the Great War | afeatheronthebreathofgod

Christmas Truce 1914

This Christmas Eve, 2014, sees the hundred year anniversary of that strange and wonderful happening – The Christmas Truce. A spontaneous Truce that broke out all along the Western Front, that first Christmas of the Great War, 1914. In many places the opposing trenches were only yards apart, shouting distance across the no go area known as ‘No Man’s Land’ strewn with unburied bodies, excrement and mud. There is so much about ‘The War to end all wars’ that looking back with the retrospectascope of a hundred years, makes us wonder ‘What were they thinking?’….

Thousands of Christmas trees had been shipped to the German Front line. A fictional account which picks up the facts and emotions portrayed in letters from those present as it unfolded gives a sense of the wonder. Phillip Maddison an English soldier in Henry Williamson’s A Fox Under My Cloak, found Christmas Eve to be literally a silent night.

‘His company, under the cover of moonset was to pick its way across the ‘frost-cobbled’ mud with posts, rolls of wirs, hammers and staples, to edge the line forward a few yards. Under the gleaming stars they walked easily. Although they risked being mowed down by machine-gun fire, Maddison ‘rejoiced that he was not afraid’.

Not a sound came from the Germans. The unbelievable became the ordinary, so that they talked as they worked, without caution, while the night passed as in a dream. The moon moved down to the top of the wood behind them; always it seemed, they had been moving bodilessly with their own shadows. Some time in the night Phillip saw what looked like a light on top of a pole put up in the German lines. It was a strange sort of light. It burned almost white, and was absolutely steady. What sort of lantern was it? He did not think much about it; it was part of the strange unreality of the silence of the night, the silence of the moon in the sky, of the silence of the frost mist…

Suddenly there was a short, quick cheer from the German Lines, Hoch! Hoch! Hoch! and with the others he flinched and crouched, ready to fling himself flat; but no shot came. Voices reached them across the dark void of No Man’s land. Then the Scots saw dim figures silhoutted on the German parapet, and about them more lights. With amazement, Maddison realised that a Christmas tree was being set there… They began to hear from the German parapet a rich baritone voice singing ‘Stille Nacht, Helige Nacht’ . The voice came across the mist and ‘It was all so strange; it was like being in another world, to which he had come through a nightmare…

This book is quoted in another called Silent Night, in which ‘acclaimed historian Stanley Weintraub reveals the truth of this inspiring episode and tell the story of those men whose goodwill, humanity and faith all too briefly prevailed over the madness of the Great War’

I will be using this remarkable episode in history woven in with the Christmas services I am taking this year. There is a very obvious correlation, and many gifted people have produced dramas, liturgies and materials to highlight the link for the Centenary. I also write a poem most Christmases and have for many years now. The following is the result of some of my journeying with centenary commemorations.

Silent Night

Light in the darkness
It started with one.

A flicker of flame against the black of night
A pin-prick of hope in a canvass of hate and fear.
One became another, a host of mystery
Sprinkle of tiny lights
Ribboned out across the Front.

Light in the darkness
It started with one.

One star. One angelic flame fracturing the night.
herald of Hope to a people dwelling in darkness.
one became another, a host of mystery
Holy couriers ablaze
Phosphorescence of grace

Song in the dark
It started with one

A lone voice lifted into the silence, void of guns
Longing for home, a soldier’s strain of Christ child come down
One became another, a host of mystery
As voice echoed voice across
No man’s land, scarred waste of war

Song in the dark
It started with one

Orison of joy sung out to astonished ears
Singing of Home, an angel’s word of Christ child come down
One became another, a host of mystery
Incarnation of Love
God birthed in dung and trench

Light in the dark
It started with One.

War. It is on our screens and in our faces, from many corners of the globe. It weighs heavy on the heart, as the seemingly endless tragedies of innocent victims play out time and again. Hard to watch. Hard to see. Hard to know how to pray. The horror of it all almost unimaginable. The writer of Ecclesiastes wrote over 2500 years ago, ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ and certainly as far as human conflict is concerned, he was right. The First World War commemorations have reminded us of the scale and cost, paid in lives a hundred years ago.

Bloodswept Lands and Seas of Red

In my early teens I discovered the poetry of Wilfred Owen, whose vivid word pictures captured the stuff of nightmares. The physical, moral and emotional maelstroms facing those fighting in the trenches. I am not sure any other poet has been able to express the pathos and pointlessness of war so eloquently.

Anthem for doomed youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

This poem could have been written for the youth of Syria, of Gaza, Iraq. . Its timeless truth as apt. He saw his poetry as a warning for humanity as he looked into a future he would never see. He was killed on the 4^th November, 1918 just days before the end of the war. His parents had news of his death as the bells were ringing out for Armistice on the 11^th of November. He was just 25 years old. Compiling a book of his poetry, he wrote in his introduction Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. His warnings unheeded, his truths live on. As part of the commemorations, a place where I work held a re-enactment of the first men of the town marching off blithely for ‘King and country’, cheered on by those left behind. It was a sober moment, realising that a high majority of those marching would never return. A whole generation of young men wiped out, leaving a crater of grief and hardship in the towns and villages from which they came. I have just finished the book The Quick and The Dead: Fallen Soldiers and their families in the Great War by Richard Van Emden. If every poppy in the photo above of Paul Cummins/Tom Piper’s artwork on display in the Tower of London, represents a life, graphically capturing the magnitude of loss, this book’s collection of letters and personal insights paints the petals of a few. Setting them in the context of their homes and families, it examines the impact of the war on those left behind, parents, wives and children and the reverberations down the generations since. In the summer of 2010, Lilly Baron a frail 97 year old made her way to France to lay a wreath of lilies at the place of her father’s death, and say a prayer She had been born in 1912 and her father had died in November 1917. Her note with the lilies said simply.

“Daddy, Thank you for five years of real happiness- I have missed you all my life.”

She was to die herself, a few months following that journey.

The following fragment from a poem by Wilfred Owen called Strange Meeting, envisions a meeting between fellow soldiers on opposite sides, just after death.

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”

“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery;

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

How much do we find ourselves again in need of those ‘sweet wells’ and ‘truths that lie too deep for taint’. Wilfred Owen was able somehow to find the words for the unspeakable. Lacking his eloquence, I can only weep, and pray Kýrie eléison,

‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy’

longing for that day when

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah 4:2

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Tag Archives: the Great War

Silent Night

Speaking into the unspeakable

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