12 Days of Ramenzo

soldier sociability

December 25, 1914

The guns have been silent for a whole day, now, but I can still hear their echoes. Every moment feels like a bated breath, waiting for another gunshot. But the artillery goes unarmed.

We set candles on the trenches and sang carols, and to our surprise, the enemy joined us in song. Some of us dared to climb the trenches, but no one was shot down. Rather, the Brits joined us midway, as if forgetting we the adversary, proceeded to spend time with us in good nature.

I think we're all sick and tired of this war. It's drawn out five months now and I've seen more death than I'd have ever fathomed in a whole lifetime, let alone less than twenty years. We buried the corpses side by side - they let us cross over to gather our dead, and vice versa. They gave us gifts, too, small trinkets and alcohol.

There was a boy among them - I don't know how he made it onto the battlefield. Too young, too fragile - hardly a child. He was singing with his comrades-in-arms, though when I approached him, he went silent, and fixed me with a piercing gaze that defied his youthful features. There was a blazing fire in those eyes, and I would have been nearly convinced that he hated me simply for being German, that he evaded enlistment requirements only to brutally defeat his enemy, but he did not rebuke me when I offered him a drink.

He had dark hair and fierce eyes, a thin face with lips pressed together in displeasure. He spoke coldly, foreign English words I didn't understand. But he took the small piece of bread I painstakingly procured from the supplies, and hesitantly accepted the single souvenir I found in my pocket. He did not give any word of thanks as he took it, gripping it securely in his hand as though someone were threatening to take it away. I offered him a drink and he took just one swig of the alcohol before he was on the ground, spitting it out.

Young and weak - I don't know how he's survived till now. Stronger men have succumbed to the festering trenches, and I've heard it's even worse on the other side. He's a remarkable exception, one that defied all odds in spite of his fragile frame. And yet he quivered like a leaf in the winter cold. There was almost something in the way he looked at me that challenged me, as if daring me to judge him before proving me wrong.

Though he didn't join us in the football match that ensued between us and the enemy.

Can you imagine, a German playing a match of football with a Brit on a battlefield over the graves of a hundred fallen men? And the abject lack of hesitation between them as they kick rolled up papers across the frozen ground, laughing and joking in their own languages as if forgetting it was war at all. They shake hands and embrace like kinsmen, not a tension or fleeting worry of a stab in the back.

He sat there, spectating the match, simply staring on as he traced the bottlecap in his hand. I don't know what was on his mind. The war, family, his dead comrades. Those were all thoughts we shared. Home, here, and the distance between.

A flickering emptiness in his eyes, replaced immediately by fire the moment I dared to sit down next to him.

He proceeded to mutter at me words I simply did not understand, and I laughed and almost slapped his back, too, out of good nature. But he fixed me with a glare that inspired a unique fear in me that I had not felt since I was a boy running from Mama's wooden spoon.

His comrade brought out a pipe and one of our soldiers had bartered him tobacco. He offered me a smoke, and then the Brit, and he took it without wheezing. He must have noted my surprise, and I dare say he smiled, then. Not a friendly smile, but a smile.

And how we all sang, together, in different tongues indecipherable to one another, but united in song. It must have been a fever dream, enemies united in brotherhood for but a number of hours.

The sun has set, since then, and I write this by the flame of a dying candle. They speak of resuming battle tomorrow. Soon the air will be filled with the sounds of gunfire and death again. It's haunting, the way we can join in brotherhood for a single day, then return to opposite sides and engage once again in bloodshed. They're only human, as are we. Those same faces we saw on the field presently hide in fetid trenches, waiting on our death and defeat.

And the British boy, he'll be in his own trench again, now, unlikely asleep. I'm certain I won't see him again; not in this life. I still don't know his name.

But I will never forget him.

Merry Christmas,

Ramen

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The Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front of the First World War around Christmas 1914.