Tregua de Belén

We called it the leak. Not the trench, not the line, not any of the words the officers used. The leak. Because that’s what it was. A slow, constant seep of everything. Men, time, warmth, hope. The whole war was a hole in the bottom of the world and we were all just draining out.

I was eighteen years old and I had already learned that the dead don’t smell like anything you know. They smell like wet wool and old iron and something sweet underneath, like a flower that’s been left in a closed room too long. That’s the part nobody tells you. The sweetness. It gets in your nose and stays there, even when you’re eating, even when you’re trying to sleep. You taste the dead on your bread.

December 24, 1914. We’d been in the leak for six weeks. Six weeks of mud that sucked at your boots like it had opinions about where you should go. Six weeks of rats that had grown fat and bold, rats that would look at you from the firestep like they were taking inventory. Six weeks of the same three songs, the same four jokes, the same endless waiting for something to happen or nothing to happen, and you weren’t sure which was worse.

I was on my knees in the mud, trying to get a fire to catch under a tin of tea, when the singing started.

It came from the German line. Maybe two hundred yards away. Maybe less. The ground between us was a moonscape of craters and barbed wire, but sound travels funny in the cold. It skips over the mud like a flat stone on water. At first I thought it was the wind playing tricks. The wind had been doing that lately, howling through the broken trees like a man who’d lost something precious.

But this wasn’t wind. It was voices. Men’s voices. Rough and untrained and beautiful in a way that made my chest hurt.

“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht...”

I didn’t know the words. I knew what they were, though. Everyone knew that song. Even in this godforsaken corner of Belgium, even in the mud and the blood and the endless gray, that song was a rope thrown across a chasm.

“Alles schläft, einsam wacht...”

I stopped trying to light the fire. The tin of tea sat in my lap, growing cold. Around me, other men had stopped too. I saw Private Dawkins, who was from Birmingham and never stopped talking about his mother’s pies, frozen mid-stride with a sandbag in his hands. I saw Sergeant Morrison, who had a voice like gravel and a heart like a clenched fist, standing with his head tilted like he was listening for a distant artillery shell.

Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.

The German voices swelled and fell, imperfect and human. They stumbled on some of the notes. They held others too long. It was the most honest thing I’d heard since we left England.

And then, from somewhere to my left, a voice answered.

It was Welsh. I knew because I’d been listening to that same voice for six weeks, complaining about the weather and the food and the officers. Private Thomas Evans, a coal miner from the Rhondda Valley who could swear for three minutes without repeating himself. He was singing too. Not the same song. Something else. Something old and slow and sad.

“Yr wyf yn gweld o bell y ffordd...”

I didn’t know Welsh any more than I knew German. But I knew what he was doing. He was throwing the rope back.

Other voices joined him. Tentative at first, like men testing ice. Then stronger. We sang “Silent Night” in English, and they sang it in German, and for a few minutes the two songs ran side by side like parallel rivers, never touching but flowing in the same direction.

When the singing stopped, the silence was different. It wasn’t the empty silence of waiting for death. It was a held breath. A question.

I looked at Sergeant Morrison. He looked at me. His face was unreadable in the gray light, but his hands were shaking. I’d never seen his hands shake before.

“What happens now?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just stared at the German line, where shapes were beginning to move in the twilight.

I’m not going to pretend I understood what was happening. I was a boy from a village in Kent, a place where the biggest excitement was the annual harvest fair. I’d joined up because everyone else was joining up, because the posters said it would be over by Christmas, because the alternative was staying home and watching my father’s disappointment grow like a weed in the garden. I didn’t know anything about politics or empires or the intricate machinery of alliances that had ground the whole continent into dust.

All I knew was that the mud was cold and the dead were sweet and somewhere out there, men who had been trying to kill me an hour ago were singing about peace on earth.

That’s the thing about the truth. It doesn’t care if you’re ready for it.

The first figure appeared on the parapet of the German trench. A man, small and dark against the fading sky. He was holding something white. A piece of cloth. A handkerchief. It fluttered in the wind like a question mark.

“Don’t shoot,” Sergeant Morrison said. His voice cracked on the second word. He cleared his throat and said it again. “Don’t anybody shoot.”

We watched the German climb out of his trench. He stood on the edge of no man’s land, exposed and absurd, a target in any sane world. He took a step forward. Then another. His boots made sucking sounds in the mud.

From our line, a man climbed out too. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was just a shape, a silhouette against the gray. Then he turned and I saw it was Lieutenant Ainsworth, our commanding officer. The man who had ordered us to fix bayonets and charge across this same ground three days ago. The man who had watched eight of us fall and said nothing, just wrote the letters home with the same hand he used to light his cigarettes.

He was walking toward the German. No weapon. No flag. Just his hands open at his sides.

The two men met in the middle of no man’s land, in the space between craters, in the mud that had swallowed so many. They stood there for a long moment, looking at each other. Then the German said something. The lieutenant replied. They shook hands.

I heard someone start to cry. It might have been me.

More men climbed out of both trenches. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They came carrying nothing, not even their helmets. They walked across the ruined ground like men who had forgotten how to be afraid. Some of them were laughing. Some of them were weeping. Most of them were doing both.

I found myself moving before I decided to move. My legs carried me over the parapet, through the tangle of wire, across the craters. I stepped over a frozen body and didn’t look down. I kept my eyes on the men ahead of me, the Germans and the British, meeting in the middle like old friends who had been separated by a misunderstanding.

Up close, the Germans looked ordinary. That was the first shock. They were young and old, tall and short, dark-haired and fair. They had the same hollow cheeks, the same mud-caked uniforms, the same haunted eyes. One of them, a boy who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, was holding a photograph. He showed it to everyone who passed. A woman. A child. His family, I realized. He was showing us his family.

I didn’t have a photograph. I had a letter in my pocket, creased and smudged, that my mother had written before I left. I pulled it out and showed it to the nearest German. He couldn’t read English. I couldn’t read German. But he nodded and smiled and pointed at the letter, then at his heart, and I understood.

We stood there in the mud, strangers from different worlds, and we shared our families with each other.

Someone produced a bottle of schnapps. Someone else produced a flask of rum. The drinks went around in a circle, German and British hands passing them back and forth. I took a sip of the schnapps and it burned going down, a clean fire that cut through the cold. I passed it to the man next to me. He was a German corporal with a beard that needed trimming and eyes that looked too old for his face. He said something I didn’t understand. I said something he didn’t understand. We both laughed.

The laughter was strange. It had been so long since I’d heard it, since I’d felt it in my own chest. It came out rusty and awkward, like a machine that had been left in the rain. But it was real. It was the most real thing I’d felt in months.

A game of football started. I don’t know who suggested it or how they found a ball. But suddenly there were men running and shouting and kicking a lumpy sphere of leather across the frozen mud. The goals were marked by coats. The teams were mixed, German and British, no one keeping score. A German officer in a crisp uniform stood on the sidelines, shaking his head, but he was smiling. I saw Lieutenant Ainsworth laughing, actually laughing, his face red and his eyes wet.

I didn’t play. I sat on an ammunition crate that someone had dragged out and watched. A German sat down next to me. He was older, maybe forty, with gray in his hair and a scar running from his eyebrow to his jaw. He offered me a cigarette. I took it. We smoked in silence, watching the football game, watching the men who had been trying to kill each other now trying to score goals.

“This is crazy,” I said.

He didn’t understand the words, but he understood the tone. He nodded. He pointed at the sky, which was starting to darken, and then at the ground, and then at the men playing football.

“Krieg,” he said. Then he shook his head. “Nicht heute.”

I didn’t know what he meant. But I felt it. Not today. The war could have tomorrow. It could have next week. It could have all the years stretching ahead, all the blood and mud and letters home. But not today. Today belonged to something else.

We sat there until the game ended, which it did when the ball fell apart and no one could find a replacement. The men drifted back to the center of no man’s land, where someone had started a fire in a shell crater. They gathered around it, British and German, sharing food and drink and stories that no one could fully understand but everyone felt.

A German stood up and started singing again. This time it was a different song, something lively and rhythmic. The other Germans joined in, clapping and stamping their feet. The British watched, then started clapping along. Someone produced a harmonica. Someone else produced a tin whistle. The music rose into the night, a crazy, beautiful noise that had no business being in that place.

I looked up at the sky. The stars were coming out, cold and bright, the same stars that had been there before the war, the same stars that would be there after. I thought about my mother, sitting in our kitchen in Kent, probably crying. I thought about my father, who had told me I was doing the right thing, that I was being a man. I thought about the eight men who had died three days ago, whose bodies were still out there somewhere, frozen in the mud.

I thought about Jesus.

I’m not a religious man. I never have been. But sitting there in the dark, surrounded by enemies who had become friends, surrounded by music and laughter and the impossible grace of the moment, I understood something. I understood that the birth we were supposed to be celebrating wasn’t about angels or shepherds or a star in the east. It was about this. This crazy, foolish, impossible thing. This refusal to let the darkness have the last word.

A German boy came and sat next to me. He was the one with the photograph, the one who had shown it to everyone. He pointed at me, then at himself, then at the sky.

“Christus,” he said.

I nodded. “Jesus.”

He smiled. He had a gap between his front teeth and his eyes were too bright. He took my hand and held it. His fingers were cold and rough, a worker’s hands, hands that had dug trenches and carried ammunition and done a thousand things they were never meant to do.

“Frieden,” he said.

I didn’t know the word. But I knew what it meant. I squeezed his hand and he squeezed back.

We sat like that for a long time, holding hands in the dark, while the music played and the fire crackled and the stars spun slowly overhead. I thought about what would happen tomorrow. The officers would come back. The orders would arrive. The war would resume. We would go back to our trenches and they would go back to theirs and we would try to kill each other again.

But not tonight. Tonight we were just men. Sons and brothers and fathers. Men who sang and laughed and cried and held each other’s hands in the dark.

The German boy let go of my hand. He stood up and stretched. He said something I didn’t understand, but his tone was gentle, almost apologetic. He pointed toward the German line. Time to go back.

I stood up too. The fire had died down to embers. The music had stopped. Men were embracing, shaking hands, patting each other on the back. I saw Sergeant Morrison crying, actually crying, tears running down his face and disappearing into his beard. I saw Lieutenant Ainsworth saluting a German officer, a gesture of respect that would have been unthinkable twelve hours ago.

I walked back to my trench. The mud sucked at my boots. The cold bit through my coat. But I felt warm. I felt alive. I felt like I had touched something real, something that all the guns and all the orders and all the empires in the world couldn’t touch.

Before I climbed down, I turned and looked back. The German boy was standing on the edge of his trench, watching me. He raised his hand. I raised mine.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

He didn’t understand. But he smiled anyway.

“Frohe Weihnachten,” he said.

I climbed down into the leak. The mud was cold. The rats were waiting. The war would be waiting too, patient and hungry, ready to swallow us all.

But for one night, we had beaten it. For one night, we had remembered who we were.

I lay down in my corner of the trench and closed my eyes. I could still hear the singing, echoing in my head. I could still feel the pressure of the German boy’s hand in mine. I could still taste the schnapps, the rum, the impossible sweetness of peace.

The dead were still out there. The war was still out there. But so was the light. So was the hope. So was the crazy, stubborn, foolish belief that something better was possible.

I fell asleep smiling. I hadn’t smiled in six weeks.

In the morning, the Germans were gone. Back in their trench. Back in their war. The football was a lump of frozen leather in the mud. The fire was cold ash. The music was a memory.

But the handshake. The songs. The boy with the photograph. The old man with the scar. The laughter. The tears. The impossible, beautiful grace of men who had chosen peace over war, even for a night.

That stayed.

I don’t know what happened to any of them. I don’t know if the boy with the photograph survived the war. I don’t know if the old man with the scar made it home. I don’t know if the German officer who saluted Lieutenant Ainsworth lived to see another Christmas.

But I know that for one night, we were not enemies. We were not soldiers. We were not cogs in a machine of destruction.

We were human.

And that, I think, is what Jesus was trying to tell us. That underneath all the uniforms and all the flags and all the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and who we hate, we are the same. We are all children of the same mud, the same stars, the same desperate hope.

We are all waiting for the same peace.

I’m an old man now. I’ve lived a long life. I’ve seen wars come and go, empires rise and fall. I’ve buried friends and enemies and everyone in between. But I’ve never forgotten that night. I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to hold a stranger’s hand in the dark and know, with absolute certainty, that we were brothers.

The world doesn’t talk about that night much. It doesn’t fit the story we want to tell about war. It doesn’t fit the narrative of hatred and division that keeps the machinery running. But it happened. I was there. I saw it.

And I believe, with all my heart, that it can happen again.

Not tomorrow, maybe. Not next year. But someday. When we’re tired enough of the killing. When we’ve had enough of the mud and the blood and the sweetness of the dead. When we remember that the only thing that matters, the only thing that has ever mattered, is the hand reaching out in the dark.

The hand that says: Not today. Today we are human.

Today we are at peace.