A Thousand Cups of Tea

Via a blog ad over at Shakespeare’s Sister, I discovered this, which I would dearly love to see.

Stille Night

by Patricia Gehr and Jeanmarie Simpson

Directed by Cameron Crain

In 1914, on the Western Front in World War I, peace broke out. Inspired by John McCutcheon’s beautiful song, Christmas in the Trenches, NSC and Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace stage a simple, elegant offering for the holiday season.

I have been fascinated for years by the spontaneous outbreaks of peace, or at least cooperation, amongst the fighting soldiers on opposite sides in the trenches of World War One.

The Christmas Truce was not the only time that soldiers stopped trying to kill one another. You must recall that European Society was then, as now, more politically diverse than modern US society, and there were socialists and anarchists and communists amongst the populations of the working people of England, France and Germany. Many of these men were swept up and conscripted to go and fight in the trenches.

Trench warfare was, of course, completely horrible, and in the long periods of numbing cold and boredom (between moments of abject terror), there was time for reflection. World War One was the first “modern war,” fought between nations with the ability to produce tanks and machine guns and repeating artillery, and as these expensive machines rolled past the trenches, and as men and materiel were wasted in incomprehensible quantities, certain types of men began to ask the question “What are we doing here?” A theory sprang from the trenches- “A state of perpetual war is necessary to sustain capitalism. We’re here to break stuff all the stuff that capitalism creates so that more stuff will need to be manufactured. We will live out the rest of our short, miserable lives here, and our children at home will grow up to take our places.”

(George Orwell, in one of his essays, documents this, so I am not just creating it whole cloth. I wish I could remember which essay it was. I am going to “pull a Goldberg” and ask for a little help in the comments.)

This idea took hold of soldiers on both sides. The IWW and International Socialist newspapers of the time, many of which were exploring these issues, were smuggled to the front lines as fresh recruits were rotated forward.

What happened is that infantry soldiers, feeling that they were being exploited for no good reason, simply stopped trying to kill one other. The stalemate of trench warfare resulted in long days of thousands of shots being fired at a randomly selected target on each side, such as a tree stump or burnt out tank. This became known as the Live-and-Let-Live Phenomenon.

The ‘live and let live’ phenomenon developed most readily where the fighting was sporadic, and where the proximity of the trenches allowed the men to see, hear and smell each other on a regular basis and slowly begin to lose their fear.

At the end of the day, one’s own survival could best be guaranteed by not antagonising the enemy. Troops on both sides quickly appreciated this.
…

Soldiers also cooperated across the lines to frustrate their officers’ intentions:

‘We received the following message, tied to a stone, from the German trenches opposite: ‘We are going to send a 40-pounder. We have been ordered to do this, but we don’t want to. It will come this evening, and we will blow a whistle first to warn you so that you have time to take cover.’ All happened as they said it would.’
-Regimental War Diary, the Fifth Leicestershire

The result was plenty of noise and smoke, but casualties on both sides plummeted. Initially, this mystified the commanders. Agents were sent forward to have a look around to try and figure out why less men were dying. It was discovered that the men in the trenches had simply grown sick of killing. The story of the Christmas Truce made its way into the papers. This did not sit well with the fat men behind desks. This is how they addressed the Christmas Truce:

British commanders Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien vowed that no such truce would be allowed again. In all of the following years of the war, artillery bombardments were ordered on Christmas Eve to ensure that there were no further lulls in the combat. Troops were also rotated through various sectors of the front to prevent them from becoming overly familiar with the enemy. Despite those measurements there were a few friendly encounters between enemy soldiers, but on a much smaller scale than the previous year.

And, in a particularly evil masterstroke to defy working class troops’ attempts to survive the war, the Spring of 1915 saw the introduction of the poison gas attack.

By 22 April 1915, the German Army had 160 tons of chlorine deployed in 5,730 cylinders opposite Langemarck, north of Ypres. At 17:00, in a slight easterly breeze, the gas was released, forming a grey-green cloud that drifted across positions held by French Colonial troops…

Additionally, troop rotations became more frequent, as did “Over the Top” charges, where a whistle was blown and men were sent up and out of the trenches to charge the enemy’s position. Since World War One was the first use of the heavy machine gun in combat, these charges met with predictable results. Very little strategic advantage was gained from Over the Top charges, but it broke up the fragile system of cooperation that had developed.

The Great War became a meatgrinder once again, and the relentless deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers resumed apace.

One more fascinating fact from this little bit of history.

from the Wikipedia article about the Christmas Truce:

Interestingly enough, there was one Austrian soldier who felt that such an understanding should not exist during wartime, and he refused to participate in the celebration. His name was Adolf Hitler.

A message from the past for Jean Schmidt and others who love war:

It doesn’t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won’t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. ~George McGovern