The Spirit of the 1914 Christmas Truce | Hacker News Reader

The Spirit of the 1914 Christmas Truce

wsj.com

37 pointsdctoedt18 comments

The key assumption here was the soldiers considered themselves "bitter foes". I'm not sure this was the case. It required "court martial" -- ie. throwing soldiers against the wall and shooting them -- to resume the fighting in some cases.

I think that anyone who lived for more than a couple of weeks on the Western front came to the realization that the people engaged in the fight had more in common than not. The officers and rear echelon folks shot thousands of their fellow countrymen who cracked under the pressure of constant bombardment and death.

So as a soldier or junior officer, you faced certain death both in front of you and behind you. Survival meant huddling for warmth in a fetid hole. Those poor bastards were cogs in a murder machine -- the only "golden ticket" was losing a limb.

On a related note, for anyone interested in World War I, I'd recommend listening to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast: http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

He's currently doing a series about WW1 called "Blueprint for Armageddon." The way he describes the war, you really get a sense of the hell that the soldiers were in, and he touches on this bit about how the soldiers on either side could identify more with each other than with their superior officers.

That was my first thought when I read the title. The article itself is more nuanced:

> But otherwise, soldiers on both sides were likely to think that the more formidable Them was the rats and lice, the mold in the food, the cold or the comfortable officer at headquarters who seemed, in the words of one soldier, an “abstract tactician who from far away disposes of us.”

> But in studying diaries and letters, Mr. Ashworth observed surprisingly little hostility toward the enemy expressed by trench soldiers; the further from the front, the more hostility. In the words of one front-line soldier, “At home one abuses the enemy, and draws insulting caricatures. How tired I am of grotesque Kaisers. Out here, one can respect a brave, skillful, and resourceful enemy. They have people they love at home, they too have to endure mud, rain and steel.”

I believe a goal of the essay is to have the reader start from the idea that the soldiers were "bitter foes", only to show, through evidence, that that wasn't the case, and that there are good reasons for what happened.

The classic book on this truce is Stanley Weintraub's Silent Night:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00311JUGK

And don't miss the Sainsbury's ad in the WSJ article, if you have some kleenex handy.

Also, from the comments in the article I learned of the fascinating story of Capt. Robert Campbell, who was captured by the Germans during WWI. When word arrived at the POW camp that his mother was dying, the Kaiser gave him a two-week leave to visit his dying mother, on the condition he return afterward. Out of a sense of duty, he returned as promised. And out of a continuing sense of duty, he immediately tried to escape!

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23957605

Also, a very good satirical look at WWI was 'Blackadder Goes Forth', with Rowan Atkinson (I.e. Mr Bean actor), Hugh Laurie (House) and Stephen Fry (QI). Utter genius comedy with a very dark undertone.

It is a very British humour though. I'm not sure if it travels well?

I am certain it travels well. Black Adder is right up there with Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.

The informal truces of the First World War amaze me whenever I read about it. I have similar feelings when I read about the widespread dissent by US troops during the Vietnam War, ranging from Search And Avoid missions, to the "flattop revolts" and suspected sabotage of Navy ships.

The bitterest foes for the troops don't seem to be the enemy troops, but the politicians and upper staff, who offer the certainty of punishment and slander of dishonor, while the enemy troops offer only the chance of death or injury.

If true, I begin to understand why John Kiriakou, the only CIA agent jailed because the US decided to torture people, is a whistleblower and not one of the government torturers, including those that authorized the program. That sort of power structure requires that the authorities be able to be worse to its own people than what the enemy will do.

I learned from one of James C. Scott's books that there was a "Memorial to the Unknown Deserter" created in Bonn, Germany, but local authorities prevented it from being set up there and it eventually ended up in Potsdam.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserteurdenkmal_%28Bonn/Potsd...

The human figure is formed from the negative space cut out of the stone. (The inscription from Kurt Tucholsky translates as "Here lived a man / who refused / to shoot at his fellow men. / Honor to his memory.")

The German Wikipedia identifies a large number of similar memorials:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahnenflucht#Denkmale_f.C3.BCr...

Although some of them have been extraordinarily controversial in Germany (and Austria), they do exist; it's hard for me to imagine a similar memorial in the U.S.

Nice, and the negative space is good use of symbolism.

I know of nothing like that in the US. The only references I found (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertion and http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/27/memorial-day-2/ ) were for Germany and Austria.

A-ha! I found one; "a statue commemorating American draft dodgers and the Canadians who took them in." http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/war-resisters... . The image link is broken, but archive.org has it as https://web.archive.org/web/20060113173812/http://vancouver.... . I can't make much sense of the image though.

Many groups in the US opposed the statue.

UEFA also created a powerful piece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYv6dHy5TJE

Rather than assuming that these soldiers negotiated truces out of purely pragmatic reasons, I think the article completely ignores that most people actually don't want to lie half-frozen in trenches killing each other. They had these "truces" because war is hell and everybody wanted a break from it. If there was nobody there to order them, most would've gone home.

A "Live and let live" policy is very pragmatic if you are lying soaking wet in a rat infested trench. It was common for troops to avoid offensive actions in the understanding that the enemy would do likewise. It would have been blatantly obvious people that the fighting in more quiet sectors had little strategic value.

How does it ignore that?

It gave examples of how shelling didn't occur during wartime, and how latrines and food trains weren't targeted, because people wanted food, wanted to eat in peace, and need to take a crap - and if they did it then the other side would respond in kind.

I guess I'm confused about how "everybody wanted a break from it" isn't a pragmatic reason.

But the essay continues: "Initially, this was a purely instrumental impulse, self-serving cooperation to prevent retaliation." (I think that's your 'purely pragmatic'.) Followed by:

> With time, however, this sense of responsibility developed a moral tinge, tapping into the soldiers’ resistance to betraying those who dealt honorably with them. It occurred to them that: The other side didn’t want dinner disturbed any more than we do; they also don’t want to fight in rainstorms; they also have to deal with brass from headquarters who screw up everything. A creeping sense of camaraderie emerged.

I can't help but think that the essay takes on your point whole-heartedly, and doesn't ignore it.

"The philosopher Daniel Dennett has pondered a revealing scenario: Someone is undergoing surgery without anesthesia but with absolute knowledge that afterward, she would receive a drug that would erase all memories of the event. Would the pain be less agonizing if she knew that it would be forgotten?"

I've only been under anesthesia once, when I had my wisdom teeth out. A few days beforehand I was struck with this same thought - what if they anesthetics simply paralysed you, rendering you unable to respond to pain, while temporarily interfering with your ability to form new memories? What if all the pain was experienced in full, and you were simply unable to remember it afterwards? How could anyone know the difference? This made the few days prior to surgery very uncomfortable.

General anesthesia really does knock you out, so you were very probably out like a light for the removal of your wisdom teeth. But when people talk about a lighter kind of anesthesia called "twilight sedation" or "conscious sedation", they actually do mean "we'll make you a little woozy, but keep you awake -- and also inhibit memory formation so you'll feel like you slept through it." The lack of disclosure to patients of exactly what this means -- "yes, you'll be awake, but you won't remember" -- gives me bad feelings about medical ethics.

What if they anesthetics simply paralysed you, rendering you unable to respond to pain, while temporarily interfering with your ability to form new memories?

The drug Versed is supposed to do this. For example patient complaints see http://versedbusters.blogspot.com/ and the comments on that page.

Wow. That sounds very much like a date-rape drug.

I think today people could tell the difference today using fMRI studies (and I hope those studies have been done and are being done). It might not have been as straightforward to tell the difference in the past.

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