Fusiliers and Germans - No-Man's Land, Christmas Day, 1914
Posted on 10/16/2004 10:14:43 PM PDT by snippy_about_it
Do you mean good Yankees? Sure, sure dead ones.
Howdy ma'am
Hiya Sam. As soon as I hit send, I thought I should have called it Mt. Bushmore sized.
Thanks Matthew, I've not heard of some of this before.
Yessiree. Msdrby doesn't quite understand why I want to build the medival equivalent of the atomic bomb.
I'll bet! I wonder how many of those shell are still lurking?
The piece you posted claims that US involvement in the war, and in particular Wilson's "contribution" made the war shorter. Nothing is farther from the truth.
The Austrians were trying to surrender in 1917, which would have forced Germany out of the war. Wilson would have none of it. He wanted Austria - Hungary destroyed. Without the American declaration of war the war would have been over during the summer of 1917. Good history written on this one.
Ehaww!
Oh, my bro!
It is this, thank you for this, thank you keepin' on posting these post's!
We MUST always support our TROOPS, we MUST always keep a clear eye toward the real solution in the support that is happening throughout the WORLD.
I LOVE YOU, Sam!
GooberDoll
WWI was a rude awakening to the 20th Century. A lot of the names from WWI beoame even more famous during WWII.
I meant good Yankee jokes. ;-)
:-)
OOOOOOO! I can get a lot of pumpkins cheap. ;-)
Here we call them "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" But we know what you menat.
The American influx of fresh troops was what the Allies wanted. The french were pretty much burnt out and the Brits had no more to contribute. The Germans and Austrians were almost at the end of thier ropes and the civilian population wanted an end to the war. We made possible new offensives by the Allies.
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE
OF 1914
"A complete Boche figure suddenly appeared on the parapet and looked about. This complaint became infectious. It didn't take 'Our Bert' long to be up on the skyline. This was a signal for more Boche anatomy to be disclosed, and this was replied to by all our Alfs and Bills, until, in less time than it takes to tell, half a dozen or so of each of the belligerents were outside the trenches, and were advancing towards each other in no-man's land.
"A strange sight, truly!"
So writes Bruce Bairnsfather about the Christmas Truce of 1914. This event was an outbreak of spontaneous fraternization between troops almost entirely concentrated in the British sector on the south edge of the Ypres Salient. Contact was in varying degrees from exchanging smokes, chatting or playing football in No-Mans-Land, to sharing meals and dinner gossip in the opponents trenches. It occurred less frequently where one or both of the opposing formations were elite or hard-edged types. From its occurrence, the Christmas Truce has been looked upon as a symbol of a humanity not yet submerged by the mechanical forces of industrial-age warfare. With its ability to inspire and hold the imagination of later generations, the Legend of the Christmas Truce might be looked upon as a rare positive outcome of the Great War.
Those present, however, like Bairnsfather, premier cartoonist of the First World War and creator of "Old Bill" , were decidedly less sentimental about it. His account above of the unauthorized truce is widely quoted, but no one ever adds what he wrote a few paragraphs later:
"There was not an atom of hate that day and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed It was just like the interval between rounds in a friendly boxing match.' [Author's italics.]
An account of a lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards shows how some of the participants took a practical approach:
"They [the Germans] took me for a corporal, a thing I did not discourage, as I had an eye to going as near their lines as possible! I... then escorted them back as far as their barbed wire, having a jolly good look round all the time and picking up various little bits of information, which I had not had an opportunity of doing under fire! I went straight to HO to report."
The crucial thing to note is that distrust was a feature of this and other truces occurring throughout the war. The English respected a brave and resourceful enemy but there was no love or liking. If there was no hostility, neither was there a relaxation of the will to win; if not that, then at least there was no relaxation of suspicion. And it proved, above all, to be an excellent opportunity for a safe reconnaissance.
There is no evidence that the truce extended to the French front, and this is understandable since they had started a major counterattack in the Champagne on December 20th. The Germans were the invaders and were on French soil. The memories of defeat in 1871 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was too vivid in French memory to allow any rapprochement with the hated Boche. Frank Richards, one of the very few "other ranks" to write a book about the war after beating odds on the order of thousands to one by surviving all four years, reports that the French people "were saying all manner of nasty things about the British Army" when they "...had heard how we spent Christmas Day;" French women spat on British troops.
Finally, if the Christmas Truce had any effect on the participants or the eventual course of the war, it was negligible. At the time, it made the various staffs apprehensive, but this was soon put in order. Guy Chapman tells us that a year later: "The staff, perhaps threatened by fire-eaters in London, had forbidden all fraternization, and to ensure their orders being carried out, commanded slow bombardment all during December 25th."
Author Denis Winter reports post-1914 fraternization including meetings in No-Mans-Land, joint prayer sessions by chaplains and some gestures of civility at later Christmas times. But, as the war dragged on to no apparent conclusion, even among the later New and conscript armies, nothing on the same scale as the 1914 Christmas Truce ever happened again on the Western Front.
This article contains extensive quotes from an article of the same name by Frank Contey which appeared in Relevance: The Quarterly Journal of the Great War Society, Vol 2., No.1, Winter 1992/1993.
For more
http://www.worldwar1.com/heritage/xmast.htm
or
http://www.worldwar1.com/heritage/heritag2.htm
Hi Gooberdoll! I hope all is going well with you.
Thanks for the compliment, Snippy and I have a lot help in keeping the Foxhole going. The contributions of our readers keep us honest and the Foxhole interesting.
Fusiliers and Germans - No-Man's Land, Christmas Day, 1914
In 1918 Maginel Wright Enright, sister of Frank Lloyd Wright, submitted to the Division of Pictorial Publicity a pencil sketch for this poster that depicted Uncle Sam as the Pied Piper, in order to stimulate interest in creating war gardens among the country's school children. This national campaign was launched in 1917 to increase the food supply during World War I.
Enright's design was highly praised by Secretary of the Interior Frederick Lane. He wrote, "I think it is a beautiful piece of work . . . I am sure a great many children will find their hearts stirred by the picture, and no older person can look at it without a thrill of loyalty and desire to do his part."
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