1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [4]
Parcels had arrived by the trainload from Germany and by the boatload from England, from places as far apart as Falmouth and Flensburg, Ullapool and Ulm. So many trains were required to bring the flood of Christmas mail to France from the Fatherland that German transport and supply depots were seriously disrupted, and even officers at the front complained that crowded billets and narrow trenches were becoming dangerously congested, for goods and parcels were showered on the troops by legions of anonymous donors as well as by friends and families. In most Germans towns and villages committees had been formed to raise funds and send Christmas parcels, Weinachtspaketen, to the troops. The more sentimental called them ‘love parcels’ – Liebespaketen – and at least one recipient, fighting for the Kaiser in the comfortless trenches of the Argonne was struck by the irony of the name. He expressed his thoughts in a plaintive verse that appeared in one of the many columns of thank-you letters in a German newspaper whose readers had been particularly generous. ‘So much love,’ he sighed, ‘and no girls to deliver it!’* Even the Kaiser sent cigars – ten per man – in tasteful individual boxes inscribed ‘Weinachten im Feld, 1914’.
The British soldiers had also received a royal gift (a useful metal box from Princess Mary, containing cigarettes, or pipe tobacco, or chocolate for non-smokers); they had plum puddings sent by the Daily Mail, chocolate from Cadbury, butterscotch from Callard & Bowser, gifts from the wives of officers of a dozen different regiments, and a mountain of private parcels bulging with homemade cake, sweetmeats, and comforts galore. There was more than enough to spare, and plenty to share with temporary friends over the way. The men drew the line at presenting an enemy soldier with socks or mufflers knitted by the home fireside, but kind donors in Britain, as in Germany, would have been astonished had they known how much plum pudding and Christmas cake would end up in Fritz’s stomach, swapped for a lump of German sausage or a drop of beer or Rheinwein shared matily in No Man’s Land.
The Germans had quantities of candied fruits, gingerbread, lavish supplies of beer and schnapps and, as if that weren’t enough, cognac lozenges (guaranteed by the German manufacturers to contain enough real alcohol to banish winter chill) and tablets that would dissolve in water to make genuine rum-grog. And if they did not quite fulfil their promise, and the ‘real alcohol’ had lost something of its potency in the manufacturing process, at least the flavour was a pleasant reminder of Christmas festivities at home.
The truce had begun on those parts of the front where the easygoing Saxons and Bavarians held the German line but, even there, by no means all British and German officers had allowed their men to fraternise or even to relax and let the war take care of itself over the Christmas season. In other places the truce had continued for days. Both sides had taken advantage of it to mend and straighten their barbed wire, to improve their trenches, to shore up the slithering walls of mud, to lay duckboards and bale out the water that lay boot-high along the bottom and rose higher with every rainstorm. Now commanding officers, who had cast a benevolent eye on the friendly gatherings in No Man’s Land and been glad of the chance to bury the dead in places where there had been an attack, spent the days after Christmas miserably composing the written explanations for these lapses of discipline which had enraged higher authority and for which higher authority was holding