Christmas Truce of 1914 Comes to Broadway
“Our
Friends the Enemy” hopes to rekindle a moment of faithful peace, in a world at
war
Pope Francis opened the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome
on Tuesday, initiating the Jubilee Year of Mercy. And on Wednesday, in New
York, the curtains will rise on an off-Broadway play in New York City
telling a tale of a fleeting moment of mercy in the midst of horror.
Our Friends the Enemy, a British play that
commemorates the First World War’s “Christmas Truce of 1914” makes its
American debut at New York City’s The Lion Theater on Dec. 9.
The Christmas Truce was a moment of shared humanity across enemy
lines in the European conflict of 100 years ago, but the spirit of feast was
quickly set aside and the mutual killing intensified until an armistice was
called five years later.
In this off-Broadway retelling, the audience is brought as close
to the fighting as the men of war were to one another. In one scene, the main
character, Private James Boyce, describes how the opposing trenches are
separated by a narrow strip of wasteland known as No-Man’s Land, snarled with
barbed wire and corpses. Boyce knows he is a grenade’s throw away from the
German troops fighting the British and their French allies.
Firsthand accounts of the soldiers gleaned from letters home to
their loved ones vary as to when the unofficial truce started. On one section
of the Western Front, British soldiers said they heard the Germans begin to
sing “Stille Nacht.” The British were familiar with the melody, but
initially, they did not understand the words. Soon, the British realized that
it was “Silent Night,” and all of their voices became one choral exchange,
singing hymns that celebrated the birth of Jesus.
Two of the producers of the play, Robert Carreon and David Adkin,
said the truce is what Christmas is all about.
“It’s not like they were singing ‘Jingle Bells,’” Carreon said.
“If you look at the lyrics in ‘Silent Night,’ they say everything about what
the Christmas spirit is.”
By some historians’ estimates, 100,000 troops, who were bent on
killing each other, put aside their weapons for a spontaneous Christmas truce.
“In the bleakest of times, in the midst of a world war, a
reverence for the human person shines through and is stronger than anything,”
Adkin said.
The peace, however, did not last. Pope Benedict XV called for a
universal cessation of hostilities, but it went unheeded by the power brokers.
The leadership on both sides were concerned that fraternization on this scale
was a dangerous threat to the war effort. Soon after Christmas, the combatants
used chemical weapons. The result was higher casualties and further
dehumanization of the enemy. By war’s end, 17 million soldiers and civilians
were dead.
If the soldiers involved in the truce had any say, they may have
all gone home.
George Goss writes from New York City.
