Christmas 1914 and After

Copyright oggbashan November 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.

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It was just after midnight on Christmas Eve 1914. I was sitting in the cold damp trench only fifty yards from the Germans in their front line equally cold and miserable.

We were relieved that there had been no firing for the last three hours.

We heard the Germans begin quietly singing the carol Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht. We joined in with the English Version Silent Night, Holy Night. Gradually both sides singing became louder and some instruments joined in, a couple of mouth organs in the English trenches and a guitar from the Germans.

After that, but with some unspoken agreement, the Germans would sing another carol, would stop and we would sing a carol in English.

We sang for hours until the grey foggy dawn gradually lightened. We could see the Germans standing just in front of their trenches in No Man's Land. A few English troops also climbed out of their trenches. Slowly, gradually, not quite believing it, we approached each other. Two hours after dawn the two forces were mixed, exchanging presents from what little we had -- cigarettes, chocolate, and comparing family photographs.

I was calling the German beside me 'Fritz'; he was calling me 'Tommy' until we found out he was a Bavarian called Hans, and I was a Hampshire man called John.

Later we heard that in some other places on the Western Front troops had played football against each other. We just stood around and talked as fellow human beings who didn't want to be at war.

Hans and I laughed about the promises made at the start of the war that it would be over by Christmas. Here we were on Christmas Day and as far as we as ordinary soldiers could see, the war wasn't going to end in days, or even weeks or months. We were angry with the governments and military commanders who had committed hundreds of thousands of men to fight, and fight and for what?

Locally the unofficial truce lasted three days until our angry officers ordered us, on both sides, back into our trenches and the shelling started again. Whose guns fired first? I didn't care. We were back in the deadly game of kill or be killed.

Over the next week I thought often of Hans and how similar we were. Hans, like me, was engaged. We had shown each other pictures of our fiancées. Hans was worried that his fiancée might be getting tired of a long distance relationship.

The reason that Hans and I had got on so well is that his English was competent, as was my German. We had been able, even if they were in a foreign language, to see the nuances in the letters from our fiancées. Hans was worried that his fiancée.could choose another while he was in the trenches. I had similar worries about mine. Although both of us wrote letters to our fiancées frequently, their letters to us had been less demonstrative and more formal over the last month.

Three weeks later, the British officers were still concerned about the effect of the Christmas truce on our fighting ability. They had ordered a succession of aggressive night patrols and raids.

On the day I was detailed to be part of a night patrol of a dozen men to cut the German wire for another patrol to attack the German trenches. There had been a very heavy bombardment of shells all day long. We had cowered in our trenches and dugouts.

At ten minutes to midnight we were ordered out of our trenches. The conditions seemed ideal. There was a heavy freezing fog, made thicker by the yellow acrid smoke from the shelling. Visibility was less than six feet.

We moved forward with fixed bayonets, with wire cutters on our belts. After reaching about halfway from our trenches to the German lines I had lost sight of the rest of my patrol. Never mind. If I kept moving forward I would soon reach the German barbed wire.

Suddenly a shape appeared in front of me with levelled bayonet. I could just see he was German. Both of us prepared to attack with bayonets when an unexpected shell landed close to us. We were blown off our feet and into a nearby shell hole. We had lost our rifles. I scrabbled at the holster which had a pistol I had taken from a dead German officer. I could just see that the German was trying to get his pistol out. We were ignoring our wounds.

Then a star shell burst high in the air and we could see clearly. The German was Hans. We burst out into hysterical laughing.

We stopped trying to draw our pistols. I dressed his leg wounds. He dressed mine. Neither of us could stand or walk.

"Are you my prisoner, John? Or are you mine?" Hans asked.

"I don't think it matters," I replied. "It depends who rescues us. They will decide."

We lay in that shell hole, halfway between the British and German lines, unable to move. We started singing the carol again, in German and English, to let people know we were there.

An hour later we were found by the British patrol. We were carried back to the British trenches and to a field dressing station. Our wounds meant that we were transferred to a hospital in Wimereux and then by ship to Portsmouth's Haslar hospital.

I managed to persuade the staff to let me stay beside Hans. That was unusual and meant I was in a ward with wounded German prisoners of war, but Hans and I could translate between the patients and nursing staff.

Even before we had left the field dressing station Hans had told me had received a 'Dear Hans' letter from his now ex-fiancée. He showed it to me. I laughed and showed him the 'Dear John' letter I had got from my now ex-fiancée.

As now unattached men, we flirted outrageously with the nurses. Most only spoke English and were startled by Hans' fluency. My usual QAIMNS (Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service) nurse was Liesl, half Austrian, the daughter of a British diplomat who had been based in Vienna up to 1910 and had married an Austrian woman from minor nobility. She was impressed by my ability in German and that I could imitate her Viennese accent and phrasing in German.

Liesl was worried by the war. She wasn't engaged but he boyfriend was a lieutenant in the Guards. One of her cousins was an officer in an Austrian regiment, fighting the Serbians.

Hans was flirting with Anna, another British QAIMNS nurse who had been assigned to the German ward because she could speak some German, not much when the war had started but more fluently after working with wounded German Prisoners of war. Anna also had a boyfriend, a second lieutenant in a Hampshire regiment.

Both Hans and I knew or flirting wouldn't get anywhere. Liesl and Anna were in the county set, minor nobility, and Hans and I were middle class, sons of working men. My father was a builder, owning his own small business. Hans' father owned a cuckoo clock factory in the Black Forest. We had both enlisted as volunteer privates because our backgrounds made us unacceptable in 1914 to be officers. But we were both better educated than most privates would be. If we hadn't been wounded, we could have become NCOs.

After about a month in the Haslar hospital we were both considered fit enough to be discharged but too injured to be able to return to the front lines, not that Hans would. He was a prisoner of war.

I asked Liesl to pull strings to get Hans allocated to be a working prisoner of war near my parents' home. I thought I might be able to provide him with some comforts not usually available to prisoners of war.

Liesl did better than that. She arranged for Hans to work for my father along with other German prisoners of war who were already helping the building firm. Hans didn't have any building skills but his fluent English meant he could translate between the British employees and the Germans. He was employed as a foreman.

When we arrived at my parents' house the German Prisoners of war were in a tented encampment, not very comfortable in a cold March. My father got the prisoners of war to build some barrack blocks that were more substantial and could be heated. The Germans worked happily, knowing that they were improving their own conditions. They were also improving their building skills as none had been builders before the war, just competent handymen.

The firm's major project after we arrived had been to extend a local hospital used for rehabilitation of wounded prisoners of war. Hans needed their help as an outpatient with his wounds, and although I wasn't German, the hospital treated me too. Hans and I were often called on to interpret for newly arrived wounded prisoners. The staff were learning German, but were not fluent enough to explain complicated medical procedures. But Hans and I could.

I was my father's deputy and responsible for the work of the prisoners of war, with Hans as my assistant. The hospital needed one or the other of us for a few hours translation each week.

It seemed an ideal existence. Neither Hans nor I would ever return to the Western Front, nor would the prisoners of war. Although prisoners they knew they would survive, unlike their comrades.

The only sad thing was the rejection by our fiancées. We flirted with many of the nurses, who, unlike the professional army nurses at Haslar, were unskilled VADs, recruited locally from farmer's daughters.

Hans and I had lead nurses for our treatment. Mine as Agatha; Hans' was Emily. They saw us every day to change the dressings on our wounds which were healing. Both of us would have to walk with a stick for the rest of our lives but after months of treatment we could get around reasonably well. Although Agatha and Emily were engaged, we flirted with them until May 1915 when both fiancées were killed in the battle for Festubert.

Our frivolous flirting changed to supporting the two women in their loss. Hans and I became serious, helping the two nurses in their grief and no longer teasing them. It took several months before the women accepted that they had lost their fiancées, and for them to appreciate how much we had been there for them throughout their grief.

Over the next few months Agatha and Emily seemed to regard us as friends if not boyfriends. It was too soon for them, but we two, unlike most of the hospital patients were fluent in English. They could say things to us the other patients wouldn't understand.

There was one thing that was difficult for the patients. On Sundays they wanted to go to church. The German Lutherans and other protestants were happy to go to the local Church of England parish church, but it was two miles away. Neither Hans nor I could walk a round trip of four miles for most of the year. For the few Catholics it was even worse. The Catholic Church was five miles away. That was too far for almost anyone.

My father provided a horse drawn builder's cart that could take a dozen men to the Catholic church, fewer than the numbers that wanted to go.

Hans and I asked my father if we could build a church in the Prisoners of war site. He agreed and we started work. It would be a Church of England church sometimes, a Catholic church at other times. It took six months to build, being ready late October.

At first it was just a bare building. One of the prisoners of war, a painter, decorated it with texts from the Bible, in German and Latin. Hans knew woodcarving from his father. He and I produced a Madonna and child. The painter did a great job of colouring it which covered some of our imperfections.

But both religions wanted a Christmas Crib. Hans and I produced figures of Joseph, Mary, the shepherds. The angels and the three Kings, but our attempts for the Ox and the Ass and the sheep were laughed at. We couldn't carve realistic animals. Eventually a competition was held. The best examples would be part of the crib. Agatha and Emily agreed to be the judges, as farmers' daughters. They knew what animals should look like and Hans and my efforts were like no animals that had ever existed.

The competition was to be judged on the second Sunday in December. On that day there were six oxen, five asses and ten sheep. Any of them were far better than Hans and my efforts.

All the carved animals, in bare wood, were displayed just inside the church. Agatha and Emily walked around them. I translated their comments for the woodcarvers. Eventually they decided that two oxen and two asses were equally good and four sheep were also acceptable. The painter would paint all eight animals. No one cared that two oxen and two asses were too many. We were just delighted with the results.

The crib display was ready the Sunday before Christmas, lit by candles. On Christmas Eve the Roman Catholic Priest and the Church of England vicar conducted a joint midnight mass to a full church. We started with the carol Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht in German as was most of the service.

It reminded Hans and I of Christmas 1914. We were sad that so many of the men who had been there then were now dead. We stood with our arms around each other, openly crying. Agatha and Helen joined in a group hug.

From that day on, Agatha was my girlfriend, Emily was Hans' girlfriend and they were until the final end of the war in 1918.

Hans' father had passed on his business to Hans' younger brother in 1917 when that brother was also disabled and discharged from the army. Hans decided to stay in England, working for my father.

He and I proposed to our girlfriends a week after the armistice and we married just before Christmas 1918 in the church we had helped to build. The crib was still prominent. The congregation sung in German at our wedding service, only weeks before they were about to be repatriated. We would miss them as friends, but we had our wives. That was more important, as was the fact that we had survived when so many didn't.