Two Christmas Mornings of the Great War, by Captain Wilfrid Ewart
Two Christmas Mornings of the Great War, by Captain Wilfrid Ewart
Of the second of the two episodes graphically set forth in this article, Captain Ewart was himself an eye-witness; the account of the first is taken from letters addressed to the author by the late Captain Sir Edward Hulse, Bart., of the Scots Guards
It is related in Sir William Napier’s Peninsular War, and has been handed down through successive generations, how during the bitterest periods of that campaign French and British soldiers met and filled their water bottles at either side of a stream, shouting friendly remarks across from bank to bank, while neither side fired a shot. Somewhere or another similar incidents are reported of the American Civil War. The history of war, indeed, is full of queer reactions, complexities, anomalies, reversions to type, abstractions.
Civilization masks us with a screen, from ourselves and from one another, with thin depth of unreality. We habitually live — do we not? — in a world self-created, half established, of false values arbitrarily upheld, largely inspired by misconception, misapprehension, wrong perspective, and defective proportion, misapplication. Our pre-war world has become — has it not? — a grand illusion. But war is reality. War takes the measure of every self-imposed, self-constituted system of society and brings to the light, as nothing else does, the true quality of human “progress,” the absolute stage of our human faring.
War, too, is revelation. All the elaborate reredos of human imaginings and self-delusions and self-conceits knocked flat; all the pretenses and garnishings and superficial trappings and make-beliefs of our mortal nature laid bare; all our individual imperfection and fatuity and insignificance and contemporary grossness laid bare, too — what then left? Only reality, simplicity, the cold truth about each one of us for good and for evil, for better as well as for worse. This stands naked. This we cannot half see now or pretend not to hear, even though we become aware in the process of the mocking laughter of some devil or some god. . . .
The following is a true tale. This is not a thing heard of and lightly repeated and half believed, but witnessed in these late years by living eyes, and, in the second case, by my own. . . .
[1] . . . I issued orders to Corps Commanders enjoining them to demonstrate on their immediate front, to keep the enemy occupied, and seize any opportunity which might offer to capture hostile trenches. . . . On the 19th [December] the Eighth Division captured some trenches at Neuve Chapelle and the Seventh Division at Rouges Bancs, but of the latter, the Second Battalion Scots Guards, in the Twentieth Brigade were driven back by a counter-attack; as also were the Devons. — Vide p. 334, “1914,” by Lord French.
December 18-19, 1914, was a night of tragedy in the British army.[1] Forgotten now — buried in the sancta of regimental records, it was only a demonstration — of what, of whom, of how much or of how little — that need be no inquiry here. And it was only on the front of two divisions that the troops advanced at nightfall, artillery firing a quarter-of-an-hour’s bombardment, all the earth shaking, and a sprinkle of musketry shattering the dark. For the most part, the Germans sat quietly waiting while the shells whined overhead to their support lines; only when figures loomed up in their wire did they open fire. The attack wavered, but the survivors came with a rush to the lip of the trench where for several moments a silent, tremendous struggle took place between bayonet, rifle butt, revolver, and physical strength. Some lay where they fell under the enemy parapet, some dragged themselves back and died in the open, some were made prisoners. Here and there a party of ten or a dozen British fought their way into the German trench and hung on till daylight; then, upon order given, withdrew. It was left to daylight to reveal — as daylight faithfully reveals — the truth of tragedy, and the price to pay.