In Europe

stolen monstrance. Elsewhere during those days there were also large-scale displays of brotherhood. In one sector, nine British divisions had organised a ceasefire along a front almost fifty kilometres in length. ‘On New Year's Eve we counted off the minutes back and forth, and agreed to fire volleys at midnight,’ a German student wrote to his parents. ‘We sang, they applauded (we were sixty or seventy metres apart) … Then I shouted to ask them whether they had any musical instruments over there, upon which they produced a pair of bagpipes (it was a Scottish regiment, barelegged in short skirts). They played their poetic Scottish songs and sang.’
    One German soldier was not at all amused: the enigmatic, fanatical corporal Adolf Hitler. ‘This should not be allowed to happen during a war,’ the
Gefreiter
fulminated.
    One year later, in the soaking wet December of 1915, ad hoc cease-fires were once again held along the front in northern France. On the dreary morning of 12 December, with trenches on both sides filled with water, Ernst Jünger saw the dreary no-man's-land suddenly transformed into ‘a county fair’. Between the rolls of barbed wire, ‘lively bartering had begun for schnapps, cigarettes, uniform buttons and other things.’ Jünger quickly put an end to it. After a brief gentlemen's consultation with a British officer on the other side, it was decided to resume the war in exactly three minutes.
    In Barthas’ sector, where the same thing happened, the fraternisation lasted for days: ‘We smiled at each other, began talking, shaking hands, trading tobacco, coffee and wine. If only we had spoken the same language!’ The Socialist International, betrayed and forgotten in 1914, seemed to have been revived by the war. Barthas:‘One day, a huge German fellow climbed up onto a hillock and delivered a speech, the words of which only the Germans understood, but the meaning of which we understood very well indeed, for he took his rifle and broke it in twoagainst a tree trunk. Applause sounded from both sides, and both sides raised the Internationale.’
    Such open signs of brotherly feeling were relatively rare, however, and each one can be offset by countless tales of atrocity. ‘Mucking about with the enemy’ was taboo. Yet these were no isolated incidents. Life in the trenches was for many soldiers only tolerable because of a number of tacit agreements with their partners in adversity on the other side of the line. Despite its enormity, the First World War was, in that sense, old-fashioned; it was a war of proximity, of looking the enemy in the eye, a war in which the specialist, modern technology and push-button killing were already making their appearance, but were not yet totally decisive.
    In many areas along the front, for example, the rule was to leave each other alone as much as possible at meal times, during the retrieval of the wounded from no-man's-land, and during night patrols. Any number of diarists make mention of the ‘immunity’ of mobile field kitchens, in accordance with the same indisputable logic: if you blow up the enemy's kitchen, in five minutes’ time you yourself will be without dinner. Interesting too was the tacit agreement between the opposing military engineers, as witnessed by Barthas: the enemy's tunnels were only to be blown up between two at night and six in the morning; during those hours, therefore, no one ever worked on the tunnels. This rule saved the lives of a great many military engineers.
    Here and there, things were taken one step further. Vera Brittain relates the story of a Scottish sergeant who had been posted across from a Saxon regiment at Ypres. These two forces had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a great deal of noise, an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. The battle was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans.
    Other letters and diaries make mention of this system as well. ‘They're quiet fellows, the Saxons, they don't want to fight any more than we do, so there is a kind of understanding between us,’ wrote one British officer. Another said: ‘On the front we were on, the Boche signals when the artillery is going to fire and shows us the no. of rounds by holding fingers up.’ Robert Graves witnessed letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: ‘Your little dog has run over to us and we arekeeping it safe