Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
A.E. Housman’s little poem about the dead of World War I still
has the power to make shivers run up and down the spine. Yet the
pathos he evokes depends utterly, it seems to me, on the
“Because…” clause in the first stanza. In other words, there was
a reason why the young men died. Negatively, it was called shame;
positively, honor. The sadness of their loss is actually all the
greater because Housman accepts this reason calmly, as a given,
without comment or criticism.
Joyeux Noel, Christian Carion’s often moving cinematic
account of the true story of the Christmas truce on the Western
Front in 1914, is like most subsequent portrayals of that war in
ignoring or disparaging the reason for it that Housman presents so
dispassionately. On this more recent and now much more common view,
our sympathy with the victims of the war ought to be increased by
the assumption that the slaughter was (as is often said)
“senseless” — for nothing. Instead, it is supposed to have been
the product of wicked or stupid leaders who somehow successfully
brainwashed their people into supposing that the enemy was subhuman
and deserved to be exterminated without mercy. Whether or not this
is a tenable view of the actual war’s origins and history I leave
it to others to decide, but simply as a matter of artistic and
dramatic judgment in a film like this one I think it a grievous
mistake. It forces us to suppose that those who died were fools,
blind to the meaninglessness of their sacrifice. Pity for them must
be mixed with contempt.
Because at the time both sides tried to suppress any information
about the truce as prejudicial to military discipline, we don’t
know much about how it actually happened, and M. Carion’s version
is necessarily mostly fictional. But he so arranges things that the
brainwashing theory is presupposed. To begin with, he leads off
with specimens of the brainwashing in the form of British, French,
and German schoolchildren reciting as if by rote patriotic spiels
all to the effect that one of the other nationalities are devils
incarnate. Cut to the arrival of the news that war is declared.
Everyone is happy. “At last something is happening in our lives,”
says a young Scot called William (Robin Laing). Cut to his death in
battle and the inconsolable grief of his brother, Jonathan (Steven
Robertson), who refuses to acknowledge in a letter to his mother
that he is dead. Palmer (Gary Lewis), a priest from his hometown
who is serving as a medic with the regiment, tries to console
him.
On the German side, Private Sprink (Benno Furmann), an opera
singer in civilian life, is summoned by Crown Prince
Friedrich-Wilhelm (Thomas Schmauser) to a chateau behind the lines
where he and his Danish fiancee, Anna Sorensen (Diane Kruger), are
invited to sing a duet for the brass (singing voices of Rolando
Villazon and Natalie Dessay). Rather improbably, Anna persuades
Sprink to take her back to the front with him for Christmas Eve. In
the French trenches, Lieutenant Audebert (Guillaume Canet) is
frantic with worry about his wife who is behind the German lines in
northeastern France. She had been having a difficult pregnancy in
the summer of 1914 and must have given birth by now, but he has had
no word from her for months. His father (Bernard Le Coq), a
general, is trying to get him sent to the rear, out of the worst of
the fighting.
On Christmas Eve, the sound of the Scots playing a mournful tune
on their bagpipes in the trench opposite inspires Sprink to sing
“Silent Night.” Soon the bagpipers are joining in, and Sprink
seizes a small Christmas tree, holding it before him as he steps
into no-man’s-land. Soon the French and the Scots are out of their
trenches as well. The junior officers in charge on this narrow
section of the front, Audebert for the French, Gordon (Alex Ferns)
for the Scots, and Horstmayer (Daniel Bruhl) for the Germans, meet
to agree on a truce just for Christmas, but the fraternization
among the men of both sides has already progressed so far that it
looks like getting out of control. The men of both sides attend a
mass, said by Palmer, share food and drink and have a game of
soccer. The next day, no one wants to be the first to end the
truce. The Germans inform the allies that their trenches are about
to be shelled and invite them to shelter with them in their
trenches. The allies then return the favor.
Eventually, some more senior officers and even a bishop (Ian
Richardson) turn up to put a stop to it all and tell the men
they’re not being fierce and bloodthirsty enough in ridding the
world forever of the foreign devils. There are too many to court
martial of those who have learned to take a different view, but the
Scottish regiment is disbanded and the men reassigned while the
French are sent to Verdun and the Germans to the eastern front. All
are reproved for their dereliction of duty, but all remain
stubbornly attached to the idea that the truce was a good idea.
Just for a moment, they have awakened from their brainwashed torpor
and recognized the other side as human. Afterwards they can never
quite forget it again. Meanwhile, presumably, all the rest of the
numbskulls on the Western front went on killing each other,
zombie-like, for the next four years.
Sorry, but I just don’t buy it. M. Carion’s movie is an
emotionally powerful glimpse of war’s horror’s being interrupted by
an outbreak of humanity, but it would be a lot more powerful if it
had more sympathy towards the reason that the warriors were there
in the first place. In fact, the film is guilty of the same fault
it criticizes in the combatant nations, which is seeing the world
in black-and-white. Instead of demonizing one side or the other, it
demonizes the leaders of both sides, making the ordinary soldiers
on both sides into wholly innocent, if rather pathetic, victims. I,
for one, find Housman’s brand of sympathy, which treats the men as
fully-functioning moral agents, much more moving.
