A Christmas Far from Home by Stanley Weintraub

To finish this war quickly, we must keep up the fighting spirit.”

Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien ordered the British 2nd Corps from his cushy rear-area headquarters: “On no account is intercourse to be allowed between opposing troops. Under threat of court martial, troops on both sides were to ordered to separate and to restart hostilities. In the national interest, the war had to go on.

The German troops, accessible from home by land, also received small Christmas trees with candles attached.īut the high commands on both sides felt they could not let this continue. To make it feel more like Christmas, governments on both sides had prepared small Christmas gift boxes for each soldier, with snacks and tobacco. Yet the muck, and the crisscrossing waterlogged trenches and the barbed-wire entanglements separating the two armies, as well as the constant firing by machine guns and artillery, made the distance seem far, far greater.Ī Royal Engineer, Andrew Todd, wrote to the Edinburgh Scotsman newspaper that soldiers were “only 60 yard apart” at some places on the front lines. The German border abutted on Belgium, which the Kaiser’s army had invaded. London was 60 miles away across the English Channel. The British and German troops facing each other in muddy Flanders were as close to home geographically as wartime enemies on someone else’s territory ever get. But only once did they actually lay down their arms and stop a war for it. Christmas has always been hard on soldiers who are far away from home.

A Christmas Far from Home by Stanley Weintraub