between us or even competition there is no referee no score and no tally at all it's not like football you see on television we were wearing combat boots

and those were a menace because they were great big boots and the balls were made out of leather back then and soon just became soggy other soldiers brought out their packages from home stringing mistletoe and lights around one another's helmets while German soldiers brought out their packages from home, stringing mistletoe and lights around one another's helmets, while German soldiers brought out a camera documenting all of it. A German circus performer who had since been drafted into the army began to entertain everybody with his juggling skills.

He's juggling like canisters of mustard gas. Really don't know. Worse than chainsaws. Hope you don't drop them. In other areas areas the two sides sat down for a christmas dinner of shared military rations wine and several barrels of beer and i should point out this is specifically a selective frontline phenomena every other part of the continued to work and many stretches of the line did not strike up any kind of official ceasefire

this is not a war-wide phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. That meant occasionally these sporadic meetings were temporarily paused because artillery randomly began raining down on them. The two sides would duck into whichever trench they happened to be closer to, wait for it to pass, and head back out to continue the fun. In another sector of the line, a British officer got a message that their artillery was about to bomb the German trench in 20 minutes. So he went over to the German officers and warned them and suggested that they would be safer in the British trenches. And they were. By the end of the day, the two sides bid their farewells and returned to their trenches. Though in a lot of places, the unofficial ceasefire landed throughout Boxing Day. And in some places, when officers insisted

that they return to things as they always were, soldiers once again purposefully missed whenever they fired the rifle. A German soldier later said, quote, We spent that day and the next wasting our ammunition trying to shoot the stars down from the sky. Soldiers were a lot more fucking poetic back then, man. Yeah, it's back when soldiers could read. Though when the war had to begin again within the next couple days or the day after that,

they made sure to tell the other side that their little agreement was off. Sorry, bros. We have to go back to killing one another. An officer climbed to the top of the trench, inviting a German officer to do the same thing. When they saw one another, they both gave each other a salute, a theatrical bow, When they saw one another, they both gave each other a salute, a theatrical bow, and then unholstered his pistol and fired it into the sky, announcing the restarting of the war. Damn. What we now see as a story of humanity shining through and even some of the worst parts of human history was not exactly seen that way at the time.

Instead, it was seen as a subversion and, in many cases, outright treason. The military tried to keep it under wraps, but eventually it was written about by the New York Times about a week later because the U.S. and the New York Times was not yet subject to any kind of press censorship. It was then spread to the British press, but the German and French governments ruthlessly crushed any story that might come out about it. Though, when they couldn't escape the story any longer, the French simply blamed the Brits for it, which to be fair, was actually largely true. Very few French soldiers took part in the holiday celebrations. A week after the truce, the German military said that if anybody ever approached the enemy ever again like that, they would be arrested for treason, which pretty much carried an automatic death sentence. While nobody was ever officially punished for taking part in the truce, massive efforts would be put in place so in the future, this shit would never happen again. In the future years of World War I, generals from both sides would make sure raids,

attacks, and constant artillery barrages were planned throughout the Christmas holiday. Not to mention the continued savagery of the war meant that fewer and fewer soldiers had any goodwill or even humanity left in them to see the guy on the other side for anything more than something he needed to kill. Though despite all of this, small spurts of the truce did happen again. The next year, 1915, Bulgarian and Greek soldiers briefly hung out for a little bit while Germans and Brits once again met up, exchanged bread, and openly talked about how much the war sucked, the layout of their trenches, and then were quickly chased back into their own line by their officers at gunpoint. Soon, the various armies of the front were so worried about these

kinds of things that an officer was court-martialed for striking up a temporary truce so that both sides could retrieve their dead from no man's land, something that was considered pretty commonplace and normal at the time. Though, by the time he went to trial, everyone realized how insane they were being, and they simply reprimanded him, and even that sentence was eventually thrown out by Commander of the British Forces, Douglas Haig. By 1916, overtures of a Christmas truce were largely ignored by one side or another, and by 1917, it was all as dead as the people stuck out in the middle of no man's land. One British soldier sums this entire episode up pretty perfectly, saying if commanders had just left the soldiers alone, the war would have ended right then and there on Christmas Day of 1914.

And that is the Christmas Truce. Man, you know, like, it's one of, like, it's stories like this that like show that like even during like wartime there is like still humanity peeking through and it's kind of like that sort of humanity has just kind of disappeared from like warfare

is horrible and it is a terrible thing that exists in the first place but like I don't know it feels like it's kind of turned a little bit into this like propagandist like heartwarming story but like when you read like diary entries and stuff from the soldiers who participated in it it's like it's kind of heartbreaking that it was this tiny respite in like an over overwhelmingly miserable experience where everyone just knew they were going to die.

Yeah, and not to mention the vast majority of the people that took part in it almost certainly died pretty shortly afterwards. I think people have a tendency to see soldiers as, in any war, really, as little more than soulless, mindless killing machines or brainwashed, propagandized monsters who do nothing but violence. And besides being terribly reductive, it's just not true. Even in the most horrific

militaries the world has ever seen, even in the most horrific wars the world has ever seen, you find episodes vaguely similar to this where you see divorced from the group, the group dynamics that kind of make this kind of industrialized violence possible, people will become people again. And that's one of the things that's pretty telling about this is that soldiers did it independent from their officers.

And they did it against their officers because they saw their officers effectively as the enemy. They're the ones making them miserable. And by extension, the politicians, the government leaders, whatever. And when given the opportunity, they took it. And you see, as I explain, in the future, it was the officers, once again, making sure that couldn't happen by planning attacks, planning offenses, planning artillery bombardments because they knew if they didn't, this would happen again

because they're just, most of these people are fucking children. You know, they're 17, 18, 19, sometimes 16 or younger, depending on what trench line they're in. They just want to fucking go home. Like all armies, they're all dying over some inbred asshole

beefing over turf. They have no skin in this game. Not a single German soldier, or not a single British soldier, not a single French soldier out there was involved in anything to do with the beginning of this war. Yeah. And that is generally the case in most soldiers in most wars throughout all time. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

But that is the Christmas Truce. Tom, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, write to the show on Patreon, on our Discord. You can pack it into a barrel of beer,

drag it across No Man's Land over Christmas, and deliver it to us. And we, drag it across no man's land over Christmas and deliver it to us. And we will answer it on the show. And today's question is, if you had to disappear from society and go off and just work by yourself, like effectively in exile,

like a lighthouse keeper or an Antarctic research station, what would you do a forest ranger easy i mean i'm already a podcaster that's kind of it's kind of like uh that's just the digital version of that right yeah no 100 forest ranger i would i would love to work in nature uh i i did do that when i was working for the bureau of land management as a wildland firefighter but but you do work in a team, so I can't really use that here. I would take one of those jobs. It's like those weird islands in Greece or there's some in the UK somewhere and some off whatever country. That's like, we just need you to live there and make sure the island doesn't fall apart.

You're the only person on the island, and you just need to make sure this radar station stays operating. I feel like I could do that. Or just a streamer. No, don't do it, Joe. Anyway, Tom, thank you so much for joining me here today uh thank you everybody who has bought tickets to our live show is already sold out one night the second night might already be sold out as well so check the links below see if you can still get a ticket we're doing two shows back to back the 26th and 27th of january at the big belly comedy club in in London. We have two different shows planned.

So if you already have tickets to the first show, if you buy tickets to the second show, you'll see a whole other show. So, you know, that's a thing that's going to happen. Thanks, Tom. Yes, this is all my fault. If you like what we

do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. Patreon supporters had first dibs on all of the live show tickets and that's something we plan on doing in the future you get first dibs on merch you get years and years of bonus content every episode early discord access books audiobooks stickers way too much shit donate to the patreon and tom use this area to plug your show. Actually, instead of plugging my show, Beneath Skin, you know it. If you don't already, that's what it is.

I want to wish everyone listening a happy Christmas. It's been a really weird and interesting year working with the show. We've grown quite a lot, and I know that Christmas is kind of difficult for a lot of people and I just wanted to say wish you a very happy

holiday time and thank you for listening to the show that's really all I have to say yeah so we're plugging our own fans actually yeah I mean like it's it's kind of breathtaking how much the show's taking off we've been doing this it'll be six years

coming soon um and um it's legitimately been life-changing i don't know how else to say that um we're having a two-night fucking sold-out show in london we never thought we were gonna do a live show because of distance and my own qualms about not thinking someone would actually pay to see this shit live. And you have promptly proved me wrong in literal hours at one point.

It's incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for all the kind reviews you leave everywhere and spreading the word through wherever the hell it is you use social media or websites because we don't do fuck all for marketing um you do the marketing by telling people that you like the show so thank you um and until next time uh uh don't celebrate christmas with hitler