ABSTRACT
While it would be true to say that pre-war standards of morality suffered as a result of both World Wars, evidence from their European theatres indicates that a shared Christian culture could at least do something to ameliorate the horrors of modern warfare. The most obvious example of this is the ‘Christmas Truce’, which was widely observed – and subsequently greatly romanticised – in the British sector of the Western Front in 1914. However, the reasons for this truce cannot be simply attributed to the spontaneous appeal of Christmas to citizen soldiers reacting against the grim experience of trench warfare. What is remarkable about the British units involved in the Christmas Truce of 1914 is that they were largely regular in composition1
and one of the most convivial aspects of life in Britain’s regular army was the manner in which Christmas was celebrated in its barrack rooms. As Horace Wyndham remembered of Christmas Day in the army at the end of the nineteenth century, barrack rooms were invariably decorated and peace and goodwill prevailed therein: ‘Old feuds, of long standing, were, for the nonce, annulled (in all probability to be renewed with increased bitterness on the next day) and old friendships cemented.’ Defaulters were released from the guardroom in honour of the occasion and ‘the bonds of discipline were perceptibly slackened, and breaches thereof openly winked at’.2 In view of all of this, the famous events of Christmas 1914 strongly suggest that the regulars and reservists who made up most of the British battalions in the line simply chose to extend the spirit of Christmas and of familiar barrack room custom to the Germans in the trenches opposite. However, this widespread truce also provided a much-needed opportunity to bury the dead, an opportunity that Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton have recognised as being for many ‘the real reason’ for the Christmas Truce.3
