1915 – Robert Graves

Christmas has traditionally been a season of hope, of giving, of celebrating our connection to our family, friends and humanity. It is the hope that this holiday season will, in the language of Wordworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” provide us…

With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

In the middle of the mud, cold and death of World War I, Christmas Eve 1914 brought about an event that, for me, so symbolizes the feelings engendered with this holiday season. As German troops in the Ypres, Belgium region began decorating the area around their trenches and singing Christmas carols, the British in the trenches across from them begin singing carols in response. Artillery in the region stopped that night, and shouted holiday greetings were followed by tentative heads popping up above the trenches. Soldiers warily ventured out into “No Man’s Land” where small gifts of whiskey, cigars and the like were exchanged. Someone produced a soccer ball, and letters home confirmed that the score was 3-2 in favor of Germany when the ball struck a strand of barbed wire and deflated.

The dead were give proper burials, and at one funeral in No Man’s Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm… “The Lord is my Shepherd….”

Last month, on November 21, 2005, the last remaining veteran of the truce, Alfred Anderson, died in Newtyle, Scotland, aged 109.

This month’s poem is dedicated in honor of the spirit of those soldiers who, for one dark, cold night in 1914, ceased to be German or British, Catholic or Protestant and were simply men with families and friends far, far away from them, and who demonstrated the awesome power of what humanity CAN be.

May your Christmas Season be filled with love, hope, joy, Peace and all that’s good.

Robert Graves
(1895-1985)

1915

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.