Dale K. Robinson
December 16, 1999
I like most of Garth Brook’s music, but I’m not really a big fan of his. The other day, though, I heard a piece by him entitled “Belleau Wood” from his “Sevens” album. The song tells the story of troops fighting at Belleau Wood on a Christmas Eve during World War I. It sent shivers down my spine when I heard it and I had to know more once I heard it was based on a true story. Brooks took more than a little artistic license with the story, however – the Battle of Belleau Wood was fought in the summer of 1918, not at Christmas time. Still, the song is very moving. Even more moving is the true story it is based upon.
Their greatcoats were stiff with mud and their boots were caked with the yellow clay. The cold permeated everything. The temperature was dropping; in some ways that was a blessing. A freeze would bring a respite from the waist deep mud in the trenches. Ice formed on the water in the shell holes, disturbed by soldiers dipping their mess tins in the puddles for water for tea. The troops huddled around small charcoal braziers, trying to stay warm. Sleep was near impossible in the cold, wet bunkers.
Bullets whizzed over head and parachute flares occasionally lit the stark and barren no man’s land between the lines. The flares bathed No Man’s Land in an eerie light. The bodies of dead cattle and dead soldiers in British khaki and German gray cast frightening shadows on the muddy field between trenches.
It was December 1914. The place was Ypres, France. The men in the trenches had been promised they’d be home for Christmas, but it was obvious that promise would not come to pass. The week before Christmas, orders came down to attack the German lines. The objective was a farmhouse occupied by the Germans and known to the Brits as Sniper House. Eighteen-pound shrapnel shells burst overhead like red stars. Machine guns provided covering fire as the Tommys advanced through the No Man’s land littered with the decaying bodies of men and cattle. Artillery shells from the British Long-Toms burst among the advancing soldiers until the artillerymen found the Germans’ range. Although the attack failed to breach the German lines, Sniper House was captured. The dead lay where they fell and the survivors helped each other back to safety.
As the sun went down on December 24th, the hard freeze still held. British High Command had ordered posts to be pounded into the ground in No Man’s Land. The posts would be strung with barbed wire and hung with tobacco leaves from a nearby drying house to screen British movements from the Germans. Henry Williamson of the London Regiment was among the troops who were detailed to the task. He expressed his opinion that the plan was sheer folly. Not only would the noise alone draw fire from the German lines, but the operation would be carried out in bright moonlight only 40 yards from the German trenches! The platoon commander told his men that their orders were implicit and must be carried out.
The men set to work in the killing field of No Man’s Land. Henry was afraid at first, but there were no flares, no machine guns, not even the crack of a sniper’s rifle. Henry wrote, “The unbelievable had soon become the ordinary, so that we talked as we worked, without caution, while the night passed as in a dream. The moon moved down to the treetops behind us.”
“I saw what looked like a large white light on top of a [post] 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? I did not think much about it; it was part of the strange unreality of the silent night, of the silence of the moon, now turning a brownish yellow, of the silence of the frost mist. I was warm with the work, all my body was in glow, not with warmth but with happiness.”
Suddenly a cheer rang out from the German lines and Williamson and his comrades threw themselves to the ground, expecting a fusillade of bullets and preparing to return fire. Instead, they watched in amazement as a Christmas tree was erected atop the German parapet. It was eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve.
From the German lines voices rose in a chorus: “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” The British soldiers recognized the strains of “Silent Night”. “It was like being in another world, to which one had come through a nightmare,” wrote Williamson. According to some reports, the British troops joined in, adding their voices to the German chorus.
Christmas Day arrived and Williamson found himself face to face with living German soldiers. The warring sides took advantage of the lull to gather their dead and bury them in the hard frozen ground. The German dead were covered with a red, black, and white flag and a German officer read from a prayer book while their troops stood attention, hatless. Williamson found himself standing at attention, hat in hand, respecting, if not honoring, the German dead. When each ceremony was complete, someone would write upon a wooden marker “Here rests in God an unknown German hero.” As Henry translated the message from the German, he was struck by how much it was like the English cemetery in the nearby woods.
The British troops traded chocolate and cigarettes and canned corned beef to the Germans for cigars and schnapps and souvenirs like the spiked German helmets. Soldiers traded names and addresses as well and lasting friendships were formed between enemies. Writing about the event, Henry Williamson said, “I had taken the addresses of two German soldiers, promising to write to them after the war. And I had, vaguely, a childlike idea that if all those in Germany could know what the soldiers had to suffer, and that both sides believed the same things about the righteousness of the two national causes, it might spread, this truce of Christ on the battlefield, to the minds of all, and give understanding where now there was scorn and hatred.”
The unofficial truce lasted several days, but with the New Year, frost settled “in little crystals upon posts and on the graves and icy shell holes in no man’s land. Once more the light-balls were rising up to hover under little parachutes … with the blast of machine guns, and the brutal downward droning of heavy shells. And the rains came, to fall upon Flanders field, while preparations were in hand for the spring offensive.”
The war raged on until November 11, 1918, but there was never another Christmas truce.
Originally published in The Destin Log newspaper, Christmas 1999 at Destin, Florida.