The night is clear and cold. Snow covering the no man’s land between trenches glistens in the moonlight. It’s Christmas Eve 1914 on the Western Front, and the British High Command is nervous. They’ve sent a message to the front: the enemy may be contemplating an attack. Special vigilance is needed.
In the roughly six months since the First World War began, more than a million soldiers have been killed. The front line stretches 500 miles, and it has barely moved. Reality is setting in on the front and at home — a generation of men is being decimated over a few acres.
After dinner that evening, British soldier Albert Moren blinks in disbelief. Across the field, within the enemy camp, he sees lights flicker on, one by one: lanterns, torches, … Christmas trees. Across the cold air comes the sound of enemy voices singing, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.”
British soldiers cautiously peer over the edge of their trench. Looking at each other, they decide to respond with a round of “The First Noel.” The Germans applaud and reply with “O Tannenbaum.” This back-and-forth continues for a while until the two enemy camps sing together in Latin “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
“I shall never forget it,” Moren says later. “It was one of the highlights of my life.”
“It was one of the highlights of my life.” — Albert Moren
A few miles north of the makeshift choir, a German soldier shouts across 200 yards of barbed wire and mud to the Scottish camp. He offers a cigarette. Two soldiers meet in no man’s land for a smoke. Then, the trenches empty.
“What a sight – little groups of Germans and British extending almost the length of our front! Out of the darkness we could hear laughter and see lighted matches […] Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill,” Corporal John Ferguson later wrote.
The next day, the soldiers meet again for rounds of soccer. In northern France, opposing sides gathered for a joint burial service. Up and down the front, gifts are exchanged, and enemies sit elbow-to-elbow for Christmas feasts.
Most British soldiers were stunned at how friendly the Germans were. They had been told by news services and neighbors that the Germans were murderous and cruel. German newspapers proclaimed that the French and English didn’t even celebrate Christmas. All it took was a snippet of genuine, courageous interaction for many soldiers to begin to question what they had been told. As one British soldier wrote home, “After our talk, I really think a lot of our newspaper reports must be horribly exaggerated.”
For a long time, the Christmas truce of 1914 was treated as a myth. After the holidays, war resumed, and millions more soldiers were killed — although thousands of soldiers did their best to maintain the peace, exchanging secret letters of warning along the front, firing too high to hit anyone, and tacit agreements not to shoot. The temporary Christmas peace was considered a rumor until the 1981 BBC documentary “Peace in No Man’s Land” demonstrated what really happened through images and first-hand accounts. Two-thirds of the British front line ceased fighting Christmas 1914.
According to Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman in Humankind: A Hopeful History (from which I’ve gathered the narrative and quotes above), similar truces also happened during the Spanish Civil War, the Boer Wars, the American Civil War, the Crimean War and the Napoleonic Wars.
Bregman argues in this book and through such examples that humanity’s natural impulse is to be kind, to show compassion and empathy. It is often collective structures, such as misguiding news and social policies that create distance between us, preventing us from leaning into our kindness. Furthermore, there is a deep philosophical history in Western cultures that argues that humans are inherently selfish. When we are taught this for so long, Bregman writes, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, we are limited creatures. We are hardwired to give preference to people who look like us, talk like us and think like us. However, that is not the end of the equation, according to Bregman. We have a choice. And when we choose to get to know someone new, to break down the distance between us, we encounter someone who is more like us than we previously believed. This changes everything. But we must leave our trenches to experience this growth.
It requires courage to step out from our entrenched beliefs, to step away from the echo chambers that reflect our joy, our anger, our grief.
It requires courage to step out from our entrenched beliefs, to step away from the echo chambers that reflect our joy, our anger, our grief. When I first read this story in Humankind, it was the morning of election day, and Bregman’s optimism spoke to me. It made me believe that no matter the outcome of the election, this guidance – to have courage, to get to know our neighbor – was the way forward.
I am a different person today. I am heartbroken and disappointed — a word that feels cavalier considering my fear and resignation. As a friend said in a text, “My optimism tank is empty.” I am giving myself permission to linger here for a little while, resisting the temptation to find a solution or jump straight into the spin zone. However, I am searching for something to cling to, and I am choosing to believe, as Black Liturgies author Cole Arthur Riley wrote yesterday, that I was not foolish for hoping, and it is ok to feel grief.
To hope is to open yourself to disappointment, but it’s also the key to living a full, impactful life. Psychologist Maria Konnikova is a leading expert on frauds and swindles. She literally wrote the book on it, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time. You might expect her recommendation to be: stay vigilant, always be on guard. Instead, she recommends that we accept and account for the fact that we’ll occasionally be cheated. It’s a small price to pay for the luxury of functioning out of trust.
To hope is to open yourself to disappointment, but it’s also the key to living a full, impactful life.
Let us grant those who need to linger in our disappointment the grace to do so. Then, when we’re ready, might we all step out of our trenches? Let’s believe in the infectious power of kindness. Let’s be courageous in the love we show for our neighbors, even those who do not think like us. Let us recognize, like the soldiers in WWI, that our “enemies” aren’t that different from us, and perhaps we have been falsely led to believe the worst of them. Let’s practice our hope in God through our actions.
When we live with this generosity, we will be let down. But we will also create ripple effects of goodness. I think we will find that the more love we give, the more love we will have. “This is true of trust and friendship, and it’s true of peace,” writes Bergman. Perhaps this multiplying love is one of God’s greatest gifts, but it requires us to respond with a step forward.
