Silent Night, by Stanley Weintraub.
The Free Press, 2001.
$25 - 224 pages.

0 ye who read this truthful rime
From Flanders, kneel and say:
God speed the time when every day
Shall be as Christmas Day.

-Frederick Niven, quoted in Silent Night

“What if ...” is a game played frequently by historians, professional and amateur. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if the American Revolution had failed? How might English sound and look if William the Bastard, the Norman duke later known as William the Conqueror, the Norman invader who brought French into Anglo-Saxon England, had fallen at the Battle of Hastings? How might the town of Sylva look today if Julius Caesar had avoided the short swords and daggers of his assassins in 44 B.C.?

History may look and feel inevitable in retrospect, but of course this inevitability is an illusion created by the advantage of hindsight. Most of us do not consider how an event whose outcome seems so certain to us now was once fraught with whirl and suspense. Rarely do we contemplate even our own influence on history, the tiny ways in which we all help fashion our world and the course of events that will later find their place into a history book; however slight, each of us plays a part, and nothing is inevitable in terms of historical outcome.

Possession of such an idea is only one reason why Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night is such a heartbreaking book. Silent Night is the full story of the World War I Christmas truce, that Christmas Eve when Germans, French, Englishmen, and others sang songs to each other rather than firing rifles. Germans generally initiated the truce, with many of them raising Christmas trees above their trench. With the dawn on Christmas Day German soldiers began calling to the British “You no shoot, we no shoot.” The shooting did indeed stop, not just in one sector but in many parts of the front lines, and the soldiers of both sides cautiously stepped into the middle of No Man’s Land to sing carols, to exchange mementos, to play games, and to bury their dead. In the evening the men serenaded one another, played musical instruments from atop their trenches so that all might enjoy a concert, and bandied about jokes and insults.

In most sectors, the truce lasted but a day or two, yet men 50 years later remembered what it meant to stroll out across the killing field and meet the enemy. To many of these old veterans the truce still seemed unreal, a beautiful interlude that occurred during a nightmare in hell. Percy Jones, a rifleman of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, wrote:

How it happened I don’t know, but shortly after this our boys had lights out and the enemy troops were busy singing each other’s songs, punctuated with terrific salvos of applause. The scene from my sentry post was hardly creditable. Straight ahead were three large lights, with figures perfectly visible round them. The German trenches, which bent sharply and turned to the rear of our advanced positions, were illuminated with hundreds of little lights. Far away to the left, where our lines bent, a few lights showed our A Company trenches, where the men were thundering out “My Little Grey Home in the West.”

Weintraub ends his beautiful little book by speculating about subsequent events had the truce sparked negotiations between the belligerents. If nothing else, such a peace would have meant an end to the extreme casualty rate — an average of 6,000 deaths per day for the next 46 months. Weintraub also explores many of the political and cultural ramifications of such a peace, demonstrating convincingly that the history of Europe and of the world for the past 90 years would have been considerably altered from its present state.

But of course the war didn’t end that Christmas of 1914. It went on and on, killing men at a rate never before seen in combat, turning Europe into a slaughterhouse, a stupid, muddy, gory war whose repercussions are still strongly with us today nearly 100 years later. The senseless waste of lives and talent, the wreckage of Europe, the creation of Soviet Russia and Facist Germany, the depreciation of human life in our modern world: all have their roots in the bestial, senseless fighting that marked the Great War.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. This hoary old maxim is probably true, for there are things worse than war, worse even than death, and man himself is both angel and beast. But we Americans would do well to read this book, to meditate on war’s horrors and on the consequences of missed possibilities for peace, and to think hard every time we are tempted to throw down the gauntlet to an enemy.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)