The last known survivor of no-man's-land football died on July 22nd,
aged 106.
Old soldiers, they say, never die, they only fade away. Bertie Felstead
was an exception. The older he was, the more famous he became. He
was over 100 years old, and had long been ensconced in a nursing home
in Gloucester, when he was awarded the French Legion d'Honneur by
President Jacques Chirac. He was over 105 when he became the oldest
man in Britain. And by then he was even more famous as the sole survivor
of the spontaneous Christmas truces that occurred on the western front
during the First World War. Few wartime events are the subject of
so much controversy and myth.
Mr. Felstead, a Londoner and at the time a market gardener, volunteered
for service in 1915. Later in that same year he took part in the second,
and last, of the Christmas truces while stationed near the village
of Laventie in northern France. He was then a private in the Royal
Welch Fusiliers, the regiment of Robert Graves, the author of one
of the most powerful books about that war, "Goodbye to All That".
As Mr. Felstead remembered it, the peace overture came on Christmas
Eve from enemy lines. Soldiers there sang, in German, the Welsh hymn
"Ar Hyd y Nos". Their choice of hymn was taken as a much-appreciated
acknowledgment of the nationality of the regiment opposing them in
trenches about 100 meters away, and the Royal Welch Fusiliers responded
by singing "Good King Wenceslas".
After a night of carol singing, Mr. Felstead recalled, feelings of
goodwill had so swelled up that at dawn Bavarian and British soldiers
clambered spontaneously out of their trenches. Shouting such greetings
as "Hello Tommy" and "Hello Fritz" they at first
shook hands in no-man's-land, and then presented one another with
gifts. German beer, sausages and spiked helmets were given, or bartered,
in return for bully beef, biscuits and tunic buttons.
A different ball game
The game they played was, Mr. Felstead recalled, a rough sort of
soccer. "It wasn't a game as such, more a kick-around and a free-for-all.
There could have been 50 on each side for all I know. I played because
I really liked football. I don't know how long it lasted, probably
half an hour." Then, as another of the Fusiliers remembered it,
the fun was brought to a stop by a British sergeant-major ordering
his men back into the trenches and gruffly reminding them that they
were there "to fight the Huns, not to make friends with them".
This intervention has helped sustain the vulgar Marxist myth, relayed
for instance in the musical "Oh, What a Lovely War!", that
the ordinary soldiers on both sides longed only for a comradely peace
and were excited or compelled to fight by jingoistic officers pursuing
their class interest. In fact, officers on both sides started several
of the Christmas truces in 1915 and of the much wider truces in 1914.
After parleying to agree the terms of the ceasefires, most officers
mingled with the enemy just as keenly as their men did.
In his account of the truces, Robert Graves explained why. "(My
battalion] never allowed itself to have any political feelings about
the Germans. A professional soldier's duty was simply to fight whomever
the King ordered him to fight...The Christmas 1914 fraternization,
in which the Battalion was among the first to participate, had had
the same professional simplicity: no emotional hiatus, this, but a
commonplace of military tradition- an exchange of courtesies between
officers of opposing armies".
According to Bruce Bairnsfather, one of the most popular soldier-writers
of the First World War, the Tommies were just as hardheaded. There
was, he wrote, not an atom of hate on either side during these truces,
"and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to win the
war and the will to beat them relaxed. It was just like the interval
between the rounds in a friendly boxing match."
The many British contemporary accounts of the truces help scotch
another myth: that the authorities kept all knowledge of fraternization
from the public at home lest it damage morale. Popular British newspapers
and magazines printed photographs and drawings of German and British
soldiers celebrating Christmas together in no-man's-land.
It is true, however, that the Christmas truces were not repeated
in the later years of the war. By 1916 and 1917 the relentless slaughter
of a war of attrition had so deepened enmity on both sides that friendly
meetings in no-man's-land were all but unthinkable, even at Christmas.
Mr. Felstead was among the doughtiest of the Tommies. He returned
home for hospital treatment after being wounded in the battle of the
Somme in 1916 but recovered sufficiently to qualify again for service
overseas. He was sent to Salonika, where he caught acute malaria and
then, after a further spell of recuperation in Blighty, served out
the final months of the war in France.
After being demobbed, he led a comparatively dull, respectable life.
Only longevity put an end to his obscurity. Writers and journalists
clamoured to interview, and celebrate, a participant in a legendary
truce whose life eventually stretched across three centuries. He told
them that all Europeans, including the British and the Germans, should
be friends.
Copyright 2001 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
rights reserved.
