Original subtitles

The First World War begins in August 1914.

Ten million men are about to die.

Running up out of your secure area and exposing yourself to enemy fire. This

was the most terrifying thing that anybody could imagine.

Thoughts of a quick victory soon fade.

They were promised that the war would be over by Christmas.

And the Western Front becomes the deadliest place on earth.

The weather certainly becomes a bigger enemy.

than the enemy.

Then in December there is an extraordinary victory.

It is not a victory of generals or of weapons.

What if they decide not to fight it? What are we going to do then?

It's a victory the likes of which will not be seen again.

The Great War, as World War I is known, has gone down in history as the prime

example of the brutality and senselessness of total war.

The fighting is at its most savage in the thin strip of land between Germany,

France and Belgium.

The war zone known forever as the Western Front.

As the fighting begins, everyone believes it will be over in just a few

months.

But the roots of the war lie in over 200 years of European history.

By the end of the 19th century, an uneasy peace was maintained between

Britain, France, and Germany by a complex structure of alliances with

their European neighbors.

But by 1910, Germany felt surrounded by its rivals and began making long-range

plans of war.

As H.G. Wells wrote,

Every intelligent person in the world knew that disaster was impending and

knew no way to avoid it.

On June 28th, 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip kills Austro

-Hungarian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand.

By the time he is buried, Europe is thrown into turmoil.

By August 3rd, Germany declares war against Russia and France.

and England is drawn in when Germany invades Belgium.

The original plan that the Germans had, the strategic plan, which made a lot of

sense on a piece of paper, was called the Schlieffen Plan.

And the idea was that the Germans would come down through Belgium and take

Paris, take France.

What they didn't count on was the Belgians resisting and the French and

the British mobilizing to stop them.

From the start, both sides think they will achieve a swift victory.

There is almost a carnival spirit in the beginning.

The First World War began as not only the war that would end all wars, but

also the First World War was seen as a big picnic and it would all be over by

Christmas.

August 7th, 1914.

The first British expeditionary forces crossed the Channel to join the French

army in an attempt to halt the German advance By this time the Germans have

conquered most of Belgium and the French border area

But after six weeks of furious fighting

they are stopped in their tracks

So the Schlieffen Plan, when it was as simple as a drawing on a blackboard, was

described as a revolving door motion. The Germans would come down, they would

quickly sweep through France, and then they would be able to go and take on the

Russians. But the problem was that when the British and the French came to stop

them, the revolving door jammed, and it jammed permanently.

All along the Belgian-French border, the Allies dig in, bringing men and

materials up to the front to hold the line.

1914, it's very, very primitive.

Both sides have just dug in, wherever they've just happened to come to rest,

if you like, after the early opening battles.

Trenches are just cut through muddy fields.

In Flanders, certainly around Plug Street, the water table is very, very

high. So three and a half feet down, you strike water.

Tactically, the Germans always occupy the high ground, so we find ourselves

left in a dip, men literally almost up to their necks in water. Now, that's no

condition to fight.

When people first arrived in the trenches, it was a shocking, arresting,

frightening environment.

It's a subterranean world.

You're in these trenches that are cut in the ground, lined with planks on the

floors. There's barbed wire up above.

You can't see over the trench, and if you do go up and look over, there's a

good chance you'll get your head shot off.

By the time the trenches are all dug, the trench system stretches 600 miles

from the North Sea, all the way down to Switzerland, and trench warfare has

become a military science.

The reality on the ground is very different from the ideal.

The weather certainly becomes a bigger enemy than the enemy because every day,

you know, maybe there's an amount of danger from the enemy, but there's

definitely going to be the enemy of cold and wet.

By late fall, the trench lines are firmly established the germans can

advance no further but nor can the allies drive them back it's clear to

everyone that no one will be home by christmas the war

has already reached stalemate and as morale drops winter kicks in with a

vengeance

Many of the regiments along the Western Front recorded more deaths in November,

December, January of 1914 to frostbite and to gangrene, things like that, to

trench foot than they did to enemy fire.

Trench foot is something that happens if your feet are permanently immersed in

water and they never dried off. Things would just get gangrenous and the toes

would drop off and they'd go black and all sorts of things like that.

The adverse conditions.

and the stagnant campaign are sapping the will of their troops to fight

despite their best efforts to demonize the enemy there was a definite

explosion of propaganda during the first world war like nothing that had ever

been seen before and this was something that happened on all sides of the war in

newspapers, in popular magazines, wartime propaganda, seeking to turn the

Germans and the British against one another. And thus you had stories about

the German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies and raping women and having mass

graves and what have you. The reason for that was that the men needed to be

motivated, the nation needed to be motivated. You needed a kind of deep,

moral... hatred of the enemy in order to sustain the kind of war that it was. You

couldn't just think of him as your opponent in a sporting match. You needed

to want to kill him.

But in the mud of the Western Front, the motivation to fight is fast subsiding.

In a misguided attempt to boost morale, the Allies launch a huge offensive on

December 19th.

This offensive has the opposite effect.

Both Allied and German troops are slaughtered in the largest numbers of

the war so far.

When I go to places where it was a battlefield, I can imagine young boys

in the mud, bad weather.

Sometimes I have the feeling that there are ghosts around here, that are still

here somewhere.

Christmas is six days away.

They were promised that the war would be over by Christmas. This is really the

crucial point in the beginning of the First World War.

If it didn't end then, it would last for a very long time.

Both sides make tremendous efforts to bring Christmas cheer to their

demoralized troops.

All 355,000 British soldiers at the Western Front are sent a Christmas

present from Princess Mary.

At home, the British public is encouraged to send the boys at the front

all sorts of special cards, letters and presents.

And it's the same for the Germans.

There is an avalanche of warm winter clothing, food treats, tobacco, cigars

and letters, letters, letters.

This makes some soldiers even more homesick.

Headquarters is very aware that during this period the troops might let their

guard down.

Word is sent to the front warning of this danger.

The sole object of war becomes obscured, and officers and men sink into military

lethargy, from which it is difficult to arouse them when a moment for great

sacrifices again arises.

As night falls on Christmas Eve, the concerns of headquarters seem prophetic.

Something strange is happening over at the German lines.

Sounds of some sort are drifting across the dark no-man's land.

Sounds no one has ever heard before in this war.

It's the sound of singing.

The Germans must be playing a trick.

On Christmas Eve 1914, in the fifth month of World War I,

Allied soldiers are surprised by what they are hearing over from the German

trenches.

They are astonished by what they see.

At first, everyone assumes it must be some German trick.

And that was how it started on Christmas night, with the lights on the German

trench and songs being sung back and forth.

Pretty much a German tradition, Christmas trees, St. Nicholas.

It's something the Germans had always celebrated and something that we'd

picked up in more recent times, so to them it meant a lot more.

They'd been drinking, which was something that the British did

discourage from the front line, so maybe it was just that the Germans were in

more of a festive mood than we were.

Private Frank Sumter is one of the first to recognise what they are singing.

And then we heard the Germans singing Silent Night Holiday Night.

Hey boys, let's join in. Shall we join in with the show?

In

some

places, there were actually instances where Both sides of the Western Front,

on both sides of No Man's Land, were singing the same hymn or carol, but in

different languages at the same time.

One description of this night's events comes from British Lieutenant Bruce

Baines' father, a well-known artist of World War I.

Well, my father was actually there that night.

He heard some sounds going on the evening before, singing from the other

side.

singing Christmas carols, and made him wonder what was going on.

He must have wondered what was going to happen the next day. After all, he knew

it was going to be Christmas Day.

Bruce Bain's father writes about waking up that Christmas morning.

It was the sort of day for peace to be declared.

It would have made such a good finale.

I should have liked the appearance of a small figure running across the mud and

waving something.

He gets closer.

A telegraph boy with a wire.

He hands it to me. With trembling fingers I open it. War off. Return home.

George Rex.

But no.

It was a nice fine day. That was all.

He probably did not think seriously that something like that would really happen.

It was just a happy fantasy.

But then the reality that did take place was just as amazing or more so.

The British sentries don't know what to make of what's happening across the

narrow no-man's land.

Private Leslie Walkington was there.

jumped down quickly in case they shot, but they didn't shoot.

And then we saw a German standing up waving his arms and we didn't shoot.

You don't know what's going to happen.

You have been told you have to come here and those people you're facing are your

enemies and you have to kill them.

But really, all those young boys, they were not.

made to kill each other.

They were afraid of each other.

So, of course, that boy said, well, if he can do it, we can do it.

So Sergeant Major said, get down.

So, oh, no, shut up, Sergeant, it's Christmas time.

So we all jumped up and we all went forward.

When they met on Christmas Troops, first they were afraid of each other, and then

they started to talk and shaking hands.

And once they did that, it just seemed to be friends.

The British Khaki and the German Grey are soon gathering all mingled together.

Would you believe it?

By mutual consent,

Our battalion and the Germans opposite had a little armistice.

It was really funny to see the hated antagonists standing

in groups, laughing and talking and shaking hands.

These men have no idea that this moment is going to resound through history.

This museum in the Belgian town of Ypres is only five miles away from where

British and German soldiers took part in the Christmas truce.

I always was interested in the people who were in those trenches and that's

how I got involved with this museum in the end. The statues behind me, my idea

was that The figure had to break through their own mind frame.

They were told that these were enemies, and all of a sudden they decided they

were equals and human beings rather than being soldiers in a war.

This Christmas Day scene is exactly what the British High Command is worried

about.

Friendly intercourse with the enemy and unofficial armistice, however tempting

and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.

We impress on all subordinates the absolute necessity of encouraging the

offensive spirit of the troops by every means in their power.

These men in No Man's Land are as much at risk from their own officers as they

are from the enemy.

Both sides are well aware that consorting with the enemy is only one

step away from treason.

A crime punishable by court martial and execution.

Take aim!

It's Christmas Day, 1914.

Five months into World War I.

And something unbelievable is happening.

Soldiers from both sides are shaking hands and making friends.

Headquarters is furious about this and has ordered the officers at the front to

take names.

While some men in the trenches aren't happy with this turn of events, many

officers in fact are taking part.

Of course, there were instances along the Western Front of truces happening

with the tacit approval of officers, whether they came out and said so or

not, it was something that they allowed to happen. And I think that you can also

make an argument that it may have been in the strategic interests of officers

to allow their men this break, this respite, to allow them a couple of days

to feel human again.

Either way, there are still some bitter realities to deal with.

No man's land was littered with human remains.

And this was something which, to some extent, the men in the trenches had been

able to ignore.

Unless you went over the top, you didn't necessarily have to look at these

bodies, these bodies of people you knew, people you'd lived side by side with in

the trenches.

So when people actually did tentatively make their way out on Christmas morning,

what they found was a massive grave.

And so at first there was this grim task of going out and retrieving bodies and

finding a place to bury them and laying them to rest.

British Corporal Robert Renton described this scene.

There were two dead Frenchmen between our lines, and the Germans helped us dig

the grave.

One of the officers held a service over one of the graves. It was a sight worth

seeing and not easily forgotten, both German and British paying respects to

the French dead.

The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want to walk on thy staff.

Yea,

though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Amen. Christmas Truce 1914.

I'm glad I came.

It's a place a lot of people ought to come to.

Ground zero.

Yes, I don't suppose it's changed a great deal since then.

I've got a book with a map in it of the area around here where the action took

place that my father described way back in 1919.

It shows two or three roads and the area of the British lines and the German

lines.

a fairly short distance apart, and I can't tell exactly how far.

When I was still a child, my father sometimes used to tell me and my brother

about the Christmas truce held between British and German soldiers at Christmas

1914.

It was a very pleasant conversation.

and how wondrous it was that these men, who must stand against each other as

enemies, could make peace for once at Christmas.

Meeting each other at such close quarters makes for a problem that high

command is only too aware of.

Every other war proves undoubtedly that troops and trenches in close proximity

to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted.

into a live and let live theory of life.

By Christmas 1914, every soldier knew that the enemy was sharing the same

misery as they were.

So they had this common experience.

My father and your father spoke together at Christmas 1914, and

today you and I meet so many years later.

Here's where the truce took place,

the fraternization between British and German soldiers.

I was only a little English.

My father described seeing a German soldier cutting the hair of a British

soldier.

They traded cigarettes for cigars and chocolates for other food.

Lieutenant Bruce Bain's father's drawing of that day tells a story that he often

told his daughter.

of how he snipped off a German's buttons as souvenirs.

Another British soldier who was there, Leslie Walkington, writes home that day.

My dear father, mother and girls, just aligned

to let you know that I have had quite a merry Christmas. Talk about peace and

goodwill. I never saw a friendlier sight.

One of their officers took a furtive...

of a group of intermangled troop.

People from both sides met in No Man's Land and we spent the day

there and we swapped cigarettes.

It was really rather like a crowd at a football match, you know.

And we exchanged odd little bits of food just like a lot of

boys from neighboring schools.

They were not nearly so strong-looking as English fellows.

The First World War still had the remnants of an old warfare that we can't

even really identify anymore.

When there were clear rules of war, there was a code of conduct.

The British thought of it very much in sporting terms, that this person on the

other side of the trench wasn't your enemy.

it was your opponent and there were certain uh certain codes certain

behaviors uh certain standards that you had to uphold and that you would uphold

british soldier george jameson also

remembers this day there's no doubt about it they were absolutely astounded

at once he said they've got a football out there they're kicking it around

they're having a marvelous time

Must have been wonderful for those guys to go over that nomad land which was not

yet pockmarked and not the moon crater landscape that we all know from later in

the war.

Whilst peace has broken out in many places this Christmas day in 1914, war,

as usual, continues to rage in many other areas of the Western Front.

The British Army lost a lot of soldiers there. A lot of men killed in action,

whether it was shell fire or rifle fire.

Some men had gone over to fraternise with the Germans and been taken prisoner

and disappeared.

Some NCOs had been over to meet the Germans and on their way back a German

sniper shot them.

Some areas the divisional commander had said, you know, there will be no

fraternization. And good regular soldiers that they were had stuck to

that and didn't participate. And if the Germans popped up, they would shoot at

them.

Even in the trenches emptied out by people playing football, some remember

there is a war on.

The game presents an opportunity to wander over to the enemy trenches and

take a look at how they are laid out, and where the gun emplacements are.

This isn't always successful, but it is certainly worth a try.

The other football game, which was a proper football game between a Saxon

regiment and Scottish blokes, witnessed by Semich, refereed by,

I think, the German officer.

And I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but the Germans won.

As German Lieutenant Johannes Niermann writes...

We Germans really wrought when the Scots revealed they were no drawers under

their kills.

And we hooted and whistled every time we caught an impotent glimpse of a

posterior belonging to one of yesterday's enemies.

This Christmas day has been wonderful, even miraculous.

Men on both sides go to sleep that night, wondering if they will wake up

the next morning to renewed fighting.

or a continued effort to defy the war.

Merry Christmas!

It's December 26th, 1914.

The morning after.

Christmas Day has now passed, but the truce lingers on.

The biggest problem with a truce of this kind was that if the guys got used to

the idea of not fighting, how on earth are you going to make them go back and

start doing it again?

It's a very real danger. If it spreads, there's a huge amount of men there who,

once they've got a taste for the fact, well, actually, you know, we don't

really need to fight after all.

General Sir Horace Smith-Dorian sends out a blunt edict.

On Christmas Day, a friendly gathering has taken place of Germans and British

on the neutral ground between the two lines.

Many officers have taken part in it. I am calling for particulars as to names

of officers in units which took part in this gathering with a view to

disciplinary action.

The fear of punishment is enough to get most of the soldiers back to fighting.

But some are still reluctant to go back to war.

They are making a choice between orders from above and their own newfound

feelings of fellowship with their opponents.

A lot of the soldiers by then were volunteers, not just professional

soldiers. So they had a whole shared experience that they felt that they

shared with the enemy.

And they would have more in common with the enemy, private, than they would with

their own commands.

It was one thing when the British and Germans were facing each other on either

side of No Man's Land and thinking, oh, the guy on the other side isn't that

bad. He's dealing with the same rain I am.

He's dealing with his trench collapsing just like I am. His rations can't be

very good. He must have trouble finding a place to sleep at night. It's another

thing altogether when you meet him in No Man's Land and you discover that he used

to work as a waiter at a restaurant that perhaps you've eaten at, or as in one

case, he was your barber back in London. It becomes much more difficult to

demonize these men.

as Private Frank Sumter of Southgate Road in Islington remembers.

We shook hands in between, and I had the experience of talking to one German.

This fellow said to me, you know Southgate Road in Islington? I said,

yes. My uncle had a shoe repairing shop next door.

He said, that's funny.

He said, there's a barber's shop on the other side where I used to work.

So, you know, it's still ironic when you think about it that he must have saved

my uncle at times.

and yet my bullet might have found him, and his bullet might find me.

This new feeling of fellowship has some remarkable examples, like the back-and

-forth trading of a German helmet.

In the exchange at Christmas, somebody got a Pickelhaube helmet as a souvenir.

Now, the German who had given the Pickelhaube in exchange for, no doubt, a

lot of ticklish jam, says...

I'm going to have a big parade tomorrow.

I need my helmet.

And so the trust is this big that this guy brings back the helmet.

And then he said, after the parade is over, you're going to get your helmet

back.

The next day, the Pickle Hauber is duly returned.

It is an example of just how much trust has built up between the troops on the

ground.

And so there was a wave of letters talking about the humanity of the

Germans that went back to London and presumably back to Germany.

These letters are all describing things that sound very strange to the people

back at home.

This isn't at all what they have been taught to think about the enemy.

So as the Christmas truce gets reported in the press, the story seizes the

public's imagination.

Meanwhile... The officers at the front line are trying to restore discipline.

It doesn't always work, as British Private Archibald Stanley remembers.

One of these snobs, people that just got his commission, you know, Katie

Carroll, his name was.

Stand to!

And he come up and he said, this has got to cease.

Shake it!

The officer wants to fire on unarmed men.

Oh, he said, give him a volley.

It just doesn't seem like fair play.

How amazingly difficult it must have been for these people to pick up

shooting again and with any kind of vigor try and kill people in the

opposite trench that they just celebrated Christmas with two days

before.

Tremendous pressure begins to be exerted to get the war back on track.

Orders and threats from the high commands begin to rain down on the men

at the front lines.

Commanders at the front have to get their men back into the fight by any

means possible.

The godfather of my wife was sent out in one of the listening posts.

The whole front is silent and the Germans opposite start singing.

When all of a sudden Urbain Crevet, my wife's godfather, remembers

the very strict order given to him by his officer, saying you have to

report everything.

So he picks up the field telephone and dutifully reports back

that the Germans are singing songs.

And then he says, I still hold the horn of the telephone in my hands when the

shelling starts.

Within minutes, the complete place is shot to pieces.

No doubt many Germans have died there. And he hears from the screaming, a lot

have been wounded.

And all he hears is the wounded.

Private Archibald Stanley remembers how his officer put an end to their

armistice. The officer

knows exactly how to end the armistice.

very hard as an individual as a group of individuals to stop it doesn't

take long until the christmas truce is just a memory and the worst is yet to

come

by

the middle of january 1915 the holiday fraternizing between opposing armies

known as the Christmas Truce, has ended almost everywhere.

The year that follows does not provide the decisive breakthrough that the

warring nations expect.

Trench lines stay virtually where they started.

It is a year of terrible losses, millions dying, and poison gas is used

for the first time in war.

By the time Christmas comes around again, men on every side of the front

are desperate and demoralized.

The commands on both sides are very aware that conditions are right for the

men to want to lay down their arms again at Christmas.

Britain's new commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, gives new orders.

The brigadier wishes to give you the strictest orders that any man attempting

to communicate either by signal or by word of mouth or by any other means with

the enemy is to be seriously punished.

The German troops are issued an even clearer order.

Any attempt at fraternization with the enemy, such as occurred last year at

Christmas, will be considered as high treason. General headquarters have

issued instructions that fire will be opened on every man who leaves the

trench and moves in the direction of the enemy without orders.

You know, Christmas Day is just like any other day. And in subsequent years of

the war, the fighting just carried on. There was a few places in 1915 where

both sides did stop and half-heartedly try and recreate it. But there was never

any specific attempt to do that.

As the war now progresses, even soccer takes on a different significance.

One year later, a Captain Neville is to become famous posthumously.

for trying to use a soccer ball to motivate his troops to go over the top

to certain death.

It is the end of an era.

The beginning of the war, it looked somewhat like wars that had preceded it.

Officers came in on horseback.

men were on foot. But bear in mind, there hadn't been a major war in Europe

for the better part of a century when Europe went to war in 1914.

So you have a war that with a few new weapons in 1914 looked like old wars.

They had machine guns and shells and things like that, but the real

technological advances of the war didn't come until later.

The tank, chemical weapons, strafing from airplanes. By the end of the war,

it was unrecognizable. It was modern war as we

to some extent as we know it today.

Today, all around the Belgian town of Ypres, it is easy to see the scars of

the battles of World War I.

Going around the countryside, you'd find shrapnel bullets, pieces of rusty metal

that belonged to the war.

You go out on your bike and you try and discover it yourself.

And it starts always with the cemeteries because there are so many around.

So you try to understand them. And so then you realize that it was probably

the last war that didn't pay any attention whatsoever to the loss of

human life.

I see always the same reaction.

They look very sad because of course the people I take to places like that are

people who think back at relatives and how much they had to suffer.

And why was it not possible to keep that peace after Christmas?

The First World War is like four years of hell.

And there's just one day during these four years. There's a sparkle of hope

and of humanity.

And that's what Christmas Truce is.

Some people say that the 20th century started in 1914, not 1900.

What's interesting about the Christmas Truce...

is you seem to be right there on a fault line.

And that's the sense you get when you read the writings of these men who,

looking back in Christmas 1915, Christmas 1916, think, how could that

have happened?

What did we have then that we don't have now?

I think in a very individual way, it makes you think, what should I have

done? What would I have done in similar circumstances?

Which hopefully then leads to the next question.

What will I do when they ask me to decide about war and peace next time?

Lest we forget, in the Belgian town of Ypres, World War I is remembered every

single night of every year.

...by Mrs. Barbara Littlejohn, daughter of Bruce Bairds' father, Captain Bairds'

father who took part in the famous truce at Brook Street.

in December 1940, she will be accompanied by Rudolf Zemmich,

the son of Kurt Zemmich, whose father also participated

at this truce at Luxembourg.

It must be amazing for the descendants of

Germans and British who squared off across no man's land to come back now

at the beginning of the 21st century, stand on that same scarred battlefield

and think about that distance that their ancestors overcame.

In some ways, they're standing there across the wasteland of the 20th

century, across everything that the First World War wrought.

Because as we know, the Western Front was just the beginning of it.

And now we can look back.

and things are mended, and we can come together and shake hands again.

But no man's land is still there.