>> Hello, I'm Mark Connelly, Professor of Modern British History in the School of History at the University of Kent and today I'm talking about the Christmas truce of 1914  - the not-so-silent night as I would argue.

 >>If you ask anybody today about the First World War,I think even people who would regard themselves as not that up on history, not that interested in the First World War even, ask them to chuck out their ideas, their thoughts, about the First World War, pretty soon many would mention the Christmas truce of 1914. Last year it certainly came back into the public consciousness in a very deep way thanks to things like the Sainsbury's advert advertising a chocolate bar: allegedly, in the pocket to have been sent to a British soldier as a Christmas present and then in a great act of fraternal greeting he hands it over, slips it over, to a German soldier in no-man's land on Christmas Day - got a lot of press comment and publicity and I think for many people confirmed an image of Christmas Day 1914, a day in which soldiers, mainly British and German, clambered out of their trenches, met in no-man's land and, as the the popular version would have it, pretty much agreed that they hated the war and wished there was a way of stopping it. 

>>Now, that iconic vision of the Great War, I would argue, is a relatively recent invention, something that's solidified, probably most strongly, since the 50th anniversary of the Great War - wasn't so much in current popular culture circulation before that. What are the facts of Christmas 1914? 

>>Well, we certainly know on the Western Front that British and German soldiers did fraternise, they did come out of their trenches, they did meet each other; to a much lesser extent that happened between the odd French and German soldier. It's certainly not happening on the Eastern Front, there's no real evidence of it happening between Russian and German and Austro-Hungarian forces and I think straightaway that starts to give us an insight into unpicking this myth, you know, working out why it took on such resonance and that is it makes a lot of sense to British people, it makes a lot of emotional sense to British people, and it makes a lot of sense to them particularly after 1945. 

>>I think we're all of us used to the idea that the Second World War was the great, you know, moral crusade of the 20th century and that if ever bloodletting is justified by a state, it was between 1939 and 1945 to remove the horrors of Japanese imperialism, Italian fascism, German version of it in Nazism, and we're all used to the appalling images of the Holocaust. 

>>Now by contrast, I think what had started, that started to do in Britain, particularly around about the time of the 50th anniversary of the Great War in the 1960s and that cultural, that very different cultural atmosphere of the 1960s was to cause people to question the moral validity of the First World War. Surely, when you compared Kaiser's Germany to Nazi Germany there was nothing in it, the First World War was about nothing and that meant that the Christmas truce came to be seen as a symbol of a pointless war, a poignant symbol of a pointless war, in which both sides, the young men of both sides, agreed that it was about nothing. But, as I said, that is a peculiarly British perspective. Britain could afford to think that about the first war; British people can afford to over-romanticise the Christmas truce of 1914 because it's not our country that was invaded. For young Belgian soldiers, with a vast majority of Belgium already under German occupation, the situation didn't look anything like so clear-cut. 

>>You know there are lots of Belgian soldiers' letters and diaries where they're saying at Christmas 14 "heard this rumour that the British have been out of their trenches talking to the Germans - why are they doing that? My family seem to have disappeared, I've heard nothing from them for months, they're somewhere behind the lines, I don't know if they're alive or dead, I don't know if they've been carted off to a prison camp to Germany, yet what on earth is going on when someone seems to think they're happy enough to talk to them?" Some very similar reactions from French people  - you know, not as much of France is occupied by the Germans in the Great War as they managed to capture of Belgium but nonetheless there's a considerable part of France under German occupation and so people are asking, soldiers are asking exactly the same question. 

>>So I think once we bring in those other particular national perspectives on the Christmas truce, we can start to see why perhaps they have been, over the decades or certainly since the 1960s, less attached to what we might call a sentimental explanation. The closest we're going to get to a continental view of the Christmas truce that is akin to the British one, some of you might have seen the film, it was about 10 years old now, 'Joyeux Noël', a Franco-German production in which they pretty much come round to the British point of view, but it strikes me just as the British point of view is something that is born out of relatively recent cultural circumstances from the 1960s onwards so is that French view in 'Joyeux' ... that Franco-German view in 'Joyeux Noël' because what that's reflecting is a sense of the modern European Union and how France and Germany are trying to bury their previous conflicts and say 'Never again', you know, 'we will simply not do this again' and in some ways I think they're ignoring there the subtleties, the very important, passionate subtleties of their own wartime history. 

>>Now, so unpacking them, what do British soldiers really think they are up to on Christmas Day 1914, what do German soldiers think they're up to? 

>>Well, the first thing we have to remember is most of the men who are at the front in ... at Christmas 1914 are pre-war professional soldiers - certainly from a British point of view.The British don't have a conscription system, unlike France or Germany, so men who are in the regular army have decided, you know, to join ... that they've made a free act of the will in peacetime to become involved in soldiering, which therefore means they do treat soldiering as a job rather than as some great ideological activity. You know, they're not there to kill a particular racial or cultural group, they're there just to get rid of his Majesty's enemies, whoever they might be. A few months earlier in the summer of 1914, it might have been a group of people that actually make up a fairly big demographic of the British Army - Irish people - because there is a belief or there is the sense that Home Rule is about to be imposed on Ireland and the Protestant majority of Northern Ireland is very worried about being ruled from Dublin and it says, via the the Ulster Volunteer Force, that it will go to armed struggle to stop this being imposed and the British Army is preparing itself for shooting in Ireland - it'll just get on and do it.

>>There's a famous,  I think it's a Laurence Binyon, poem about the British Army called 'An Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries', that's in many ways what a professional army is, right, it's a group of mercenaries; they're not there to carry out anything with any great personal passion or ideology, just to do the job that they're paid for, that they're professionally trained for and to do it with a degree of professional pride and skill, and I think, in many ways, that's what we see happening on Christmas Day 1914. 

>>And then the immediate context comes into play. The British had been attacking the Germans in the few days up to Christmas 1914. It had been really quite bloody affairs, it had been very messy, and the weather had been atrocious, there'd been lots and lots of rain, and these guys are in scratch trenches  - they're nothing like the trenches of later years of the war, you know, none of them are being built to any great Royal Engineers pattern or anything like that. They're improvised, they're held up by bits of timber, bits of wood from the blasted ... what's now becoming the blasted trees of the forest ...stuff that they can strip out of abandoned farmhouses and suchlike, and it means that they're not in very good condition by Christmas Eve 1914 - hideous state. 

>>Something begins to happen weather-wise - weather, I think, is very important here. Suddenly, a winter anticyclone starts to stick in: it becomes colder and drier and it's freezing by Christmas Eve. That is a huge relief to soldiers on both sides - you can now move about in these horrible little ditches a little bit more easily, you can move some of the wounded out, you can tidy things up a bit, both sides are exhausted, I think, by the evening of Christmas Eve and they're rather looking forward to a few quiet days. They're ... you know, if the enemy's not going to stick his arm through the cage and rattle a stick around, then we're going to be the same, we'll just ignore each other for a bit, I think that's the the atmosphere of Christmas Eve 1914. 

>>As we know from the great legend, which is true, the men do start singing carols to each other and that helps next day an atmosphere in which men from certain units clamber out and they do fraternise and talk to each other in no-man's land, swap little trinkets, souvenirs and suchlike, but I think we have to deconstruct the atmosphere of that day with a little more rigour really to try and get to the bottom of it. 

>>First of all, it's by no means total across the entire front - a unit that I've looked at with great local pride is the East Kent regiment, the Buffs -  interestingly, their war diary goes missing all of a sudden from the 21st of December, it's lovingly kept throughout the war but they haven't got a war diary for a week so they clearly did something, but from other scraps it's clear just how up and down this experience is.

>>So one of the officers' diaries in the Buffs says "One of my sergeants tells me that the the Germans want a truce and he wants to go out into no-man's land, I've told him not to go but he has and he's been shot and now some of the other men want to go out and get him back and I've said 'no, no, no, you know that's his silly bloomin' fault, he's gone and got himself shot, I mean they're the enemy after all' ", and then he goes and spends the day with some fellow officers in the second line dugout and doesn't mention anything about a truce going on. About half a mile up the road, though, other units are out, so it's very patchy. 

>>And then, what is the atmosphere like between those men who are out? Well,I think it can be summed up in this kind of way - that they're pretty much saying to each other "We're really sorry that we have to get on and kill you but a job is a job, eh mate, and today we've got a day off, so that's all right, isn't it, so, you know, let's have a little bit of a smoke in no-man's land, a little bit of an exchange of chocolate, perhaps a drop of schnapps, a little bit of rum for you, that's all very nice. Tomorrow, mate, it might go off again and I might have to kill you but there's nothing personal in it , you know - give my love to the Kaiser, off you go, that's it" and what we've done since, particularly since 1964, is to drop or lose sight of that explanation and see in it instead, I would argue, a much deeper sense of common humanity than is perhaps being displayed that day. 

>>Now here I don't wish to throw out the baby with the bathwater - something clearly very remarkable is happening in a very violent modern war - but, if we emotionally over-invest in it, if we almost kind of turn it into a Dickensian sentiment, what it doesn't help us to do is explain the rest of the war. Why did men who - apparently, according to the sentimental version - really didn't want to kill each other, carry on doing that, and it can't be just explained by saying "Well, there are a lot of old, nasty old generals hundreds of miles behind the line who have a draconian disciplinary system who kept, keep men in line, keep men fighting". That doesn't explain it because when soldiers genuinely don't want to fight en masse, as the Russians do in 1917, an army disintegrates. 

>>I think Christmas 1914 makes a lot more sense if we see it within a tradition of military truces. All wars have had truces - usually to clear wounded or clear up the dead or when otherwise conditions become too appalling, men have stopped killing each other and then have gone back to it with just as much rigour and enthusiasm. So if we see it within a tradition of kind of military activity and perhaps don't overly sentimentalise it, then we can see it for its true place in the history of the First World War but I, like you all, nonetheless, do fervently hope that, if we are going to take something from the Christmas truce, it is that the moments of humanity should shine out and we can learn something from it; the problem, I would say, is making a myth a fact of history. And, on that point, I will say thank you all very much for listening and I hope you enjoyed this talk.