Silent Night: Keylor on Christmas Truce
The famous “Christmas Truce” of Dec. 24, 1914 is almost as well-known as the Great War whose inexorable march it interrupted. This year, as the world remembers the 100th anniversary of that fateful night, William Keylor, professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, critically examines the history and meaning of the Christmas Truce.
Keylor spoke to The Conversation on Dec. 23, after British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s released an advertisement dramatizing the event that drew sharp criticism for both its commercialization and its historical inaccuracy.
Said Keylor in his article:
On Christmas Eve both sides erected Christmas trees on the parapets of their trenches and began to sing Christmas carols. On Christmas Day soldiers from both sides climbed out of the trenches and advanced into No Man’s Land, where they exchanged treats and holiday good wishes and arranged for the burial of dead comrades caught between the two lines. Contrary to the version put forward by Sainsbury’s, it was actually German soldiers that made the first move, with the British soon following. And historians dispute whether there was in fact a football match.
You can read the entire article here.
William R. Keylor is the author of Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession(1975); Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979); The Twentieth-Century World and Beyond: An International History since 1900 (6th rev. ed., 2011); The Legacy of The Great War: Peacemaking 1919 (1997), edited with an introduction; Encyclopedia of the Modern World, (2006), editor; and A World of Nations: The International Order Since 1945 (Second Edition, 2008); as well as dozens of articles in scholarly journals and book chapters on twentieth-century history.