Original in Spanish: Tierra de Nadie y la tregua de Navidad
No Man’s Land must have smelled awful.
I imagine the first soldiers sent to the Western Front had no clue that the First World War was going to become a war of attrition.
How rough it must be to live for months and months in a trench.
I suppose there comes a moment when you accept that this hole, where you gamble your brains if you lift your head, must be home. Yours and another army’s, of rats and lice. The trenches must have smelled awful too.
And a few meters away, the bodies of comrades rotting because it was dangerous to go near enough to bury them.
Hunger, cold… no wonder they were utterly fed up.
Meanwhile, well-fed bigwigs decided which human being you had to put in your crosshairs that day and kept repeating it was for the good of your nation.
I’d say that abstract entity called “nation” must carry relative weight when your existence has been that miserable for a long while; maybe what keeps you there is fear of what will happen if you run. Maybe the fear of disobeying is that big.
At Christmas 1914, without anyone giving them permission to make friends, the soldiers gave themselves a break.
They say that from one side they started singing carols and the other side joined in, and then they kept approaching each other until they ended up celebrating Christmas together. Some even used the chance to bury the dead.
And that was the day Germans, French and British disobeyed by making peace all at once.
Desertion or looking insufficiently patriotic cost you death at the front, but none of the armies could afford to execute every soldier who joined the party, so in the end it came to nothing.
Well, “nothing”: I suppose after that they remembered hard that the guy they had to aim at was neither that much of an enemy nor that different. Maybe pulling the trigger even got harder.
This song remembers that momentazo. If you didn’t know the story you’ll never hear it the same way again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buJ2DZZHHAI
EDIT: F. warns me that some did pay dearly for it; this link says “Some French soldiers were shot, while the Germans were sent to the Eastern Front. The letters soldiers sent their families describing the events were destroyed, newspaper reports censored, and photo negatives confiscated.” For now I have no other reference about the poor souls who ended up paying the price. Thanks, man. https://canalhistoria.es/blog/la-tregua-de-navidad-de-1914/
(Facebook, 2019-10-29)