John Hudson - Christmas 1914: The First World War at Home and Abroad

In memory of Private John Rigby Foy,
12th Battalion, The Kings (Liverpool Regiment)
who died in Northern France, 2 June 1918

C ONTENTS

Thanks are due to David Glass and Bob Duckett of the Bradford Historical and Antiquarian Society; Jan Sykes of Bradford Local Studies Library; Su Holgate at Bradford Metropolitan District Council; the staff of Bristol Central Library; Stephen Dixon; Linda Hudson, for proofreading and much more; the Trustees and Documents and Sound Section of the Imperial War Museum for allowing access to the collections and to E. Morgan, copyright holder of the papers of W.M. Floyd; Cate Ludlow and Ruth Boyes of The History Press; Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis for permission to use an extract from A War In Words , with acknowledgements to Simon and Schuster UK; Toby Pinn of Clevedon Salerooms; the staff of Stroud Library; Gillian Thomas of Treorchy Library; Phil Vasili; and the copyright holders of all quoted songs.

There are two facts about Christmas 1914 that are known by all and will probably be so another 100 years from now. One is that everybody believed the Great War would be over by then and festive peace would be celebrated around the home fires, and the other is that extraordinary truce, with the football kickabouts and shared sweets, Schnapps and cigarettes with our friend the enemy Fritz in no-mans-land.

The truth, of course, is rather different: any realistic hopes of an early end to the war had dissipated almost within days of its outbreak. The British Expeditionary Forces first significant taste of action at the Battle of Mons had seen it inflict heavy casualties on the enemy but fail to hold the line of the MonsCond Canal and eventually retreat over two weeks to almost the outskirts of Paris. A straightforward tactical retreat executed in good order, the top brass explained. To the British press, however, yet to be properly reminded that truth is the first casualty of war, it was a humiliating and bitter disaster; a bravely fought disaster, granted, but a disaster for all that.

When our troops again came face to face with the German First Army, at the River Marne east of Paris, it was still only early September. This time, however, the French, whose tactical withdrawal at Mons had unwittingly helped to put the British forces in an impossible position, were everything an ally should be in their fierce defence of their capital, and the Kaisers hopes of a swift victory on the Western Front came to nothing. Instead, his army retreated to the north east, the British and French pursued it and both sides then showed they had learned lessons from the way they had been conducting themselves to date by digging deep trenches and settling in for the long, long haul. Any brave talk of victory by Christmas and in truth, both sides had at first been dreaming that dream soon foundered in the mud of Flanders.

Trench warfare was not unknown in military history, but it was not what the British public had foreseen; they were far more familiar with the concept of fast-moving, fluid battle lines, and while the retreat from Mons was the last thing they wanted to see in the way of fluidity, at least they understood the scenario. Trench warfare? Idle men peeping over the parapet and eyeballing the equally indolent and inactive enemy? To some armchair generals back at home by their firesides there was almost something comical about it.

We can see, then, that it had been determined some months before the event that Christmas 1914 would not be a peacetime celebration; and developments leading immediately up to it, that December, saw such an escalation in hostilities that any hopes of a happier New Year were now equally forlorn. Already the newspapers were dominated by war news, and tributes to bewildering numbers of young men who were losing their lives on the other side of the English Channel. This was particularly disorienting and distressing in the local weekly press, whose pages hitherto had rarely been sullied by troubles any more disturbing than the police court sequels to fights outside the Dog and Duck on Saturday nights. December, however, was the month when Over There became Over Here, and that was a backward step by no means everybody had reckoned with.

The trenches as a somewhat comical curiosity: this postcard did not appear again after that first Christmas of war. (Authors collection)

It started in the middle of the month and swiftly escalated; a bag of what looked to be rusty rivets was dropped on Southend; on the 15th the first Zeppelin was sighted off the east coast and as these had long been supposed to pose Germanys main threat from the air, were such an outlandish proposition possible at all, that seemed an ominous sign; not nearly so ominous, however, as the events of the following morning, when German battleships were left free to bombard the north-east coastal towns of the Hartlepools, Scarborough and Whitby, killing well over 100 defenceless men, women and children. At the same time, one of their flotillas was sowing mines off Filey which accounted for hundreds more lives before they were cleared. There were clearly questions to be faced by the British Grand Fleet, questions rarely if ever asked in living memory as our ships Ruled the Waves.

The action quickened considerably in the last days leading up to Christmas. On 21 December a German seaplane, as distinct from an airship, dropped two bombs just off Dover Harbour, and three days later one landed on the town itself, breaking a lot of windows and blowing a gardener out of a holly tree. It was the first airborne bomb to land on British soil, and although its end result was almost comical, like something out of the latest Keystone Cops film, its implications were not, with the engineering might of the Ruhr gearing up for the battle ahead. The first Zeppelin raid came on 19 January 1915, but airships as a fighting force were quickly made obsolete by fast-advancing technology, as were those aircraft that dealt the earliest blows of the war. On both sides of the Channel, hostility was the very fertile mother of invention.

The Christmas Spirit 1914, as seen in the New York World by Rollin Kirby, who won the first Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1922 and repeated the feat twice more in a career that spanned both world wars. ( The War Budget , 16 January 1915)

And then came Christmas Day, that time of sharing pictures of wives and girlfriends with the foe and exchanging verses of Silent Night one with another; up to a point. It was also the day of Britains first air raid on Germany, where seaplanes did what they were able in stormy skies over Cuxhaven. The enemy were doing likewise over London Docks and the Medway towns, while those mines planted in the North Sea nine days earlier were blowing ships out of the water with distressing loss of life. Even on the Western Front, all was far from quiet in most areas: men were still fighting and dying; in some trenches, the enemy was passive, so the other side stayed passive, too; there was gardening to be done on no-mansland, burying bodies, clearing weapons and debris, and spasmodic local arrangements were made for this to be carried out by both sides without fear of aggression. Anything over and above this was the exception; so exceptional, in fact, that it is still recalled with awe to this day. The other fact everyone knows about it is that it never happened again.