With British and German forces separated only by a no-man’s land littered with fallen comrades, sounds of a German Christmas carol suddenly drifted across the frigid air — “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht [Silent Night, Holy Night].”
Then, during that first Christmas Day in World War I, something magical happened.
Soldiers who had been killing each other by the tens of thousands for months climbed out of their soggy, muddy trenches to seek a shred of humanity amid the horrors of war.
“Not a shot was fired,” Lt. Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxony regiment wrote with amazement in his diary that Christmas. On the other side of the front line, Pvt. Henry Williamson of the London Rifle Brigade was amazed by the goodwill among his enemies. “Yes, all day Xmas Day & as I write. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
Few could be believe their eyes, especially on this mud-caked patch of Belgium and northern France where crimson poppies had long ago shrivelled in the cold.
Peace allowed for corpses to be recovered from the fields and given a proper burial. Fighting continued in many other places on the front line. But it was a momentary peace in a war that would last for nearly four more years.
The ‘Birdcage’ attack Near one of the spots where British and German soldiers fraternised for the unexpected truce, a dark, dirt track veers off the road and meanders into the gloom of the woods. There, a cleared space has the graves of British soldiers who died on December 19, 1914, in a battle as gruesome as it was insignificant, their dreams of a peaceful Christmas ignored and buried in the cold mud.
It was a time when swift military movement from Germany across France to the Belgian coast was grinding to a stalemate, leaving hundreds of thousands of casualties behind. For both sides Germany versus an alliance led by France and Britain this buried any hope that the war would be over by Christmas.
The result was a form of warfare across trenches where human life was expendable.
“There are a number of local attacks which never make it into the history books, but which all cause a great loss among the troops,” said Piet Chielens, curator at the In Flanders’ Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium.
The December 19, 1914 “Birdcage” attack occurred on a bulge of the German line about the size of a football field. Allied soldiers also had been thinking about Christmas, but for 80 of them it turned into disaster in an area where a warren of barbed wire had given the German defenders a huge advantage.
Chielens said that during those early days of the war both sides dug into the Flemish soil, with commanders “attacking without deep thought, without deep concern about the fate of their men.” The infamous “Birdcage” was one of those battles that made them realize that strategy wouldn’t work.
Some of the bodies found after the attack were so mangled they could no longer be told apart, and today the headstones of several casualties stand shoulder to shoulder to mark that horror.
