German tenor Walter Kirchhoff had performed at London's Covent Garden opera house in 1913, but he had never sung for a French audience.
That changed dramatically during the unofficial 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front during World War I.
Soldiers on both sides had been separately singing Christmas carols and bawdy songs when Mr. Kirchhoff arrived in the trenches.
The musician had accompanied German Crown Prince Wilhelm on a Yuletide visit to the front.
There, his impromptu concert for the "field-grey boys" of the 130th Wuerttemberger Regiment drew plaudits not only from his fellow Germans but from enemy troops huddled 75 yards away.
"French soldiers on parapets opposite had applauded until [Mr. Kirchhoff] gave them an encore," Stanley Weintraub wrote in "Silent Night," his 2001 history of the unlikely halt in hostilities.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of that short lull during four years of increasingly vicious combat.
During a period of several days along a 300-mile front that divided Western Europe, men who had been seeking to kill each other for five bloody months refrained from dealing death. Contemporary reports say they exchanged small gifts, drank together, sang familiar songs and even played spirited soccer matches in the no-man's land between their trenches.
War had broken out in Europe in August 1914 with an apparently unstoppable cascade of troop mobilizations, angry diplomatic notes, cross-border skirmishes and mass invasions. Germany and Austria-Hungary found themselves fighting a two-front war against enemies that included Russia, Italy, France and Great Britain.
Soldiers and politicians had gone into the conflict believing the fighting would be over by Christmas. Instead they found themselves stalemated in cold, muddy trenches on the Western Front dug from the North Sea to the Swiss border.
"By December, the ordinary soldiers knew it would be a long winter and a long war to come," Mr. Weintraub said in a recent interview from his home in Delaware. "There was no great enthusiasm in the lower ranks for the fight to continue."
Mr. Weintraub, the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, has written several books abut wartime Christmas celebrations during different periods in history.
British and German troops had received gifts from their governments in the days before Christmas. London sent out brass boxes stamped with an image of the pretty, 17-year-old Princess Mary and filled with tobacco and chocolate. Berlin sent its soldiers wooden boxes containing cigars or sausages.
"That meant that both sides had something to trade," Mr. Weintraub said.
The Germans also had an advantage in direct rail connections to their homeland. In addition to military essentials, trains carried barrels of beer and thousands of 3-foot-tall Christmas trees, already decorated with candles.
The sight of the lighted trees on the edge of the German trenches worried and then intrigued British, Belgian and French soldiers, who were often less than 100 yards away.
"The British crawled out to see," Mr. Weintraub said. "Then the Germans crawled out. When they met, they had something to trade."
Although top brass on both sides opposed any conciliatory gestures, enlisted men and many lower-level officers -- lieutenants, captains and majors -- welcomed the respite. The two sides reached an agreement to meet Christmas Day. The truce held in many places while burial parties retrieved and interred the remains of fallen comrades.
With no women around for many miles, many young men's fancies turned to sports.
Shell holes were filled in and ersatz soccer balls were created from tied-up bundles of cloth. Although some German and British athletes just kicked their makeshift balls around in informal scrimmages, other soldiers picked national teams, played full matches and kept score.
The story of soccer matches in no man's land sounds too good to be true, but Mr. Weintraub said he found plenty of contemporary evidence for the Tommies- vs.-Fritzes games in soldiers' letters and in war diaries kept by military units.
"They write about the games, and they even give the scores," he said. "The Germans won most of them."
Heavy French censorship kept reports about the Christmas truce and fraternization with the enemy out of that country's newspapers. But by the end of December and in early January -- after the fighting had resumed in earnest -- many British newspapers had carried letters to the editor describing the Yuletide events.
Although the United States would remain neutral until April 1917, when it declared war on Germany, many Americans had family ties to Europe and a personal interest in the fighting. The New York Times on Dec. 31 picked up a story from the London Daily News that described the battlefield pause.
"Many of our chaps walked out and met the Germans between the lines," the Times story said. It quoted a letter written by an officer in the Queen's Westminster Rifles. "I went over in the afternoon and was photographed in a group of English and Germans mixed."
Next came the part of the report that must have chilled higher-ups on both sides.
"The Germans opposite were awfully decent fellows -- Saxons, intelligent, respectable looking men," the officer wrote. "I had quite a decent talk with three or four and have two names and addresses in my notebook."
Mr. Weintraub wrote that the truce lasted through Boxing Day, Dec. 26, in many places and in some locations, it held until the new year.
Worried commanders moved to end the era of good feeling. Troops that had met with their enemy counterparts were taken off the front lines and replaced with soldiers who hadn't been involved in the informal cease-fire.
Generals took no chances for "slackness" in the war effort the next year.
At Christmas 1915, British commanders "ordered a slow, continuing artillery barrage through every daylight hour," Mr. Weintraub wrote in "Silent Night."
It wasn't only officers who worried about the effect of seeing the enemy as human might have on the will to fight.
A 25-year-old Austrian-born soldier living in Munich had joined the German army in 1914 as soon as fighting broke out. By December, Adolf Hitler had been promoted to corporal and had won the Iron Cross, Second Class, for rescuing his wounded company commander.
When soldiers in his unit discussed meeting up with the enemy in no man's land, Hitler angrily rejected the idea, Mr. Weintraub wrote. "Have you no German sense of honor left at all?" Hitler asked his fellow soldiers. Baptized a Catholic, he had turned against Christianity.
"He rejected the idea of going out there to mingle," Mr. Weintraub said. "He hated the British and he didn't believe in Christmas."
lbarcousky@post-gazette.com
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