We get advance glimmers of the kingdom of God now and then. One happened in 1914, during WW I on a European battlefield. On Christmas Eve, German troops began to put up small Christmas trees, lit with candles, outside their trenches, and they sang Christmas carols.
From the other side of the “no man’s land,” British and French troops responded with carols of their own. Soon the German soldiers proposed a Christmas truce, and the British and French units agreed. This was nothing formal, nothing worked out by generals, just a spontaneous concurrence between common soldiers in the front-line trenches. Handmade signs popped up with messages like, “You no fight, we no fight” and “Merry Christmas.”
Soon soldiers from both sides left their trenches and shook hands. Next, they began to bury their dead who had been lying unreachable in no man’s land. Then they even began to share gifts — foodstuffs that had been sent to the front lines for the holiday. In some sectors, the two sides put down their rifles and played soccer.
Of course, it couldn’t last beyond a couple of days. The generals didn’t like it, and they soon commanded the troops to began firing at each other again. For a few days, both sets of troops tried to keep the spirit of peace going, by firing into the air instead of at each other, but the generals soon made them aim.
But still, the truce happened, inspired by Christmas. And it tells us that peace on earth is not an impossible dream, just a difficult one.
And there’s one more part of this story: As the troops from the German side in one section of the line were trying to figure out how to communicate about the gift exchange across the no man's land, the solution they hit upon was this: They used a specially trained messenger to carry the proposal to the enemy.
Who was this ad hoc ambassador of peace? We don’t know his name, but we’re pretty sure about what division he belonged to. He was a four-legged member of the canine corps. —Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night: The Remarkable 1914 Christmas Truce, (Free Press, 2001).
