The Christmas Truce And The Future Of War
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Denosn via The Mises Institute,
Jeff Deist: Our guest this weekend is in the studio with me. He’s Judge John Denson, a great war historian and a lawyer who helped Lew Rockwell found the Mises Institute right here in Auburn in the early 1980s.
You know, John, there are varying accounts of what happened. Depends on who you read and you can’t really ask anyone because none of the participants are alive today or very few. How widespread do you think it really was and do we make more of the Christmas Truce than we ought to because it’s so hopeful, in other words, it’s something we want to believe in.
John Denson: Well, I do recognize that there are various accounts of it and one reason I like the book Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub is I think he goes to original sources. It’s all from a British viewpoint because he went back to letters, from the front to home, to their mothers and fathers by soldiers who were actually there and diaries of eyewitnesses.
There’s a French movie called Joyeux Noel, from a French viewpoint but I doubt his sources are as good because in Weintraub, who is a very well-respected historian and is an Emeritus Professor of Arts and Humanities at Penn State. He’s written a lot of military history and he goes to original sources and he says that the French and the Belgians were not as prone toward the troops as the English were. They were fighting this war on the French soil and Belgian soil and the British just came across the channel, so I think there was a different viewpoint. So, you get different perspectives depending on who’s telling this story, but I think Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub came out in 2001, is a very accurate source, from what I can tell.
Deist: Well, you mentioned that the German and British soldiers saw the war a little differently. It was not being fought in their homeland, they weren’t French. But something that’s so significant to me is you mentioned in your article from which we excerpted in our Mises Daily yesterday, you say the British and French soldiers, however, saw little meaning in the war. To them, after all, the British king and the German Kaiser were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. So, this is such an astonishing fact, that the threat that would be posed to the establishment, to the generals, and the politicians by having rank and file soldiers, sort of awakened to the idea of the preposterousness of the war.
Denson: And Weintraub also states — which I include in my review that you’re going to publish — that about 80,000 Germans went to England before World War I to get jobs. They were cab drivers working in restaurants as cooks and waiters and so forth and they well understood the English language, so there was no language barrier between a lot of them because they spoke …read more
Source: The Christmas Truce And The Future Of War
