December 25,1914

I went to watch a movie last Sunday and I watched the movie, “Merry Christmas”. It was an emotional movie based on a true and actual event during World War I. I read the story something like 5 – 7 years ago in a trivia box inside the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The story goes like this, on Christmas Eve, December 24,1914, the Germans, the French, and the British (which according to the movie are Scots) fought to a stalemate on a particular frontline. Battles then are hardly decisive due to the development of the trench warfare, wherein troops dug up a trench and connected it through an underground tunnel networks and infantry with fast clip rifles settle in and shoots the enemy. Tanks weren’t “invented” yet back then and mass cavalry charges (similar to the ones you see in LOTR) become a fool’s death charge because of the “fast” clicking rifles (if you remember watching any Napoleonic army fight scenes or even American Revolution or Civil War movies, rifles are much “slower” back then and the mass cavalry charge is still considered the decisive advantage in warfare). Hence, battles are fought long and boring with massive losses of life on both sides foolish enough to mount a charge. Anyway, it is this backdrop that the story came to being. After fighting for something like 3 years, troops morale are down, soldiers are weary and very disillusioned. On that fateful evening, the Scots missing home began singing Christmas carols out loud and generally, trying to do some merry – making after all, it’s Christmas. The Germans on the other side heard the heartfelt song and missing home nonetheless, began to also sing their own Christmas carol. Soon enough, both sides began singing carols and as the story goes, both sides declared truce and even held a soccer match until January of the following year. Well, that’s the story I’ve read in the Inquirer. The movie’s story line is much more complete, detailed, and developed as well (go watch if you want to “discover” the details). Anyway, I was particularly “drawn” into a scene in the movie. The troops from both sides couldn’t hold back their emotions after singing the carols that they decided to cross the line and meet up in the middle of what was once the battlefield. I couldn’t simply fathom how the soldiers would feel when they first “see” the face of a faceless enemy (they all hide behind the trenches remember?), the murderers of their father, their brothers, their sons, their friends, and their comrades. Now, they come face to face, no longer an enemy? These soldiers exchange liquors and cigarettes and share the Christmas meals just like what friends do. They even held mass together. Ironic isn’t it and life seems to be full of it. And there, friendship grew in the strangest of places. Soon, both sides exchange their POWs and were allowed to bury their dead without impediment. Before long, both sides were warning each other of the impending bombardments from their respective sides and each offers the other temporary shelter against such attacks. Words about what happen soon reach the ears of the high command, and each side suffer a disgraceful and harrowing fate. The Scots were disbanded and disgraced while the French were reprimanded and sent to a “quiet” sector. The poor Germans were sent to the Russian front to die an “honorable death”, an euphemism for being sent to the battlefield as cannon fodders. Sad and devastating, maybe their fate, their reputation was even more savaged! Public opinions on both sides branded them as cavorting with the enemy, a classic act of a traitor. How could the French party with the occupiers of their country, for Alsacae – Lorraine was occupied by the Germans more then 50 years ago before the outbreak of the war? How could the Germans trust the French for they have signed pacts with their enemies, the Russians and have geographically encircled them, threatening their very existence? They simply cannot. Fast forward a century later, here I am among many who’ve watched the movie and have nothing but pity to those “foot soldiers”, a mere pawn in the struggle of their megalomaniac rulers, who sip champagne in the headquarters whilst they die in the field. If they have indeed commit any wrong at all, it is because they are human, disillusioned and weary of war. However, history isn’t always kind to these people as I mentioned, during that time they are traitors and much more so by the time of WWII. Now, they aren’t? History is not what it seems for those who are too naïve to understand. History is not the “faithful” retelling of the story past rather it is the biased propaganda of those who controlled the right to interpret history. Furthermore, history is the interpretation of the past in the present limelight. What was a victory would be painted as a massacre in a century from now and a madman who murders by the millions would be hailed as a legendary military genius. For what is the difference of Napoleon the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great with Hitler? (FYI, I DON’T IMMORATLIZE HITLER BECAUSE HE IS A MONSTER BY ALL STANDARDS, ANCIENT AND MODERN!!!) All of them commit brutal murders and they are all conquerors. Funny, but isn’t history supposed to be the truth about what has happened? Why then people “worship” conquerors and abhor “cowards”? Perhaps, it is because war is particularly glorious to those who haven’t seen the gory of it. It takes a few to start a war and carry it and would take many to fight a war and sustain it and much, much more would have to suffer and die to end a war. There are times that as a historian and a strategist, I could easily understand the “necessity” of war but as a human being, I cannot but simply abhor it and it is for this reason that one could always identify with the soldiers depicted in the movie and lament their fate. I remember a poem that I’d recited in class during my college days, one that I think is apt and fitting description of the movie. Indeed as the poem ends, there are so many “disturbing” questions about man’s behavior in history, this one in particular but no one seemed care to answer it.

QUESTIONS FROM A WORKER WHO READS
By Bertolt Brecht
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of the kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold – glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is filled with triumphant arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did Caesar triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beats the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the second won the Seven Years’ War. Who
Else won?

In every page a victory,
Who cooked the feast for the victor?
Every ten years another great man,
Who paid the bill?

So many reports,
So many questions.