The Christmas Truce – and 2024

Just when you think the world is irretrievably lost, that an incoming tide is going to swamp your castle, along comes another Christmas. Joy fills the heavy heart, and what was lost is found. Sometimes unexpectedly, the tide turns. It did in 1914.

You know the facts, or have read them somewhere before, perhaps read the diaries of those filled with dread along World War One’s Western Front that Christmas, minds awash in death, bodies aching, cold, shivering in those dark, muddy, disease-ridden trenches. If any spot on the globe needed hope, it was there.

As British and German diaries record, suddenly there rose – first quietly, then with full throated faith – the sound of Christmas carols. It came from the German trenches. The unexpected note of hope and faith was returned by the British.

The moment seemed surreal, an unexpected miracle. Muddy and miserable, soldiers on both sides of “no man’s land” sang about “Peace on Earth,” celebrated Christ’s birth, hoping for an end to war, young men nurtured in families of faith.

Then, as if the Christmas angel described in Luke 2:14 were actually there, urging “Glory to God in the highest …and on earth peace among men,” this miraculous moment expanded. Men would think on it, weep and talk about it all their lives.

In places like Bois de Ploegsteert, in Belgium, a soldier wrote of being covered with mud in a “horrible clay cavity … miles and miles from home …,” with not “the slightest chance of leaving, except in an ambulance,” when it happened: The Christmas truce.

From “away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond,” as the Christmas carols grew, a voice from the enemy shouted to us, “speaking English with a strong German accent” and said, “Come over here.” A British voice responded: “You come halfway, and I come halfway.”

And so it began. As history relates: “Enemy soldiers began to climb nervously out of their trenches, and to meet in the barbed-wire-filled ‘No Man’s Land’ that separated the armies,” until soldiers were exchanging “handshakes and words of kindness.”

In a place filled with terror, fear, thoughts of surviving the efforts of others to kill them, adversaries began singing Christmas carols in one chorus, traded “tobacco and wine, joining in a spontaneous holiday party.” Wrote a soldier: “There was not an atom of hate on either side.”

Perhaps the most incredible part of this outpouring of trust, gratitude, hope, and celebration of Christ’s birth was that it did not, as some surmise, occur in just one spot, not just in Belgium.

Accounts in diaries on both sides, show it happened up and down the Western Front on that miserable, suddenly miraculous, inexplicably hopeful Christmas, British, French, German and Belgian troops creating their own, undeclared ceasefires, and more on the Eastern front.

So, exactly 110 years after that miraculous intercession by what seems an unseen Christmas angel and “great multitude of the heavenly host,” what do we make of such a moment?

No, the war did not end that night, nor for another four years. No, these combatants did not, against their commanding officers’ or political leaders’ orders to fight, lay down their arms.

But something marked, inspiring, and enduring did happen. For one moment – one blessed night – all along the front lines of a terrible war, one that should never have begun and that settled little, men remembered their shared faith in better times, and together hoped for peace.

They recognized that, for all that divided them on the field of combat, they were all human, had in common a faith and a loving God. In that epiphany, they remembered what mattered most.

Into that moment was tucked a reaffirmation of their shared misery, hopes and humanity, our  common fate, our mortality, and the transcendent nature of Christ’s message, even mid-war.

More broadly, the moment reminds us that – at any given time, with a little resolve, trust, prayer, and understanding – everything can change, in a life, nation, and among nations, for the better.

Just when you think the world is irretrievably lost, that an incoming tide is going to swamp your castle, the powers of darkness about to prevail, a shared belief in the possible, the power of prayer and understanding miracles happen, can reverse the tide, chase evil back into the shadows. Never are we closer to this understanding and the joy that lifts all hearts, than at Christmas. For a time, we pause to recall the message of the Christmas angel and heavenly host, calming hearts of “shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night” more than 2000 years ago, again in 1914 – and in 2024. May this Christmas be one of joy, reflection, and gratitude, with all hearts full – Merry Christmas

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.