Christmas 1914

The story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  Así que...

• 0:04Jocko Willink?

  En principios de diciembre de 1914, el avance penitenciario de los alemanes había sido detenido por los Aliados antes de que los alemanes llegaran a París.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  Pero había sido detenido a un gran costo, a un costo de enfermedad.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Y ahora, los ejércitos habían acostumbrado a las trenches.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  Y nosotros sabemos qué eran las trenches. El infierno.

• 0:38Jocko Willink?

  No una aproximación metaforica del infierno, sino el infierno real.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  El infierno de la tierra.

• 0:49Jocko Willink?

  Artilugias, mortas, disparos de arma automática, escopetores, esquenar, gritos de los heridos y muertos.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  Y encima de eso, el entorno: lluvia, yisca, y nieve, y trenches inundados, y frío.

• 1:13Jocko Willink?

  Y, por supuesto, la muerte estaba en todas partes.

• 1:19Jocko Willink?

  En todas partes.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  Y no parecía que hubiera fin al horror.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  Pero en el día de Navidad de 1914, el horror se detuvo, si solo por un tiempo corto.

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  Mientras los hombres, por un momento,

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  reconocían a los hombres contra los que estaban luchando, como otros hombres.

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  Como otros hombres con las mismas esperanzas y sueños y deseos que ellos mismos tenían.

• 2:10Jocko Willink?

  And the chief of all hope was peace.

• 2:19Jocko Willink?

  And this is an excerpt of how the Christmas truce unfolded, according to Henry Williamson, a British Army officer who was there.

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  And here's what he wrote.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  "For weeks we had lived in flooded trenches. The Germans were eighty yards away. Our trench was inflated. We lost many men, shot by snipers.

• 2:58Jocko Willink?

  Night after night, since the tailing off of the Battle of Ypres, we had toiled in the parapets, filling sandbag with clay mud, squelched through muddy lagoons of woodland tracks carrying rations, duckboards, pumps, and ammunition.

• 3:18Jocko Willink?

  We were volunteers, rushed out to help General French's shattered expeditionary force.

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  A few weeks before,

• 3:30Jocko Willink?

  we had been schoolboys, bank clerks, undergraduates, medical students.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  Now our lives were ravaged. Some of us, the young ones who thought of their mothers, were near to despair.

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  We were without hope, without horizon.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  At first, trench life had been interesting, even enjoyable. It was fun cooking our own bacon and making tea in the wood while shrapnel cracked overhead.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  Good sport stalking the wild geese in the marshes, satisfying to feel the soft hairs of our unshaven chins.

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  The regulars were decent chaps, heroes of Mons."

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  But the rains fell.

• 4:33Jocko Willink?

  And the trenches filled, almost waist-high.

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  After a few days, we could scarcely move our legs, nor did we seem to need food. At night, we dragged ourselves out of the ditches and moved about, uncaring of bullets aimed at random in the dark.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  All night, we worked, carrying parties, pumping fatigues, parapet-building. At dawn, we slid into water again. And set ourselves to endure the gray daylight.

• 5:09Jocko Willink?

  Even now, so long afterwards, when I hear rain on the tiles overhead, the ghost of that time makes me draw the blankets closer around my neck.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  On Christmas Eve of 1914, we were in the support line about two-hundred yards inside the ploeg-steered wood.

• 5:34Jocko Willink?

  It was freezing.

• 5:37Jocko Willink?

  Our overcoats were as stiff as boards, our boots were too hard to move, but we rejoiced as the mud was hard too. Also, happy thought, we would be able to sleep that night. Inside a new blockhouse of oak boughs and sandbags called Piccadilly Hotel.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  No bed but the cold earth, no blankets even, but sleep. Sleep.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  Then came a message from Brigade Headquarters. Brought, I think, by Second Lieutenant Bruce Barron's father, of the Warwick's. Wiring parties were required in No Man's Land all night.

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  And there would be a moon.

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  We would have to work only fifty yards from the German machine guns in the White House opposite the eastern edge of the wood.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  Two hours later, we filed out of the dark trees into the naked, moonlit terror of No Man's Land, holding our shovels beside our faces in hope of protection against the expected mortar blast.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  The moon was high and white among the frozen clouds. We were visible. Someone slipped with a clank of a spade or rifle. We flung ourselves on our faces and waited.

• 7:14Jocko Willink?

  But the battlefield was as silent as the moon.

• 7:20Jocko Willink?

  For an hour, we worked in silence, in a most mysterious soundlessness. What had happened? We began to talk naturally as we drove in stakes and pulled out concertiners of prepared wire.

• 7:36Jocko Willink?

  There was no rifle fire, either up or down the line, from way up north, beyond Ypres, to south, beyond Armintiras and the French Army.

• 7:51Jocko Willink?

  At midnight, we heard laughing as we worked. We heard singing from the German lines, carols, the tunes of which we knew.

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  I noticed a very bright light on a tall pole raised in their lines. Down opposite the East Lanks trench, in front of the convent, a Christmas tree, with lighted candles, was set on their parapet.

• 8:23Jocko Willink?

  The unreal moonlight life went on happily.

• 8:28Jocko Willink?

  Cries of "Come on over, Tommy! We won't fire at you!"

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  A dark figure approached me hesitatingly. A trap? I walked towards it with a bumping heart.

• 8:42Jocko Willink?

  "Merry Christmas, English friend." We shook hands tremulously.

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  Then I saw that the light on the pole was the morning star, the star in the east. It was Christmas morning.

• 9:00Jocko Willink?

  All Christmas Day, gray and khaki figures mingled and talked in no man's land. Picks and spades rang in the hard ground.

• 9:12Jocko Willink?

  It was strange to stare at the dead we had only glimpsed at swiftly from the trenches.

• 9:20Jocko Willink?

  The shallowest graves were dug, filled, and set with crosses knocked together from lengths of ration box wood marked with indelible pencil. "For king and country, for fatherland und Freiheit."

• 9:40Jocko Willink?

  "Fatherland and freedom."

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  "Freedom? Freedom? How was this? We were fighting for freedom, and our cause was just. We were defending Belgium, civilization."

• 9:58Jocko Willink?

  These fellows in gray were good fellows. They were, strangely, just men like ourselves.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  "How can we lose the war, English comrade? Our cause is just. We are ringed with enemies. The war was thrust on us. We are defending our parents, our homes, our German soil."

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  A most shaking, staggering thought, that both sides thought they were fighting for the same cause. The war was a terrible mistake. People at home did not know this.

• 10:43Jocko Willink?

  Then the idea came to the young and callow soldier that if only he could tell them at home what was really happening, and if the German soldiers told their people the truth about us, the war would be over.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  But he hardly dared to think it even to himself.

• 11:11Jocko Willink?

  The next day was quiet and the next. Waving hands from the trenches by day, singing and reflected blaze of trench bonfires at night. It was a lovely time. On the third afternoon came a message from the Germans. "At midnight, our staff officers visit, and we must fire our automatic pistol. But we will fire higher. Nevertheless, please keep undercover."

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  At 11:00 PM, Berlin midnight, we saw flashes going away into the air. Two days later, an army order came from GHQ to the effect that men found fraternizing with the enemy would be court martialed and, if found guilty, would suffer the death penalty. And again in that place, the very lights soared over no man's land at night.

• 12:21Jocko Willink?

  And bullets cut showers of splinters from trees, and sometimes, human flesh and bone. So hope sank into the mud again. But did not die. Despite a withering anew as each poor human unit fell in machine gun and mortar blast and colossal reverberating rending of the shells of those four years. The years whose truth seems to be incommunicable.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes, as one listens to what people say, "Here in the England a generation died for",

• 13:19Jocko Willink?

  it seems like almost pre-war again.

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  Can it be that we lack imagination

• 13:34Jocko Willink?

  to see the other fellow

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  as ourselves?

• 13:50Jocko Willink?

  And Henry Williamson continued to fight.

• 13:55Jocko Willink?

  He was eventually wounded by gas. Then when he was declared unfit to serve in the army, he then volunteered for the air force to see if that could get him back to the front.

• 14:11Jocko Willink?

  But he didn't make it back to the front luckily,

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  because the war ended.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  The war ended.

• 14:25Jocko Willink?

  But not before 20 million were wounded and 17 million men were killed.

• 14:37Jocko Willink?

  Men.

• 14:42Jocko Willink?

  Just normal men.

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  Gone.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  So, this holiday season,

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  please,

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  think of those men and women around the world in the trenches now, risking life and limb for what they believe in.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  For freedom.

• 15:24Jocko Willink?

  And think of the civilians trapped in those hellish places, suffering

• 15:33Jocko Willink?

  in the merciless path of war.

• 15:40Jocko Willink?

  And finally,

• 15:43Jocko Willink?

  as Henry Williamson asked, "Let us not lack the imagination to think,

• 15:55Jocko Willink?

  to think of other men

• 15:59Jocko Willink?

  as men.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  Men like ourselves.

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  Men like us."

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  Merry Christmas to all.

• 16:23Jocko Willink?

  And may there be peace on earth.