Peace Breaks Out on Christmas Eve

The new book about the Civil War “truce.”

Alfred Anderson was only 16 when he joined Scotland’s famous Black Watch Brigade in 1912. His battalion, the 5th, was part of the Territorial Force, a reserve unit intended to defend the British Isles against attack. In other words, he wasn’t a professional soldier; he was a young fellow who expected to spend summers at a training camp in the country. Last month he died at the age of 109 (he was born in 1896). He was the last of the more than 500,000 Scots to have fought in the Great War. Most of his obituaries, however, mentioned another distinction, running headlines like the one in the Victoria, British Columbia, Advocate: “Alfred Anderson, Last Survivor of World War I ‘Christmas Truce.’”

The Christmas truce occurred in 1914, the first year of the war. It wasn’t an official truce by any means but an unprompted uprising by the soldiers in the trenches. In isolated instances all up and down the front, from Belgium to central France, peace suddenly broke out.

Often the dropping of guns began with a Christmas carol wafting across No Man’s Land (the area between the opposing trenches). Songs of the season were traded, and then communication led to a meeting in the middle, which was no longer No Man’s Land at all, but a place of conviviality. Soldiers exchanged trinkets and gifts. A soccer game often followed. As the Christmas truce spread along the line, it became an affirmation of the goodness of people, a fairy tale come true, the way things should always be. It was, in other words, truly Christmas.

“I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” Anderson told the London Observer in December 2004. “Only the guards were on duty. We all went outside the farm buildings [where he was billeted] and just stood listening. And, of course, thinking of people back home.” Only two months before, he had been in Scotland. Suddenly, in October 1914, the Black Watch had been called into service, becoming one of the first British outfits on the front. “All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices,” he said. “But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt merry.” He didn’t participate in the soccer game that sprang up among the Germans and British. “We didn’t have the energy, anyway,” he said. “The silence ended in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.”

When commanding officers heard about the homemade truce, they were furious and ordered the troops back into the trenches. The Christmas truce was not repeated in 1915. By then the generals were prepared with explicit orders forbidding any such fraternization. Many also ordered “slow fire” on the opposing trenches all day—that is, just enough artillery to blast away any glimmer of good cheer. By then, the soldiers were different anyway, made older and grimmer by a very hard year of war.

The Christmas truce of 1914 didn’t make any difference in the course of World War I, but it has remained a unique moment in military history. However, James McIvor has found an instance in the Civil War when the animosity between the Union and Confederate soldiers also lifted, if only for the length of a single song. He writes about it his new book, God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers: A True Civil War Christmas Story (Viking, $19.95). It isn’t a long book, and even so only about two pages of it actually pertain to “the incident.” At that, it was “an incident such as history seldom records,” wrote a Tennessee soldier who was part of it.

As the opposing forces settled into battle lines near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on December 30, 1862, the bands on each side played an evening concert for their respective comrades. The two concerts continued, unharmoniously enough, until, “as if by common consent,” recalled the Tennesseean, both took up “Home, Sweet Home.” The men on both sides soon joined together in singing the song. When it was over, though, they went back to their brooding and prepared for the next day’s fighting in the fierce Battle of Stones River (which is known as the Battle of Murfreesboro in Confederate histories). Three thousand men died in the fight, never again to see their homes, sweet or not, while fifteen thousand were wounded. By itself the incident of the singing probably doesn’t deserve a whole book, but McIvor meanders through the lives of various soldiers and their lot in the war, always a topic worth recalling.

The truce in World War I, however, stands as an even more promising and in a sense more arresting moment. It is as if what was for all too few years known as “the war to end all wars” had in fact been just that. Of course, that may seem a treacly thought, and the sense of hope that fuels it an impossible one. But then, why are people still haunted by the 1914 Christmas truce today? And why would Viking publish a whole book about the fact that some soldiers sang “Home, Sweet Home” together in 1862?

—Julie M. Fenster is the author most recently of Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race (Crown, $25).