By Neil Earle
The scene? Christmas, 1914. The Western Front.
Along a sector of trenches manned by a Highland Brigade the tough Scots hear the words of a familiar tune wafting from the German lines: “Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht.”
“Silent Night, Holy Night.” The Fritzes were serenading the Porridge Eaters with “Silent Night,” perhaps the most gentle and sensitive of all Christmas carols.
Cautiously, the Highlanders poked their heads above the barbed wire. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. German soldiers had placed small Christmas trees and candles outside their trenches. Signs appeared in fractured English in the Gothic German script. “You no fight, we no fight.”
Incredibly, some men left their trenches, half in disbelief. Soon small parties and then whole squads quickly formed in the Wasteland called “No Man’s Land.” A Yuletide Feast – German chocolate cake, cognac, postcards, French newspapers, then British bully beef (a rare delicacy), Nestlé’s, Virginia Slims – all were set out, and exchanged. In a few places German and British soldiers actually played soccer (“Germany 3-British 2” reads the official record of the 133rd Saxon Regiment). But first both sides buried their hallowed dead who had been rotting along the front.
Frank Richards recorded for BBC History magazine his reminiscence of 150 British and Germans gathered in one cluster and 6 or 7 other clumps of men talking and smoking and fellowshipping all along the line in front of the 8th Division. In the Vosges Mountains to the South, a young German solider named Richard Schirrman was so inspired by a similar Christmas Eve interaction event with French troops that, after the war, he founded the German Youth Hostel Association in 1919.
Peace on earth, among men of good will.
For a brief few moments the spirit of Luke 2:14 transformed the living hell of a tiny part of the worst war men had yet seen. It didn’t last long, although some accounts say the spontaneous fraternization went on into the New Year. “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Frederick Niven, a Scottish poet, wrote of this event. It was titled “A Carol from Flanders.”
O ye who
read this truthful rime,
From
Flanders, kneel and say:
God speed
the time when every day,
Shall be
as Christmas Day.
8 ½ million dead and 21 million wounded. This would be the final tally of the Great War, World War One, 1914-1918. “The war to end war.” What a heart-breaking, soul-crushing slogan the soldiers were sent off with. And this strangest Christmas celebration ever recorded was such a will of the wisp. Officers and generals made sure it didn’t happen the next year, but then, the line goes, generals die in bed, soldiers die where they fall. On November 21, 2005, Alfred Anderson, the last British witness to the Christmas Truce did die in bed, in Newtyle, Scotland at age 105. But the story of that stark and beautiful Silent Night has gathered force and lives on as a testimony to the power of the simple Gospel Story. In 2005 the French film celebrating the Christmas Truce, “Joyeux Noel,” won the Best Foreign Language Film at the 78th Academy Awards.
“Silent Night, Holy Night” – the strangely gentle theme haunts us every time we see soldiers celebrating Christmas. A few years back we witnessed CNN images of bulked-up sons and daughters leaning their machine guns against an ancient mud-brick wall outside Baghdad or Tikrit or Kandahar singing “Sleep in heavenly peace” as they ate their Christmas turkey along with their K-rations, trying to channel some fleeting memory of the season, of home and peace and special faces.
Thus have soldiers from Christian nations learned to cope. And “cope” rhymes with “hope,” a word that embodies part of the spirit of the season we are in.
In what Paul Fuessel called “the Troglodyte World” of the Western Front with its rats, corpses and incessant noise, that universe of mud out of which were carved 25,000 miles of trenches – enough to circle the earth – war served as a potent backdrop for recalling Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber’s masterpiece, a gently floating dream of peace composed in the Tyrolean Alps when Father Mohr’s organ had broken down that Christmas Eve. Mohr wrote the words and Gruber played accompaniment on guitar.
Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace.
Peace – there it is again, heavenly peace, the message that makes the Christmas Truce of 1914 so newsworthy and timeless and that takes on more import as the names of the great generals fade into the dust. Jesus is called the Prince of Peace, he taught “Blessed the peacemakers,” He brought the Gospel of Peace (Ephesians 6:15). So the good news of Christmas and the song that ended the war however briefly, this serenely emotional tune is a living challenge to us today. How can we live out the meaning of the words? What can we, small individual cogs in a machine that seems biased to regularly recurring wars, what can we do to bring about peace?
Like the babe in the manger and like Mohr and Gruber’s masterpiece we have to begin right where we are, right where we live in the midst of our human weakness. Christians represent a kingdom that exists in this world in great weakness – a baby born of a virgin, a messiah nailed to a cross, a Deliverer leaving us for heaven. But strange as it all is, what the angel told Mary is true, his kingdom will eventually be the last one standing. “Of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:33). We ambassadors of that Kingdom, we first need to grasp that the opportunities are right there before us, right where we live, on our block, in our complex, in our communities. We may feel as insignificant as grains of mustard seed but here we are, the very seed of the Kingdom (Matthew 13:38).
How do we practice peace as ambassadors of peace, emissaries of another Kingdom? This year a book was reviewed that mentioned coping strategies to deal with “The Dirty Dozen” we can run into at any given time right there at work, on the job (but not all at once, thankfully).These were listed as:
The
Backstabber
The Liar
The Blamer
The Short
Fuse, etc. etc.
These toxic personality types are adapted from Arthur Bell and Dale Smith’s book, Difficult People at Work: How to Cope, How to Win. These are the people who made a prophet out of the steel executive who said, “A railway is 10% iron and 90% people.”
Since its people who fight, people who disturb our peace, and people who sometimes drive us “batty” we must learn to break the cycle. We must learn to get along. Jesus said the greatest in His kingdom is the slave of all (Mark 10:34). His was, in other words, an Upside Down Kingdom. Saint Paul wrote words of peace: “We who are strong ought to bear with the scruples of the weak and not to please ourselves” (Romans 15:1). It was Paul who said that his Christian calling was to be all things to all men (1 Corinthians 9:22).
How to do that? There isn’t space left in this brief commentary except for raising the issue. Since its individual people and individual attitudes who mainly determine the culture of a team, a corporation, a group, then its’ incumbent upon serious peacemakers to seek and apply of some of these wise strategies and techniques in the year ahead. It was the Prince of Peace who said we were to be as wise as serpents yet harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16).
And we can always try to be better world citizens. Those French, British and German fraternizers of 1914 hold up a high standard for all of us. Amid the living Calvary of the Great War they wrote the lesson that in the end there is just one race, the human race. Thus the more we learn more about another culture, another ethnic group, another part of the word, the better for all of us. It just may be that in the new year our voice around the family table, the city council, the board meeting or at happy hour can make all the difference in turning suspicion into acceptance: “Now wait a minute, I know this man Rashid. I’ve met his family. I’ve learned a few things about his culture. You can’t say all ________ are like that.”
As the French say, “Tout comprehendre, c’est tout pardonner.”
It hardly needs translating.
These and other such words are mere fragile candles of hope lit against the encircling gloom, or what seems like it. But such is the way of the Kingdom of God which comes in great weakness, a Kingdom led by a man who cruelly died, now glorified, King of all Kings. Strangely, one person makes all the difference – the first German soldier to stick his head above the trenches, Father Mohr wondering what to do about his broken organ. That’s always the way it has been. That’s why the correct translation of the Christmas message is so meaningful at this time of year, “And on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests” (Luke 1:14).
Merry Christmas and a truly peaceful and prosperous New Year from the Glendora Worldwide Church of God.