Piping the Peace

Tonight, one century ago, across the battlefields of war-ravaged Europe, tens and likely hundreds of thousands of soldiers laid down their weapons and crossed the desolation of "no man's land" to greet their enemies as friends and celebrate together what has become known as the Christmas Truce. 

Over half the British sector of the western front was involved in this Yuletide fraternisation as were huge segments of the French and, of course, their German counterparts. On the eastern front, less marked but similar reconciliation occurred between Austro-Hungarian and Russian soldiers as the poor bloody infantry ignored the threats of their superiors in an act of defiant international solidarity.

British and German troops celebrate together at Christmas 1914

Well known are the games of football that were reputedly played (there is no photographic evidence, but there were professional footballers in the trenches of both sides and many reports of informal games). Gifts were exchanged, photographs of sweethearts, wives and families displayed, hymns were sung, music played and meals taken together - many Germans in particular could speak English (then as now not so the other way round). In the Belgian sector, German soldiers, who had occupied nearly all of Belgium, agreed to take letters for their opponents and post them to their families behind the lines.

The High Commands of France, Britain and Germany, safely far behind the dangers of the Front and living in extremely comfortable conditions, had been anxious for some time about what might happen in this, the first Christmas of the war. Nearly five months on from the heady August days when leaders on all sides had promised a quick victory and it would all be over by Christmas, the troops had experienced weeks of shell-shock and near static warfare. 

Equipped for summer campaigns, many soldiers lacked the boots and clothing required to survive in the open winter air, never mind the shells and bullets of their enemies. Friends, neighbours and relatives had been lost, especially demoralising for regiments that were often formed from the men of the same village and even street. 

The enthusiasm which had greeted the war among some, though far from all, of the heavily propagandised civilian populations had already begun to dissipate as casualties mounted in this, the first large industrial-scale war. Indeed, the recovery and burial of the dead was a key part of the truce, with men helping each other inter and commemorate their dead.

A British High Command note from General Horace Smith-Dorien, dated 5 December 1914, is particularly telling about the generals' concerns about their soldiers' temperament: “It is during this period that the greatest danger to the morale of troops exists. Experience of this and of every other war proves undoubtedly that troops in trenches in close proximity to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted to do so, into a “live and let live” theory of life…officers and men sink into a military lethargy from which it is difficult to arouse them when the moment for great sacrifices again arises…the attitude of our troops can be readily understood and to a certain extent commands sympathy…such an attitude is however most dangerous for it discourages initiative in commanders and destroys the offensive spirit in all ranks…the Corps Commander therefore directs Divisional Commanders to impress on subordinate commanders the absolute necessity of encouraging offensive spirit… friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices, however tempting and amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited."

Live & let Live - Generals frowned on truces to retrieve the fallen.

The truth of the matter is that the Christmas truce, sanitised in the years since as a touching gesture of reconciliation by troops from three Christian nations on the eve of Christ's birth, was far from the one-off incident that many rightwing historians portray it as being (indeed, a few seem to like to imagine it didn't actually happen at all). Rather, it was the latest of a string of incidents that marked discontent and dissent among the ordinary soldiers stuck in muddy trenches facing a dreadful attrition which often made death a preferable option.

From as early as the start of November, when the initial moves and counter-moves of the armies had become bogged down in trench warfare with millions of men facing each other in some places just a few yards apart, the "live and let live" nostrum first manifested itself in unspoken agreements to respect mealtimes, while by December half hour ceasefires would be called to allow joint retrieval of the dead. During these, soldiers began to speak to each other, exchange newspapers and in some areas even visit each others' trenches. The Christmas truce, possibly kicked off by the quaint, typically out of touch decision of the German Imperial Government to send thousands of Christmas trees to decorate their trenches, in many areas lasted well beyond Christmas, with messages and joint singing reported on New Years' Day 1915.

The news of the truce was suppressed by all Governments - but the Scottish and American press broke the story a few days later and soon the German and English papers followed, most of them commenting positively and lamenting the fact that the slaughter was about to begin again. (In France, by contrast, the Christmas truce was officially kept secret for some years). But this did nothing to slacken the resolve of the High Commands - all of them reissued instruction banning all forms of fraternisation and threatening punishment of those who disobeyed.

Perhaps because of its widespread nature, there is relatively little evidence of retribution against soldiers who took part in the Christmas truce, although the film Joyeux Noel shows British officers being removed from duty and a chaplain defrocked, while the Kaiser's son personally oversees the transportation of a German unit to the Eastern Front. It is perhaps a telescoped narrative of what did come next, however.

For future episodes of fraternisation were definitely not treated so lightly and as a result, Christmas 1915 saw only a very partial repetition of the ceasefire. The Church was employed to ensure that British troops in particular could find no commonality with the Germans, as Brigadier General Crozier described in 1915:

"Blood lust is taught for the purpose of war, in bayonet fighting itself and by doping their minds with all propagandic poison. The German atrocities (many of which I doubt in secret), the employment of gas in action, the violation of French women, the "official murder" of Nurse Cavell, all help to bring out the brute-like bestiality which is necessary for victory. The process of "seeing red" which has to be carefully cultured if the effect is to be lasting, is elaborately grafted into the make-up of even the meek and mild .. . The Christian churches are the finest "blood lust" creators which we have, and of them we must make full use. (The British soldier) is a kindly fellow ... it is necessary to corrode his mentality"

Yet, as fraternisation died away with the ever more overpowering destructive nature of the war, discontent turned inward. Agitation grew against the continued conflict among troops on all sides. Mutinies broke out - in April 1917, two months after the Russian army refused to support the Czar against the political revolutionaries in Petrograd, a battalion of French soldiers refused to go over the top at the battle of the Aisne, which had cost over a quarter of a million French lives. Four ring-leaders were shot and many others imprisoned, but within a short time the mutiny spread to 68 divisions - half of the French army refused to go into battle and many talked of marching on Paris to overthrow the Government. In June, Russians units lent to their allies on the western front joined with French troops to set up a soviet council which issued a "Declaration of Soldiers' Rights".

The revolt was eventually contained with the court-martial of 3,500 troops, and 550 condemned to death (49 were actually executed). As Dave Sherry observes in "Empire and Revolution", "This was limited punishment given the scale of the mutiny. Clearly it had terrified the French generals and the ruling class."

Next, mutiny spread to British, Australian and New Zealander troops following Field Marshall Haig's decision to throw them into a series of bloody and unsuccessful battles in Flanders in appalling weather. In September 1917, 100,000 troops revolted in the base at Etaples, burning down the Military Police buildings and locking up their officers. As with the French, the British High Command responded with some limited concessions and execution of the leaders, suppressing the revolt after five days - and keeping it secret for decades. 

More mutinies were to follow through 1918 both at the front and back in England, with mass groups of troops refusing orders and walking out of barracks in Folkestone, Dover and Shoreham. Canadian troops rebelled as well over two days at Arras. (The 15,000 strong West Indian Volunteer force continued to obey orders until after the ceasefire when they were denied the payrise given to British conscripts and detailed to clean toilets for white soldiers - at this point, after already enduring several years of racist treatment, they too rebelled.)

Among all sides, desertion grew the longer the war endured. As the volunteers of 1914 fell under the shells and bullets, they could only be replaced by forced conscription. By autumn 1918, as many as two million Germans had either deserted or avoided the draft, with 25,000 fleeing to Switzerland where many associated with Russian Bolshevik exiles.

As 2014 closes, with the British Government's David Cameron and Michael Gove attempting to "celebrate" the conflict of 1914 to 1918, it is worth reflecting that this was no popular war. Although  unsurprisingly titled "The Great War for Civilisation" by the victors, this was not the battle against Nazism or totalitarianism of 1939 to 1945. It was fought essentially in the interests of elite ruling classes and at the behest of their capitalist leaders - arms manufacturers and merchants, engineering firms, oil companies. All of them were seeking to expand their profits and, in an early manifestation of the neoliberal ethos, they happily incorporated state power to their cause so that, to paraphrase Clauswitz, war became economics by other means.

Many of these rulers, with some notable exceptions, had anticipated a quick war and a few even believed their own propaganda about over by Christmas. But, writing nearly 30 years earlier, Karl Marx's colleague and friend Friedrich Engels had anticipated things very differently and, as it turned out, highly accurately:

"(There will be) a world war of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.
The devastation of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three or four years and spread over the whole continent; famine, pestilence, general demoralisation of both armies and of the mass of the people, produced by acute distress; chaos in our trade, industry, commerce and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states to such an extent that crowns will roll on the pavements and there will be no one to pick them up; absolute impossibility of seeing how it will all end...

This is the prospect when the system of mutual outbidding in armaments, taken to its final extreme at last bears its inevitable fruits. This my lords, princes and statesmen is where in your wisdom you have brought old Europe." ("Empire and Revolution", D.Sherry, p,12)

Little wonder then that the war came to an end first in the east with the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 and then in the west with the German Revolution of October 1918. History has often viewed both as isolated if powerful events, but in fact all Europe was ablaze by the final Armistice on 11 November 1918. Ten million soldiers and ten million civilians were dead; and a flu pandemic originating among in the squalid conditions of the trenches was to take between another twenty and forty million lives over the next two years.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more, shattered into at least six different entities. Soviet Republics were declared in Bavaria and Hungary. Italy endured the Bienno Rossa, two years of social upheaval which eventually birthed the fascist Blackshirts and brought Mussolini to power. The Ottoman Empire had also collapsed and Greece and Turkey faced each other in a new conflict that would lead to massive and brutal transfers of populations between Europe and Asia Minor.

In Britain, the Government invested huge military efforts and resources to subvert the new Communist regime in Moscow and for several years was spooked by the prospect of revolution - furiously sending tanks to Glasgow in 1919 to suppress protesters after the Battle of George Square. With angry, demobilised conscripts demanding the Government make its' promises of a "land fit for heroes" a reality and even the police going on strike, King George V persuaded the then Prime Minister to withdraw an offer of refuge to the deposed Russian Czar, fearing his cousin's presence would precipitate a similar royal cataclysm in the UK.

The Christmas Truce was a remarkable event. And now, more than ever, as capitalist companies seek to profit from its memory, it is all the more important that we remember the context in which it occurred and where, in time, it led. 

It was the first of a number of rebellions that eventually saw several million combatants ignore the commands of their leaders and instead make common cause with their fellow soldiers across the lines. It was an act of humanity and compassion for sure; but it was also one of the most powerful acts of defiance against authority by oppressed people in all of the last century. Let us never forget them.

Lest We Forget

The British Legion has censored the anti-war verses of its Poppy Song.

Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday in the UK, when the dead of war are commemorated by ceremonies of red poppy wreath-laying at memorials around the country and a two minute silence is observed. The events mark the moment that World War One officially ended at 11 am on 11th November 1918. The first Remembrance Day was in 1919, when the two minutes were known as the Great Silence, a fitting term given the absence of perhaps forty million souls carried away by the conflict and its aftermath.

This year is, of course, especially poignant given that it is just over one hundred years since that war began in August 1914, as commemorated on this blog in an earlier post, "We Will Remember. And One Day Learn".

And learn we still have to do. The First World War was once referred to as the Great War, with the epitaph "The War to End All Wars", as the socialist H.G. Wells called it, so great was the scale of death and destruction of this first truly international, industrial war. But of course it was far from the end of war; rather it presaged that even worse was to come.

And in the 96 years since it ended amidst Europe-wide chaos, civil war, revolution and a flu epidemic of historic proportions, around 150 million more people have died in wars; quite possibly more than in all the rest of history put together. We have not learned, and we have not changed.

And nor will we if, among all our other propensities to fight with each other, we choose in our very act of remembrance to forget. Yet this is what seems to be happening.

The Royal British Legion organises the Remembrance events and in doing so, it has always had a fine line to tread between remembrance and glorification of war. All the more difficult, perhaps, as in the last decade or so several hundred new names have been added to the lists of the dead from Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan - and many have felt uneasy about the nature of the Legion's commemorations, which have seemed increasingly willing to support current government policy rather than remember those who were lost. Yet whatever their views of the political decisions that have led to these wars, many have still wanted to commemorate the fallen and injured in the hope that there will be no more in the future.

But how much harder that now is when it is revealed that the Legion has accepted support from two big arms manufacturing companies - Lockheed Martin (the world’s largest arms company) sponsored last week’s Poppy Rocks Ball, while Thales (who manufacture the pilotless drones that have killed hundreds of innocent bystanders) have joined London mayor Boris Johnson in a big Red Poppy billboard at Westminster.These are companies making money - huge profits - out of wars happening right now. It is surely an affront to those who have fallen to have such events funded by these merchants of death.

But almost as bad, breathtakingly so, is the official Remembrance song issued by the Legion and sung by Joss Stone. This is a censored version of the beautiful The Green Fields of France by Eric Bogle. The original version recounts the thoughts of a visitor to the grave of a 19 year old soldier, Willie McBride, questioning the reasons for his death and it is distinctly anti-war.

The Legion, however, has cut it; as well as renaming it No Man's Land and squeezing any feeling or power from it as they turned it into lachrymose mush, it has excised two key verses (almost half the song) including:

Ah young Willie McBride, I can’t help wonder why,
Do those that lie here know why did they die?
And did they believe when they answered the cause,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain,
The killing and dying, were all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again. 

Scots-born Bogle wrote the song as a reaction to the slaughter of the Vietnam War, hence his line that in the war to end all wars, "the killing and dying were all done in vain." He has criticised Joss Stone's version for diminishing the intention of the song to build up verse by verse to a powerful anti-war statement.

Our PM wears a poppy while on an arms sale promotion to Gulf rulers

Compromised by its funding by arms merchants and association with three pro-war government parties, the Legion should be seriously revisiting its purpose - its support, or often lack of support, to former service people has come under increasing criticism. It should be focusing on them rather than adopting the role of cheer-leader to the Michael Gove-view of the slaughter of the trenches being a good thing.

It seems certain that more people will follow the route already taken by many on the Left and in the peace movement and wear white poppies in their own acts of remembrance. Among them will be a growing number of war veterans, people who, unlike virtually all of our blood-thirsty political class, have been at the sharp end of killing and dying, and want no more of it. Remembrance Day was established to mark the sacrifice of the dead in part so that we would learn to not add to their number. The deaths of millions through the last century must be commemorated for, as the over-used phrase goes, those who do not learn from history are bound to relive it.

But, with the plethora of regional conflicts around us, so many eagerly anticipated by our rulers and their arms manufacturing funders, perhaps we already are.

Lest we forget.



A petition has been started to ask the Royal British Legion to apologise for censoring the words of the poppy song. You can sign it here: Petition

Meantime, here is the full version, performed by the incomparable The Men They Could Not Hang.

We Will Remember. And One Day Learn.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST by WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod.
All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
 Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

--- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
 To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Wilfred Owen died fighting in the trenches on 4 November 1918, just one week before the end of the war. 

In Remembrance of Lions

Harry Patch - A coin for our times?

The Government has come under substantial criticism for deciding to put Lord Kitchener on the new £2 coins to mark the beginning of what could easily see-saw uncomfortably between commemoration and celebration of the slaughter of the First World War as we approach the centenary of its beginning in August. Education Secretary Michael Gove, who worryingly is responsible for the current review of the history curriculum to make it more supposedly patriotic, has added to the furore by claiming the war to have been a noble one, seen as noble by those fighting it, and a "just" conflict. He has accused supposedly left-wing historians as well as programmes such as Blackadder Goes Forth and the Monocled Mutineer of tarnishing it out of some sort of seditious lack of Britishness and an apparently perverse support of Prussian militarism.

There is not the space here to consider his claims, but both Labour's Tristram Hunt and Cambridge University historian Sir Richard Evans have given powerful responses to Gove, castigating his simplistic and narrow-minded view of events and, in Sir Richard's case, his cunning plans for history teaching in schools.

Gove, who has never served in the military or been in harm's way in the service of our country, is just like so many politicians who talk tough with other people's lives - but as for Kitchener himself, he is an odd choice  for a coin.

Conqueror of the still-troubled Sudan in 1898 in as bloody a campaign as might be imagined, Lord Herbert Kitchener of Khartoum ceased being a serving general to become a member of the Liberal Party Cabinet as Secretary of State for War at the commencement of hostilities. He was key to the drive to raise a volunteer force for what some have described as "the war that had to be fought". After a record-breaking period of over 40 years of general (though not total) peace, the European imperial powers - Russia, Germany, France, and Austro-Hungary (and arms merchants far and wide) - were itching for a conflagration to settle their primacy as industrial, social and political changes swept their peoples, challenging the long, tense equilibrium of The Powers. Britain, with its naval supremacy and huge overseas Empire, was to an extent on the sidelines, but tied to Russia and France through the Tripartite Alliance. So, when the Czar declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary, we were drawn in within a matter of days.

Kitchener himself played no part in the fighting as regiment after regiment were slaughtered on the fields of Flanders, whose red poppies today commemorate the blood spilled on its soil. Perhaps contrary to popular imagination, he did argue for a cautious approach and opposed what he termed "too vigorous offensives". But while other generals still genuinely believed the war would last months, Kitchener was planning for at least a three year conflict which he believed would last "until the final million", whether as a warning or as a strategy, or both, it is not clear, but chilling under any circumstance.

After initial success in organising the new armies for the front, Kitchener came under increasing criticism for failing to organise weapons and munitions supplies and was gradually sidelined by Prime Minister Asquith. He became an envoy to the Czar and died in June 1916 en route to Russia when his ship was sunk by a German mine off the Orkneys.

For a century now, the Great War, once seen as "the war to end all wars", has been judged as far from just in either its cause or execution. It was grounded in squabbles between unelected Royal families in eastern Europe and led directly to the deaths of fifteen million people, with many more injured and disabled or displaced. It traumatised a generation and led rapidly to the conditions that would claim over sixty million lives in the 1939 to 1945 war.

We should commemorate those who died - no one can doubt their bravery and sacrifice, but unlike the Second World War and the struggle against the Nazis, their deaths were at the hands of their political leaders as much as at the ends of their opponents guns. That the conflict unleashed consequences on a scale they could perhaps not have imagined (although Kitchener apparently did) is no mitigation.

Commemoration should therefore be about the people who were at risk, who lived and died in the trenches, rather than the men who sent them there from the safety of their Whitehall office desks. So rather than Kitchener on our coins, why not Harry Patch, the very last veteran of the 1918 army, who died in July 2009? His perspective on the conflict was rather different to Mr Gove's gung-ho take on it. Rather than a noble cause, Harry Patch, a veteran of Passchendale, warned that the war was "organised murder, and nothing else."

Harry Patch would be an appropriate face on our coinage, but it is doubtful if his views would chime with our Government's intentions for the remembrance of the war, coming as they do ahead of the difficulties they face in the European elections in May and the General Election next year. When he was 106 years old, Harry met a former Austrian solider, who was 107, and, declaring his former opponent to be a "nice gentleman", he said, "He is all for a united Europe and peace - and so am I."

Lions led by donkeys is a long used phrase to describe the British Army of the Great War, men who lived and died in the most appalling conditions. Many of those suffering shell-shock were punished in on way or another, and over three hundred, including at least one 16 year old child, were executed by firing squads sanctioned by the British Government and Lord Kitchener. It is an insult to them to lead their remembrance with a coin that has no space for anyone who served in the actual conflict and all the more galling to have Michael Gove try to put such an appalling spin on the slaughter. He might do well to think on this extract from Harry Patch's book, The Last Fighting Tommy, and ask himself if this really is what he believes to have been noble:

"We came across a lad from A company. He was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel and lying in a pool of blood. When we got to him, he said: 'Shoot me'. He was beyond human help and, before we could draw a revolver, he was dead. And the final word he uttered was 'Mother.' I remember that lad in particular. It's an image that has haunted me all my life, seared into my mind."