What, No Christmas Adverts About The Trenches In 1915?

Sainsbury’s 2014 Christmas advert based on the first noel in the Flanders trenches has not been repeated this year despite the outrageous success it registered in 2014. This year, it’s ‘let’s ignore history and get back to basics’. Marks and Spencer’s Art of Christmas advert celebrates middle-class excess; John Lewis has produced a heart-tugging mini-story with a gift-ridden solution to loneliness. Asda promises glitter and traditional nonsense, Lidl offers a School of Christmas and Waitrose jazzes up Heston Blumethal. [1] More pertinently, Sainsbury’s has abandoned the trenches in favour of a feline children’s book character called Mog. [2] The British Expeditionary Force has served its commercial purpose and can once more fade into history.

The reason for the short lived homage to the Western Front will not be analysed in our blind and biased media. Memories of Christmas 1915 are to be buried with the hundreds of thousands already sacrificed in a miserable war of attrition that raged across Europe in December of that fateful year.

Of course the Northcliffe press did their best to minimise the disaster. On Christmas Eve they rejoiced that the Royal Family would again be at Sandringham and soldiers on leave were to be found pushing ‘through civilian crowds in cheerful groups, happy in their holiday’. [3] Without the slightest trace of sarcasm the Times decided that ‘The merriest centres of entertainment in the country will be the place where the troops of the new armies are at present stationed, for it is a paradox of war that most men throw off care when they put on uniform’. Finally, in order to stress the normality of Christmas in Blighty, it reported that the display of poultry at Smithfield was a wondrous sight … with the supplies of British and Irish Turkeys described as plentiful. With just a bit of imaginative manipulation, Sainsbury’s might have made something of this. British and Irish turkeys, indeed.

The reality was frightening. In France the murderous fighting in the Vosges mountains of Alsace gave rise to claims from both sides that they possessed the strategic ridge which had been the object of so many assaults over 1915. The French attacked the summit of the Hartmannsweilerkopf from December 21-23 [4] with no thought of a seasonal peace. On Christmas Eve an official message from Berlin claimed that ‘we have completely recaptured Hartmannsweilerkopf’, while on Christmas Day a French communique insisted that the Germans had launched a violent attack … but had been everywhere repulsed.’ [5]

Flanders had already descended into a quagmire ill-fitted for celebration of humanity and hope. There were no exchanges of carols or gifts between the brotherhood of man. On Christmas Eve 1915, the order was clearly understood. ‘Our men will have no fraternising tomorrow.’ [6] The British Commanders ensured that there would not be a repeat of the dangerous nonsense of the previous year. As the Times correspondent wrote: ‘Christmas Day began with rain … the aqueous roads were crowded with the traffic of war. Screened by shrubbery, I began my Christmas in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud too late …’ He found the salvos from British Howitzers roaring methodically from their lairs, screaming across no-man’s land towards enemy positions,‘exhilarating’. [7] Orders from the top brass ensured that there would be footballing rematches in 1915.

In an unusually frank and compassionate ending, the Times correspondent described a view which Sainsbury’s would never have attempted to commercialise. ‘We splashed and squeezed about between those stacks of hard grey bags, and ooze was everywhere, repulsive to touch and to smell. Within dark recesses of the bags I saw recumbent figures covered with new mud, fast asleep; others jammed themselves against the muck to allow us to pass as cleanly as possible … Through the indirect eye of a cautious mirror I could make out beyond the still land, ominous in its astonishing quietude, with some fantastic ruins beyond, through which showed the forlorn light of this Christmas Day.’ [8] Not the cosy image that sells product, I’m afraid.

The disaster of the Dardanelles also hung over the British Empire towards the final months of 1915 awaiting the unkind apportioning of blame. In November, with the Russians no longer a threat to Constantinople, Kitchener gave the order to abandon Gallipoli and 93,000 troops, 200 guns and more than 5,000 animals had to be spirited away from the vulnerable shores of that ill-judged target. Another sacrifice in a miserable litany of sacrifice. [9] The evacuated Australian troops celebrated their salvation that Christmas on the island of Lemnos, far from home. One miserable irony marred their brave attempt to find solace in the seasonal act of giving and receiving.

Each man was presented with a ‘Christmas Billy’ but the picture on its exterior showed a Kangaroo on the map of Gallipoli, with his tail knocking a Turk into the sea. The words beneath said THIS BIT OF THE WORLD BELONGS TO ME. Not so, though those they left behind might have made such a claim. [10] To make such misery even worse, the entire Gallipoli strategy had been a ploy to assuage the Russians and keep them in the war. [11] The loss of tens of thousands of Australian, New Zealand, Irish, French and British troops had been but the residual cost of a greater lie. Pity the dead, but even more, the widows and families torn asunder by a prolonged war.

One particular voice from the front deserves our attention. Ben Keeling, (Frederick Hillersdon Keeling) a militant socialist in his undergraduate days at Cambridge and disciple of George Bernard Shaw wrote insightful letters to friends and family from the western front. [12] These told a far different tale from the usual tripe dished out by the propaganda machines like Northcliffe’s newspapers. Keeling was a patriot, devastated by Britain’s ‘madness’ to side with France and Russia against Germany. He had no personal quarrel with Germany and ‘firmly believed that Russia had provoked the war … These accursed barbarians, Jew-baiters and upholders of gross medieval Christianity … [Russians] may stand for culture but are the enemies of civilisation.’ [13] Wait a minute. Wasn’t Britain and the Empire fighting to save Civilisation? Isn’t this the diatribe still gushing from the mouths of contemporary warmongers and First World War co-celebrants?

At Christmas 1915 Ben Keeling told it as it was in a letter to his friend R C K Ensor [14] ‘We are in a camp of tents with a very few mud huts. By the way the Chronicle published some time ago some rot from some blithering correspondent who, I suppose, drives about in GHQ motor-cars and thinks it is a wonderful thing to come under shell-fire, to the effect that all the troops are comfortably housed for the winter in nice warm huts. That sort of thing makes men swear out here. … It is a bloody shame to deceive the public and say we are in comfortable huts when we aren’t. Till the autumn we hadn’t even got tents, but generally just our waterproof sheets as roofs for bivvy shelters … In our brigade a man is damned lucky if he gets a dozen hour’s sleep in three days in the trenches … And then people think that it is mud and wet we mind; that is nothing, absolutely nothing compared with the nerve-wracking hell of bombardment.’ [15]

Consider his words. Life at the Front at Christmas 1915 was barely tolerable, but the stories published back home devised images of comfort and warmth. This was no misrepresentation; it was a damned lie. It was a myth concocted to assure the public that all was well and the troops were content in their safe sanctuaries. And it was a lie promulgated from the pulpit. The great prelates of England struggled with the concept of Peace on Earth, interpreting the message of Christmas 1915 as a reinforcement of the propaganda about righteousness, honour and truth. The Archbishop of Canterbury peddled the promise that victory would make ‘no such fighting either necessary or possible in years to come.’ [16] A century on such words must be embarrassing; best not to ponder that Christmas message as we lay plans to rip Syria apart at Christmas 2015.

Dean Inge of St Paul’s, the Church of England’s personal military recruiter rallied his congregation with a timely reminder of the duty of sacrifice, as in – other people being sacrificed. The Church did not approve of Chaplains at the front. [17] With the certainty of a race-patriot he extolled the qualities of ‘our race at its best’ and took a swipe at the militant unions and ‘cliques, factions and classes’ who made plots against public order. Bishop Inge did not clarify whether he meant the engineering strikes, the rent strikes which protested against mothers and their children being thrown onto the streets while their men folk fought in the trenches, [18] or the conscientious objectors.

Bearing all this in mind, we can appreciate why Sainsbury’s have not turned to Christmas 1915 in their latest advert. Images of hellish bombardment, physical and mental deprivation or soldiers cursing those who deliberately misrepresented their plight will not sell the merchandise they so desperately need to protect their market share. So it’s back to Christmas schmaltz. Mog might just prove to be a winner. Simple economics, you see. Last years’s romanticising of the unofficial Christmas ‘truce’, was simple economics, not patriotism. It was made for profit, as was the miserably prolonged first world war.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11970490/Watch-Waitrose-Christmas-advert-2015-why-emotion-makes-the-tills-ring.html
[2] http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Watch-Sainsbury-s-just-beaten-John-Lewis-battle/story-28179081-detail/story.html
[3] The Times, Friday 24 December 1915, p. 3.
[4] John Howard Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History p. 75.
[5] http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/59981658
[6] The Times, 27 December 1915, p. 7.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com Gallipoli Blogs 1-19 posted from 4/2/2015 to 24/4/2015
[10] http://www.gallipoli.gov.au/anzac-timeline/events-of-the-gallipoli-campaign/november-december-1915.php
[11] Gallipoli, The Untold Story, in New Dawn, No. 149, March-April 2015.
[12] F.H. Keeling, The Keeling Letters and Recollections, with forward by H.G. Wells, https://archive.org/details/keelinglettersre00keeliala
[13] Ibid. p. 181.
[14] Robert Ensor worked for the Daily Chronicle during the war and was later commissioned to write a volume of the Oxford History of England covering 1870-1914.
[15] Keeling, The Keeling Letters and Recollections, pp. 258-9.
[16] The Times, 27 December 1915, p.10.
[17] firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com The Unholy Spirit, Blog posted 24/9/2014
[18] The Glasgow Rent Strikes of 1915 were an embarrassment to Asquith’s Liberal government
[https://remembermarybarbour.wordpress.com/mary-barbour-rent-strike-1915/] as were the demands from unions involved in Munitions. The prime minister had to send Lloyd George in person to try to calm the agitation amongst engineers and munitions workers on Christmas Day 1915.†

A Seasonal Blog: The Christmas Truth, 1914

Readers who do not live in the UK might want to look at the supermarket-chain Sainsbury’s Christmas advert before reading this blog. It can be viewed here.

The current Sainsbury’s Christmas advert offers the perfect example of a commercial rewriting of history to present beautifully crafted film as if it was historical truth. Done in the best of taste, with the blessing of the Royal British Legion, Sainsbury’s message is about gift giving in the expectation of an increased market share for the company. It is sentimental and sugary-sweet. The trenches are deep and crisp and even seem to have nicely spaced-out lamps. Handsome soldiers with perfect teeth smile through comfortable clean clothes and heavy overcoats as they gingerly extend their hands in friendship towards the enemy. There is an overwhelming sense of humanity and a hint that the ordinary soldier saw no point in the carnage that had already been raging for four bloody months. No evil in sight; it is Disney World history.

As both sides settled into the stalemate of that first winter campaign, soldiers faced long, wet, dark days with daily artillery fire to deepen depression. Honour and glory were stuck in the oozing mud, and legs rotted into black with false frostbite ‘until many of them were carried away with bronchitis and pneumonia’. These very decent men from good clean homes struggled relentlessly against the lice and vermin that invaded their privacy. New enemies with strange names like cerebo-spinal meningitis sent shudders down the line, and a sense of hopelessness replaced the early expectation of a quick victory. [1] Pity then, that the Sainsbury’s version is so clean-cut and sterilised with no sense of hardship and squalor.

Little wonder that a spirit of goodwill descended over the trenches with the Christmas mists in Flanders as a truce of sorts broke out along sections of the front line not far from Ypres. (Tour guides take visitors to impromptu road-side memorials every day) In some parts it lasted for more than twenty-four hours; not so in others. The cease-fire was not continuously observed, but despite the fact that any man who first put his head above the parapet was taking a risk, groups of officers and men from both sides cautiously stepped out of their trenches and met an enemy with whom they shared common ground.

Letters sent from the front and published in the Times around New Year, recorded the amazement of British officers, men from the Royal Field Artillery, the Leicestershire Regiment, the London Rifle Brigade, as well as Scottish, Irish and Welsh regiments, that this spirit of cautious trust, blossomed, albeit briefly, into a temporary peace. A Major in the Leicesters found the Germans ‘jolly cheery fellows for the most part, and it seems so silly under these circumstances to be fighting them.’ [2] Men were later imprisoned for such treacherous sentiments. An officer from the Rifle Brigade was astounded to find the German trenches on Christmas Eve bedecked with lanterns looking like ‘The Thames on Henley Regatta Night,’ and thought that three quarters of the German army were ‘very young youths’.

An Army Medical Corps Major wrote of the ‘sing-songs’ which ended with both sides rendering ‘God Save The King’, and a football match which ‘the Saxons’ (Germans) won 2-1. Clearly, both sides enjoyed the universal appeal of football under impossible conditions. ‘We had an inter-platoon game of football in the afternoon, a cap-comforter stuffed with straw for the ball, much to the Saxons’ amusement.’ [3] The Sainsbury’s advert caught that part of the story well. At least four football ‘matches’ were reportedly played between British and German troops, and the Glasgow News reported a 4-1 victory for the Argylls. [4] But look at the vocabulary. These Germans weren’t ‘Huns’, they were ‘Saxons’, men who had similar historical family roots, including of course, the King and the Kaiser.

The satyrical magic of Joan Littlewood’s magnificent Oh! What A Lovely War, was best caught towards the end of the football game when the ‘match’ was interrupted by the sound of heavy guns symbolising an end to the truce. The awkwardness was broken by a small Scotsman who rasped, “That’s the bloody English”, with an inferred responsibility which was definitely unfair. But this truth is clear. British Military Headquarters issued orders forbidding any ‘truce’ with the enemy. What happened was illegal and dangerous in the minds of the warmongers. This is the second major failure in Sainsbury’s advert. It fails to capture any sense of disobedience, of a solidarity between men from both sides which defied clearly expressed orders.

The British Military Commanders, and those who operated above them, gave strict instructions that there would not be ‘anything of the nature of a truce’. All ranks were reminded that ‘war is war, and the Germans invariably have some sinister motives in all they do, especially under the guise of a gush of friendly sentiment.’ This order was issued on 21 December from British Headquarters and reported abroad by Reuters. The Generals could see the danger. If men laid down their weapons all along the western front, the war would collapse. Had it grown to a mutiny, governments would have fallen. Profits would have plummeted. That was the backdrop on which Sainsbury’s had no wish to focus attention.

Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, was renowned as a journalist who told it as it was. He recorded the full horror of the first world war and faced the wrath of arrogant Generals who arrested him four times and attempted repeatedly to censor his reports. He fought his own battle against the military brass whom he famously described as having ‘the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam.’ Gibbs saw that British soldiers held no great bitterness against the Germans, trapped like themselves in trenches barely a hundred yards away; an enemy that was enduring the same misery during that winter of 1914. In his wonderfully observed record, The War Dispatches, Gibbs wrote warmly about the sense of comradeship amongst men who did not want to kill each other but lived under the spell of ‘high distant Powers who had agreed this warfare’. They were caught in someone else’s war, sacrificed like gladiators in the Roman amphitheatres who had to kill or be killed by their owners. They were all victims; all expendable. At that moment in time these British and German men, standing together in the mists of Flanders, took photographs, arm in arm, exchanged cigarettes, sang …and cursed the war.

The Times of 23 December 1914 painted a thoroughly positive, nearly joyous, account of Christmas plans at the front. How the men who stayed at home must have cursed their luck that they were not in Flanders. Army units were reported to be making their own arrangements on a very extensive scale. One corps was said to have ordered 700 chickens from Paris and proposed to serve every man with half a chicken ‘ hot from the field kitchens’. What luxury.

‘The authorities’ were reported to have arranged for sufficient plum puddings for every man to have half a pudding to himself. Whether everyone was so fortunate, we do not know, but one letter home did mention ‘tinned plumb pudding sent from Uncle Jed’. According to The Times, supplies from home of these seasonal luxuries were so colossal that workers in the Field Post Office were buried chin-deep in parcels. [5] Such propaganda was, of course, for home consumption, but we are left with the nagging feeling that Sainsbury’s may well have missed a trick in not promoting sales of chicken and plum pudding.

And what of the Germans? At this early stage of the war the ‘Boches’ were depicted by the British propaganda machine as spiteful, vindictive and mean. The Times dismissed stories about German difficulties in providing sufficient Christmas rations for their soldiers, but boasted that ‘it is quite safe to say that they will fare very much more frugally than our own men.’ The report warned that British soldiers should take great care because the Germans would want to spoil ‘the other fellow’s enjoyment’ by strafing the trenches. Such behaviour, they described as ‘a good sound, Hunnish axiom’.  To the ranks of the elite the enemy were ‘Huns’; in the  ranks of ordinary men, they were ‘Saxons’. An interesting divide indeed.

What the middle-classes read in the comfort of their warm coal-fired homes was as far from reality as possible. The lads were to be served hot christmas fare including half a chicken and plum pudding. Really? The stale biscuit which Sainsbury’s went to commendable lengths to reproduce for their advert, was the more likely fare for the ordinary soldier, though in that first Christmas of the war there was more to go round. The Christmas message from the Anglican pulpits of christian justification struggled to marry the concept of peace and the raging war. Hensley Henson, the Dean of Durham preached proudly that ‘the battlefield became radiant with moral witness when its carnage was transfigured by unselfish devotion and its anguish was mitigated by ministries of love’ [6] Such meaningless nonsense may have sounded fine in the hallowed halls of Durham, but it bore no semblance to the reality of the trenches.

In all the nonsense of this propaganda, the final line in The Times article of 23rd December stung like the bitter poison of a profound lie. According to their report, the order to avoid fraternising with the enemy was greeted with ‘unanimous and cordial approval in our trenches’. It was not. Nor did the spirit of the ‘Christmas Truce’ wither in the days that followed. Philip Gibbs recognised that although ‘it became so apparent that army orders had to be issued stopping such truces’ they were not always obeyed. Local truces, and what he described as ‘secret treaties’, were agreed by which soldiers agreed to keep up the appearance of constantly shooting at each other without actually targeting the enemy. It could not last. Units were changed. New officers came up the line.

And so the first Christmas and New Year of the war passed into history and the mythology of times rewritten. Men were once again coerced to massacre each other by powers beyond their ken.

Philip Gibbs was one of a dying breed of investigative journalists who refused to buckle to officialdom. He was deported back to Britain by the angry military authorities for his fearless reports in 1914, but, supported by his newspaper, he returned in 1915 as one of the five official war correspondents attached to the British Expeditionary Force. His final words on this period in history remain profoundly sad. ‘The winter passed in one long wet agony, in one great bog of misery.’ [p.83]

The Sainsbury’s advert sadly misses the point. In the filthy inhumanity of trench warfare decent men wanted peace. They wanted the war to stop. They wanted to go home. At the same time the British public were fed propaganda to sustain an appetite for prolonging the ‘just’ war. Powers that could not be challenged ordained it so. Sainsbury’s Christmas 1914 advert projects the sterilised image which official histories want us to believe. No attempt has been made to analyse why this happened; why brave men on both sides of the divide were sacrificed.

Be assured, there will be no Christmas 2015 advert in similar vein. The High Command on both sides made sure in 1915 that every soldier knew the severe cost of fraternising with the enemy.

[1] Philip Gibbs, The War Dispatches, p. 81.
[2] The Times, 2 January, 1915, p. 3.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Bob Holman, The Sunday Herald, 31, November, 2013, pp. 26-28.
[5] The Times, 23 December 1914, p. 7.
[6] The Times, 26 December 1914, p. 3.
[7] Philip Gibbs, The War Dispatches, p. 83.