History Without the 'Why'
LEVITHAN, JOSHUA
History Without the 'Why' Silent Night: The Remarkable 1914 Christmas Truce By Stanley Weintraub Free Press. 224 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Joshua Levithan Teaching Fellow in History, Yale...
...consisting of rambling speculations about aftermaths different from the actual history...
...chapter...
...The unprecedented size of the truce reflected the size of the armies involved as well as the fact that late December was a period of relative quiet along the western front...
...But history without analysis and anomaly without investigation are extremely unsatisfying...
...The Christmas truce is important history, but not because it was peaceful, or quaint, or large, or spurred in part by holiday considerations...
...The author seems to presume that the words of the truce's participants, culled mostly from the letters, diaries and literary productions of British and German officers (with an occasional voice from the ranks), will present a coherent explanation of the brief spontaneous peace amid the mass murder of trench warfare...
...December was the first time the stationary armies were subjected to the sight and smell of their comrades rotting a few yards in front of them, beyond their safe reach...
...They took photographs, played soccer, and stubbornly ignored the realities of the War...
...Weintraub also glosses over resistance to the truce, labeling a British soldier eager to shoot at German Christmas trees a "die-hard," and fails to point out that the numerous anecdotes of food and goods exchanges may have concealed more pragmatic motivations for contacting the enemy: Wartime supply left front line soldiers with the occasional surplus, and German beer oruniform "souvenirs" were frequently traded for British canned food, an exchange more reminiscent of bartering than Christmas gift-giving...
...Using a greater variety of sources, Brown and Seaton produced a work where explanation and analysis go hand in hand with many personal chronicles...
...The book comes closest to touching on the larger picture in its closing "What If...
...Neither side could attack in mass while seeking to strengthen their exhausted forces with new recruits...
...Nor is it helpful that they are sandwiched between a short Introduction offering only the barest background information, and a concluding chapter entitled "What If...
...In many sectors of the western front, which stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel, an impromptu truce took hold on Christmas Eve...
...More to the point, as Weintraub mentions but does not adequately emphasize, in many sections the truce began to deal with a problem of static warfare: the presence of decomposing bodies inNo Man's Land...
...History can do without "what if" but it cannot do without "why...
...Stanley Weintraub's new book, Silent Night, strings together fragments of first person narratives, both factual and fictional, of the strange meetings begun that Christmas Eve...
...the protest inherent in the truce was poignant, but it was not political...
...The many questions that arise naturally from the descriptions of this odd hiatus are left unanswered by the author's approach...
...By the end of the War, November 11, 1918,amajority of the men who were in the trenches on Christmas 1914 had been wounded or killed...
...The British and French forces were now dug into some 25,000 miles of zigzagging, waterlogged trenches opposite their German adversaries...
...Indeed, the real interest of the 1914 truce lies in the irony of men who would go on to murder each other briefly protesting the brutality of trench warfare by exercising, with song and with burial shovels, the rituals of a vanishing age...
...Reviewed by Joshua Levithan Teaching Fellow in History, Yale University CHRISTMAS 1914 was the first major holiday to occur during "the War to end all wars...
...Readers interested in the broad historical context or larger relevance of the truce should seek out Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton's excellent The Christmas Truce (1984...
...Instead of leading us to contemplate the range of human behavior in the weird crucible of prolonged combat, the author appears to want to portray how nice it was to celebrate a warm beery Weinachten...
...Regrettably, this rich vein of cultural history, concealed beneath an act of military disobedience, is not tapped...
...This mawkishness is ultimately less problematic, though, than the absence of any serious exploration of the origins or significance of the truce...
...The particular horror of living with unburied corpses and choking on the charnel house odor had not yet been accepted as de rigueur...
...Silent Night's emphasis on the holiday itself notwithstanding, the relevance of religion, culture and ethnicity to any larger comprehension of the War or the 20th century is left undiscussed...
...Silent Night, by contrast, is little more than a book of holiday postcards—eerie snapshots of a calm moment in a storm of horror...
...There the author, indulging in the current fashion for counterfactual history, muses about the lost potential of the truce to "change things...
...Actually, what he portrays as an aberration of modern combat was, more accurately, a vestigial incident that became truly exceptional only in retrospect...
...In several areas the respite lasted through New Year's Day, but eventually the officers on both sides got their troops back to the ugly business at hand...
...It is important because it prompts us to ponder why, after a German soldier shakes hands with a British soldier in No Man's Land and declares, "never was I as keenly aware of the insanity of war," 8 million young men nevertheless lost their lives...
...Although fierce open fighting in the preceding five months had cost the lives of over a million men, what amounted to a stalemate had developed...
...Unfortunately there was no real potential for any change, since the resolve of the nations and armies involved was years from breaking...
...In 1915, strict orders from above forbade any similar "fraternization" (the Latinate term enabling the generals to avoid specifically forbidding "brotherhood" on Christmas), and the battles of attrition were dutifully fought without any significant pause...
...Despite explicit orders against "friendly intercourse," the soldiers from both sides met between the lines to bury the dead and to exchange gifts, songs and conversation...
...In the Introduction Weintraub concedes that truces were commonplace in Western wars, yet he contends rather unconvincingly that the 1914 experience was unique because it was inspired by the spirit of Christmas...
...In this respect, despite the great poetic works that applied the Christ paradigm to the soldiers of World War I, the story is more appropriate to Good Friday than to Christmas...
...Being caught up in the escapist romance of the Christmas season would be charming—if there were not a war on...
...The first act under the truce was often to assemble burial parties, and in at least one instance a joint German-English burial service was held...
...Any attempt to gain insight into the meaning of these accounts is further frustrated by their presentation: a confusing mixture of paraphrase and quotation...
Vol. 84 • November 2001 • No. 6
