War and Christmas: Europe's story is now echoing in Ukraine

LondonThe anti-war message that is the novel Nothing new in the westErich Maria Remarque's novel contains some of the most harrowing sentences about the cruelty of war ever written. Published in Catalan in 1930 (Edicions Aymà, translated by Joan Alavedra), Chapter VII reads: "The horror of the brow sinks into the deepest recesses of ourselves as soon as we turn our backs on it; we mock it with ignoble and ferocious jokes. [...] the troops, who organize dances as soon as they leave the firing zone, it's indecent talk."

The novel dismantles the honor and heroism of combat from the perspective of Private Paul Bäumer, who has been forced to enlist to defend the Kaiser's homeland. His is an experience marked by mud, hunger, constant fear, bombings, and arbitrary death. War destroys not only bodies, but also the identity and expectations of an entire generation. Soldiers learn to survive by dehumanizing themselves, while they watch friends and enemies die with the same futility.

A radically different moral experience is that which Ernest Jünger explains in another classic text, Storms of Steel (translation by Andrés Sánchez Pascual, Tusquets, 1987), where he recounts his experiences as a combatant on the German side in the trenches of the First World War, especially from January 1915 onwards. Jünger constructs the narrative of an inner transformation in which the war is a trial that ennobles the individual.

During the first winter of the Great War, one historical episode stands out as a moment of clarity: the Christmas Eve Truce of 1914. Across several sectors of the front in Belgium and France, nearly 100,000 soldiers, mostly British and German, agreed to an unofficial ceasefire. There are hundreds of eyewitness accounts, many of which, from the British side, have been digitized and can be consult the Imperial War Museum's collection (IWM).

Part of the summary is as follows: "Late on Christmas Eve 1914, the men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German soldiers in the trenches opposite [less than 300 meters away] singing carols and patriotic songs, and saw lampposts and small figures in the trenches. The next day, British and German soldiers met in no man's land." They exchanged gifts, took photographs, and some even played impromptu football matches. They also buried the dead and repaired trenches and shelters. After St. Stephen's Day, encounters in no man's land became less frequent. The truce was not respected across the entire Western Front. In other places, fighting continued, and there were casualties on Christmas Day itself. Some officers expressed their displeasure with the ceasefire. "They were kicking the can down the road, hoping the truce would undermine morale." Remarque doesn't mention this episode in his novel, published in 1928, even though images of it are preserved at the IWM. But he could have, because it's a moment consistent with his narrative and moral universe: the soldiers, momentarily freed from discipline under the pretext of Christmas, recognize the enemy as an equal human being. War appears as an imposition beyond the combatants' control. Jünger, for his part, expresses contempt for fraternizing with the enemy, which he considers a dangerous erosion of discipline and the meaning of combat. For him, war demands tension, distance, and acceptance of the conflict to the very end. In his aforementioned book, he refers to Christmas 1915. And the events he describes have nothing to do with those that occurred the previous year. "We spent Christmas Eve in our position. Buried in the mud, we sang carols, which were drowned out by the sound of British machine gun fire. On Christmas Day, we lost a man in the Third Sector; a ricocheting bullet hit him in the head. Immediately afterward, the British tried to take out the Christmas tree. But our men, filled with rage, shot him down. The British responded in turn with rifle grenades." The Christmas Truce of 1914 is, therefore, an exceptional event.

During the Second World War, a similar episode, a kind of general ceasefire, even if only for a few hours and in very specific sectors, was unthinkable and impossible. And yet, on Christmas Eve 1944, in the midst of the white hell of the Battle of the Bulge, what its protagonists have described as a "small miracle" occurred. In a secluded cabin in the Hürtgen forest, a German woman, Elizabeth Vincken, and her son Fritz took in three exhausted American soldiers, one of them seriously wounded. Shortly afterward, four German soldiers knocked on the cabin door. Part of what happened can be read in an official U.S. government source. American Battle Monuments Commission websiteIt includes a summary of the version that was first published in "Truce in the Forest," which appeared in the selections of Reader's Digest in January 1973.

In essence, it says this: "In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, on Christmas Day 1944, young Fritz Vincken, then 12 years old, and his mother experienced a miracle of peace in the Hürtgen Forest. In an isolated cabin, they took in three soldiers from Poiderdo. Later, four German soldiers appeared. Despite the danger of execution for treason, the mother forbade weapons inside, imposing a sacred truce: 'Tonight, in this house, no one will kill each other.' The tension transformed into humanity as mortal enemies shared a humble meal of potatoes and chicken. Around the table, uniforms lost their meaning, and only young boys remained, far from home and exhausted by the war. A German nursed the wounded American back to health, and together they gazed at the stars before resting. The next day, they said goodbye with a handshake, leaving behind the only documented trace of brotherhood amidst that offensive. The German corporal still had time to tell one of the Americans which routes to avoid so as not to fall into the hands of his army. For a few hours, the war had receded a few inches.

Hatred prevails in the Balkans

In the Balkans of the 1990s, such isolated and spontaneous gestures were impossible. The wars in the former Yugoslavia, marked by ethnic intolerance and racial and religious hatred, turned the other into a non-human object, and therefore, exterminable. As in the war in Ukraine, the calendar also conspired against the truce: Catholic Christmas is on December 25, Orthodox Christmas on January 7; Muslims, moreover, were excluded from this shared liturgy. There was no common date that could suspend, even for a few hours, the unleashed madness.

In fact, when ceasefires did occur during the holidays, they were the result of formal negotiations, often mediated by the United Nations, and intended to allow humanitarian corridors, not for any fraternization. Sarajevo, a city besieged for almost four yearsThe Christmas holidays brought not the silence of weapons but tense pauses, broken by sporadic bombings.

The war in Ukraine, which began in 2022, confirms the extent to which the truce has become a political tool rather than a gesture of humanity. In January 2023, coinciding with Orthodox Christmas, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a 36-hour unilateral ceasefireResponding to a call from Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Kiiv immediately rejected it, calling it a "cynical trap and a propaganda operation designed to buy time and regroup forces."

Events lent credence to skepticism. According to Ukrainian authorities, the truce was not fully respected, and artillery exchanges resumed with full force as soon as the deadline expired. The pause functioned as just another maneuver on the military chessboard, not as a moral imperative. Since then, Moscow has manipulated truces according to its political interests. It has decreed others, not necessarily at Christmas. For example, the one that began at midnight between May 7 and 8, 2025, on the occasion of the celebration of... 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War IIor the one he had offered a few days earlier, in this case to satisfy Donald Trump, on the occasion of the Orthodox Easter, April 19

Christmas Day 2025. To paraphrase Erich Maria Remarque, Nothing new in the eastThe slaughter continues in Ukraine. Despite the enormous sacrifices of the soldiers and the suffering of millions of civilians, the war has become a cycle of destruction with no real change, or only minimal changes. Each day seems the same as the last. When it finally ends, some of the soldiers who fought there will write about what they experienced and what they lost. And like the German writer, they will always be able to say: "This book is not intended as an accusation or a confession. It merely attempts to tell the story of a generation that was destroyed by the war—even those who managed to escape its flames."