We are four friends, storytellers from Denmark, who back in 2010 have asked our storytelling network to celebrate the International Day of Storytelling for Peace 21 September. We join forces with all the people celebrating The United Nations´s celebration of Peace One Day.
The response has been fantastic! Many storytellers and groups of storytellers in different countries have promised to help celebrate this day by telling stories about peace. This is a movement! Please spread the message to the rest of the world!
2014 we made this proclamation: In 2014 we can celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Christmas Truce at the West Front in World War 1. It was the greatest miracle of peace ever seen. The story about this gigantic outburst of peace should be known by every kid in the world. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides of the front met in No-mans-land and celebrated Christmas together. English and French soldiers came up from the trenches and met their counterparts from the German trenches, and the officers had big trouble to get them back to war.
Dear friends and story lovers: Let´s tell the stories that put their little sticks in the wheel of hate and revenge.
Love from Marianne Christensen, Barbara Katlev, Ann Mari Urwald and Karsten Mathiasen
Take a look at our Facebook page: facebook.com/groups/283701625010
The Christmas Truce
The Christmas Truce at the West Front in World War 1 was the greatest miracle of peace ever seen. The story about this gigantic outburst of peace should be known by every kid in the world! In 2004 Christian Carion made the film Jouex Nöel. It is a love story on the documentary background of the truce where hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides of the front met in No-mans-land and celebrated Christmas together. English and French soldiers came up from the trenches and met their counterparts from the Germans trenches, and the officers had big trouble to get them back to war. Some places the truce was only one day, some places three days and it is reported that in some parts of the front it took three weeks before the slaughtering got restarted.
In 2003 Michael Jürgs came out with his great documentary book, Der kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg. (In Danish: Den lille Fred I Den Store Krig) Sorry I can´t find an English version of this book! In 2004 Christian Carion made the film Jouex Nöel (In Danish “En dag uden krig”) with the same theme.
Here is a text and a song about the truce.
From Chicken soup for the soul, Stories for a Better World, p.168-172
The Christmas Truce
May the children of tomorrow
be as shocked to learn of war
as the children of today
are shocked by slavery.
Linda K. Williams, in the song, “The Children of Tomorrow”.
On Christmas Day 1914, in the first year of World War I, German, British and French soldiers disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with “the enemy” along two-thirds of the Western Front. German troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches with signs that read: “Merry Christmas” and “You no shoot, we no shoot.” Thousands of troops streamed across a no-man’s land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire weapons, and to aim high.
A shudder ran through the high command on either side. Here was disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court-martial. By March 1915, the fraternization movement had been eradicated and the killing machine put back in full operation. By the time of armistice in 1918, 15 million would be slaughtered.
Military leaders have not gone out of their way to publicize it. On Christmas day 1988, a story in the Boston Globe mentioned that a local FM radio host played “Christmas in the Trenches,” a ballad about Christmas Truce, several times and was startled by the effect. The song became the most requested recording during the holidays in Boston on several FM stations. “Even more startling than the number of requests I get is the reaction to the ballad afterward by callers who hadn’t heard it before,” said the radio host. ”They telephone me deeply moved, sometimes in tears, asking, ‘What the hell did I just hear?”
I think I know why the callers were in tears. The Christmas Truce story goes against most of what we have been taught about people. It gives us a glimpse of the world as we wish it could be and says, “This really happened once.” It reminds us of those thoughts we keep hidden away, out of range of the TV and newspaper stories that tells us how trivial and mean human life is. It is like hearing that our deepest wishes really are true: The world really cold be different.
David G. Stratman Excerpted from We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life
Christmas in the Trenches
My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here,
I fought for king and country I love dear.
“Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung.
Our families back in England was toasting us that day,
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate in the cold and rocky ground,
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I, “Now listen up, me boys!” each soldier strained to hear,
As a young German voice sang out so clear.
“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me.
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony.
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more,
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent,
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” struck up some lads from Kent .
The next they sang was “Stille Nacht” –“Tis ‘Silent Night,” says I.
And in two tongues one song filled up the sky.
“There’s someone coming towards us!” the front-line sentry cried.
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side.
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright,
As he bravely strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into no-man’s land.
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand.
We shared some secret brandy, and we wished each other well,
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave’em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photographs from home,
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own.
Young Sanders played his squeezebox, and they had a violin,
This curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us, and France was France once more,
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war.
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night,
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”
“Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung.
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war,
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore.
My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell.
Each Christmas come since World War I, I’ve learned its lessons well.
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same.
John McCutcheon
