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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Wishing everyone a peaceful Christmas

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President Obama’s decision to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba seems the right move to make during the Christmas season. It’s an act of reason in the face of that old saying, “Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.” The decision is, instead, an act of compassion after 50 years of stubborn ideology and imposed deprivation.

The Ely High School Christmas Band and Choir Concert in December celebrated such compassion with music in memory of an outbreak of peace in December of 1914 during World War I. A letter that a soldier in that war wrote to a parent 100 years ago was read, the scene dimmed, and students came down the aisle of the auditorium carrying lights and singing, “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht,” the carol Silent Night in German.

Many soldiers wrote astonishing letters home after that historic Christmas on the border of Belgium and France. Prussians, Saxons and Bavarians on one side of the front lines in Flanders wrote home. The Allies, British and French troops, those from India, Scotland and Africa wrote home.

And the letters told of a Christmas Eve truce, tentatively begun when the German troops thrust small candle-lit trees up out of the muddy trenches, facing their foes across a mortar-pitted No Man’s Land.

In his book “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce,” Stanley Weintraub tells of the hundreds of small acts of bravery and kindness that “bubbled up from the ranks,” as one side began to sing a Christmas carol, answered by a song from the opposing trench. The “Boys of Bonnie Scotland”, “O Tannenbaum”, and “Auld Lang Syne” rang out.

“You no shoot, we no shoot,” came the call from the German side. The firing ceased, with rare exceptions, from both sides. And tentatively the soldiers emerged from horrid, rat-infested, deep-mucked trenches to shake hands across the barbed wire. No one knew where exactly Christmas bonhomie began, but it spread up and down the lines.

The No Man’s Land was pocked rough and strewn with the bodies of the dead from both sides. The soldiers agreed there would be peace, no shooting, and time to bury their comrades in the light of day. With no instructions from higher command levels, they agreed and began to talk and exchange small gifts from one side to the other. Tinned sweets and cigarettes changed hands. A warm sweater, fur lined gloves, a bottle of schnapps, newspapers.

Weintraub writes that, “the combatants had agreed almost everywhere on Christmas Eve (although neither side stuck strictly to it) that ‘the only thing forbidden was to make any improvement to the barbed wire.’ Further, they concurred ‘that if by any mischance a single shot were fired, it was not to be taken as an act of war, and that an apology would be accepted; also that firing would not be opened without due warning on both sides.’”

Soccer matches sprang up across the rough terrain, sometimes with only a helmet stuffed with straw for a ball. Improvised teams played those on their own side, and even across the lines of war in some cases.

The scale of the peace when the shooting stopped on Christmas of 1914 felt like a dream to the thousands when it was over, and officers on both sides required the war to re-commence. Weintraub writes that “The impromptu truce seemed dangerously akin to the populist politics of the streets, the spontaneous movements that topple tyrants and autocrats. For that reason alone, high commands could not permit it to gain any momentum to expand in time and in space, or to capture broad appeal back home.”

The troops went, reluctantly, back to the work of war—but not without regret or warning. One French communiqué to the Germans read, “Be on guard tomorrow. A general is coming to visit our position. For reasons of shame and honor, we shall have to fire.”

At home, the truce went unreported officially until the New York Times broke the story, and soon letters from English and German soldiers hit the pages of uncensored newspapers. The bullets had already begun whizzing back and forth on the front lines. The letters kept coming with snippets of news about what seemed a Christmas miracle. “Our trenches are only 80 yards and we meet each other half way. We give them tins of jam for cigars,” came a letter in the Bedfordshire Times and Independent with a headline that read “British and Germans Good Friends on Christmas Day in the Trenches.”

Another soldier wrote, “Just after one o’clock on Christmas morning I was on look-out duty and one of the Germans wished me good morning and a Merry Christmas. I was never more surprised in my life when daylight came to see them all sitting on top of the trenches waving their hands and singing to us.”

The Christmas truce, five months into World War I on the Western Front, was seen as a strange and spontaneous act of good will toward men. It was a brief interlude, and one that perhaps has meaning for nations in conflict today—one that we may be privileged to see between the U.S. and Cuba today. A message of tolerance and peace. One of live and let live.