Paul Nash, The Ypres Salient at Night |
In this year of centenary remembrance, many contemporary
poets have written about the Great War. Anthony
Wilson, a poet and faculty member at the University of Exeter, has generously
allowed me to share his poem on the Christmas truce.
Natalia Goncharova, "The Christian Host" |
Truce
Just
who gave the order
no
one knew.
They
say there wasn’t one.
Stille
Nacht in
no man’s,
its
accordion leaking like gas
across
the frost.
One
by one came stars,
better
to pick out limp rags
of
surrender.
What
I remember next is nothing,
if
absence is what nothing is,
a
song into which we sang silence.
Witnesses,
we witnessed it.
We
were part of that cloud, and lost in it.
--Anthony Wilson
The
poem breaks the silence with “Just who gave the order,” and then changes the
landscape of military command in the short line “no one knew.” No order, only rumor and not knowing – that is
what made the miracle of peace possible.
Men stepped out into the no-man’s land of not knowing. In the absence of hostilities, into the empty
space created by the silent guns, the imagined soldier of the poem remembers
filling the nothingness with a song “into which we sang silence.”
Subtly,
the poem invites us to compare the first Christmas with the truce of 1914: the “limp rags of surrender” suggest the
swaddling clothes, the stars that appeared “one by one” are reflections of the single
star that paused over Bethlehem, and the soldiers who witnessed the truce recall
the witness of the shepherds and the cloud of angels that appeared to them.
December
24th, 1914 was another kind of holy night, one in which men lost
themselves in the miracle of communion with others, as fleeting as a
cloud.
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