Silent Night

[Note: I’ve posted a slightly different version of this before, but I love the story.] Eventide, December 24, 1914, and the boys of war have not yet learned to kill. Oh yes, they have killed, but just six months into this bloody draw, burying their faces in the mud and excrement of their trenches as shells fall around them, and praying they won’t be given orders to go over the top to their slaughter to win less territory than the length of a dead man’s body, they are not yet predators. Nighttime silence falls, and gradually, as tentative as a request for a first dance, from the trenches the sound of Christmas carols replaces gunfire, and soldiers from both sides slowly emerge and pick their way through the fog and dead of no-man’s land weaponless to meet their enemy. Hands clasp each others’ rough hands, arms drape around broad foreign shoulders, ale, schnapps and wine are shared, cigarettes and mementos are exchanged, the killing field becomes a soccer pitch as men expected to deal death gambol about like lambs until the light of Christmas Day, when they return to their bastions, and the silence, soft as a Sunday morning, holds as the common men of Christmas pray and celebrate the Christ child and another day of life while their officers stand ignored or look the other way. But soon enough the day passes, and the normalcy of the abnormal returns. Snipers find in their sights men they had hugged only hours before and fire away, grenades are tossed and guns as big as trees awaken. Death regains the upper hand, the devil dances, the war returns, but the memory of the silent night of the Christmas of 1914 lives on.

Bluejay

Veteran of old My Poetry Forum before its hiatus. Happy to be back.

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