CHRISTMAS and WAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 287, 22 December 1944, Page 10

CHRISTMAS and WAR

Often There Has Been No Peace on ‘ Earth, But Sometimes Goodwill

Written for "The Listener" by

HAROLD

MILLER

HERE are two good : reasons why Christmas is for Christian men the season

of peace, and of these the better known is not perhaps the more powerful. Christmas is the season of peace-or at any rate of peaceful thoughts-because it is the feast of the Prince of Peace; but it is also the season of peace for the very good reason that at that time of the year in the civilised upper half of the globe it is generally much too cold to fight. So in past ages, well before Christmas, the warriors "went into winter quarters" and collected great stores of food and drink and licked their wounds and replenished their supplies and waited for fighting weather. Up to quite recent timés there is no record that I can find of a great battle being fought on Christmas Day. But, if there has been little fighting, there has been plenty of misery. Those Roman legionaries at the outposts on the Rhine and Danube never got leave for Christmas; it was during Christmas week in the fateful year 406 that the German tribes gathered on the bank of the Rhine, preparing to pour across into the rich province of Gaul, and very cold they must have found it, as they loaded their rafts and pushed them out from

the’ shore; but on they went. And the bleak Christmas winds that swept across the Russian steppes and the plain of Hungary did little to deter Attila’s tribesmen or the hordes of Genghis Khan. Winter quarters in a_ strange continent can never have been precisely gay. Ancient, medieval or modern, winter is winter still. It was just before Christmas that the miserable remnant of Napoleon’s army escaped from the snows of Russia and staggered westward across the windswept plain of Northern Europe. No fighting, but no comfort either for them at Christmas. Nor were things much better for that dreadful Christmas that the British and French troops spent outside the walls of Sebastopol in 1855. If it was possible for things to be worse, perhaps they were worse in the bogged trenches of Flanders in 1917. No, there is not much fun in warfare in the middle of winter. Hands Across the Trenches What is very astonishing is that, so strong is the spirit of Christmas, that "everywhere, in whatever circumstances of wet and cold and horror and inhumanity, Western men’s thoughts do turn to Christmas, and sometimes for an hour or two they put their weapons down and hold out friendly hands to their enemies and smile and smoke and swap addresses and pictures of wives and children, and think the thoughts of ordinary men.’ This at any rate is what happened in France on that first Christmas Day of the first World War. "At 8.30 a.m.," says an account, "I saw four Germans leave their trenches and come towards us ... They were three private soldiers

and a stretcher-bearer, and their spokesman started off by saying that he thought it only right to come over and wish us a happy Christmas ... (After half-an-hour’s talk) we parted after an exchange of Albany cigarettes and German cigars and I went straight to Headquarters to report. On my return at 10 a.m., I was surprised to hear a hell of a din going on and not a single man left in my trenches . . . I heard strains of ‘Tipperary’ floating down the breeze, swiftly . followed by a tremendous burst of Deutschland uber Alles and ... I saw to my amazement not only a crowd of about 150 British and Germans... but six or seven such crowds all the way down our lines . .. Meanwhile Scots and Huns were fraternising in the most genuine possible manner. Every sort of souvenir was exchanged, addresses given and received, photos of families shown, etc. One of our fellows offered a German a cigarette; the German said, ‘Virginian?’ Our fellow said, ‘Aye, straight cut,’ and the Gerrhnan, ‘No thanks, I only smoke Turkish!’ (After the Germans had sung

a marching song and the Scots had replied with The Boys of Bonny Scotland) we went on, singing everything from Good King Wenceslas down to the ordinary Tommies’ songs and ended up with Auld Lang Syne, in which we all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Wurtembergers, etc., all joined." Then a hare started up and all joined in a wild chase; and then an officer turned up with a bottle of rum, "the yproper stuff," which was polished off "before you could say knife." There was more chasing in the afternoon and towards evenifig all joined in collecting dead bodies and burying them. The next day the war was resumed. "There was an attempt," says the Official History, "to repeat this custom of old warfare at Christmas, 1915, but it was a small and isolated one, and the fraternisation of 1914 was never re-peated"-which seems a pity. Of a Different Kind In the collected works of that promising young American poet, Joyce Kilmer,

who is buried at the edge of a little copse beside the Ourcq with a Ger-

man bullet in his brain, there is a very moving story of fraternisation of a rather different kind on Christmas Eve between three American soldiers and a simple French peasant woman and her child. They also exchanged pictures and food and drink and sang songs. They began with Sweet Rosie O’Grady and Take Me Back to New York Town and ended up with Mother Machree; "and Sergeant Riley obliged with a reel-in his socks -to an accompaniment of whistling and handclapping." And then, upon being requested to respond, Madame and the little Solange sang a couple of Latin hymns. "But during the final stanza, Madame did not sing. She leant against the great family bedstead and looked at us. She had taken up one of the babies and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity about that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier’s widow-we all felt it and some of us saw the in her eyes ... ‘I tell you, Joe,’ said Sergeant Reilly, afterwards, as they lay on’ the floor, smoking a last cigarette, ‘it’s 40years since I heard a hymn sung in a kitchen, and it’ was my mother — God rest her-that sang them. I sort of realise what we’re fighting for now, and I never did before. It’s for women like that and their kids.’"" Which is perhaps as good a reason as there is for warlike thoughts at Christmas-though doubtless King Herod would not have understood it. It Was No Joke But things were not always like this. It was no joke being in the middle of the Atlantic for Christmas, even if you had the luck to escape the German torpedoes; and it was no joke for those gallant troops, so indifferently led, who surrendered at Kut-el-Amara in the summer of 1916 and were driven slowly across towards the Mediterranean. Captain Yeats-Brown saw a group of them, just before Christmas, "moribund on the barrack square at Mosul." Nothing in the annals of war can be much more horrible than the treatment they received at the hands of the Turk. Seventy per cent of them never saw England again. For the rank and file, one of the survivors tells us, "Christmas came and went without notice." They were past noticing. But the officers were better treated; and in one place at any rate rigged up an altar and draped it with a flag that they had made and held a service and sang the Christmas hymns and finished up the day with a concert. What a War! What a World! In the second World War things have been somewhat different. More perhaps than in any war that preceded it, in Europe at any rate, this has been a winter war. By the second December the blitz was over but the bombers were still coming; the Navy was still at sea (continued on next page)

~ (continued from previous page) and the convoys were still at their hazardous job; in the Western Desert Wavell was in the thick of his great offensive. By the third Christmas the Germans were at the gates of Moscow and the Japanese had given the Americans a terrible blow at Pearl Harbour and were moving down towards Singapore. By the fourth Christmas the face of things had changed: the 8th Army had driven the Germans into Tunisia, terrific raids on German cities. were destroying German war industries, the Russians were advancing, things were moving in the South Pacific, and it might safely be said that the tide had turned. And .now as our sixth Christmas approaches, the end seems to be in sight. What a war! What a world! Never, it would seem, has the continent of Europe, at any rate, been the scene of greater misery. Armies have been destroyed, great cities have been blown to pieces and whole populations torn from aes homes and driven into strange ands. Mere misery is piled up mountains high. That First Christmas Christmas, it would seem, and the spirit of Christmas’can hardly have much meaning in a world so scarred and tormented by war. And yet it was in just such a world that that Christmas story first was acted! The

Jewish people to whom the Christchild came were not a nation of tailors and moneylenders, renowned for their meekness, but a_ tough and turbulent people renowned for their warlike qualities. A modern historian, Edwyn Bevan, compares them with Dervishes and Afghans, "peculiarly reckless fighters. . . terrible to control.’ A hundred and fifty years before the Gospel story began they had first wrested their independence from the Greeks, after a long and bloody struggle under the Maccabees,:.and had then turned upon one another, After two generations of civil war the Romans had stepped in (B.C. 63) and put an end to their independence. Where disorder continued, the Roman generals put it down with the usual Roman _ thoroughness; only a few years before the birth of Jesus the Legate of Syria put a temporary end to trouble by crucifying 2000 rebels for the sake of example. But worse, far worse, things were to follow. That other crucifixion, on Calvary, was scarcely over when a succession of revolts occurred that ended in the slaughter of Jews by hundreds of thousands. Such was the world which was the scene of ®he Gospel story, a world that for hatred and misery and insecurity cannot have been very different from Central Europe to-day. And the hearts and minds of men were not so different either. One day, we are told by a good authority, not long before the end of the Jewish state, a young rabbi sat down on a hill above the city and the tears welled up in his eyes as he looked down on it and he said: "If thou hadst known, even thou, the things which belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee and compass thee round and keep thee in on_every side and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another, because thou knewest not the time of. thy visitation." And so indeed they did, and so indeed they will until men learn the: message of Christmas and "the things that belong unto peace." ---