Europe at peace

Carol and I went out to see Joyeux Noël at the National Archives yesterday evening, a fictional version of a historical event on the battlefields of France during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 1914, when British, French and German soldiers stepped out from their trenches to fraternise during a brief ceasefire. They sang together, shared drinks, played football and helped one another to bury the dead whom each side had blown to pieces. Afterwards, because it had de-motivated them from continuing to kill one another, the officers and men concerned in these extraordinary acts of military disobedience were punished by their "superiors". But the memory of their respite remained.

Before the film began we listened to violin duets (arrangements of Weihnachtslieder) accompanied on the piano by a pastor of the Lutheran Church, and sang three verses of Stille Nacht, also sung by one of the German characters on screen, and then we were addressed by the German and French Ambassadors who drew our attention to the difference between then and now. They both mentioned the turn away from emnity made by Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle when in 1963 they signed the Elysée co-operation treaty, encouraging an initiative to link the young people of their respective countries that is still going strong nowadays. In French it's known as the Office Franco-Allemand de la Jeunesse; the Germans call it the Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk. Something else I hadn't realised is that since 2003 (forty years on) German and French cabinet ministers have been holding joint meetings twice a year. The German Ambassador said that the men of the trenches in 1914 must have had an inkling of what Europe would one day become, once peace were allowed to flourish. The film told an optimistic story, he claimed.

The fraternisation scenes were done very well, so that the only way you could tell the men apart—even though they spoke three different languages their looks were strikingly alike—was by the hats they wore, and when the hats were taken off for the football game there was no way of telling which nationality was which.

Interestingly enough, the director of the film noticed that his groups of French, British and German actors kept themselves to themselves at the start of the filming, but once they started work on the fraternisation scenes, the barriers came down:

A family bond on the set was very much there after that.