The Christmas Truce Letter

Meine liebe Alice,

I do not know your name. I do not know your voice. I have never seen you in the light of day, never watched you laugh, never heard you speak a single word. And yet I am writing this letter to you by the light of a candle stub in a frozen trench in Belgium, because your brother showed me your photograph tonight — by candlelight, in the mud between our lines — and I have not been able to forget your face.

It sounds like madness, I know. Perhaps it is. Perhaps the war has broken something in my mind, and I am grasping at phantoms. But I do not think so. I think that tonight — Christmas night, 1914 — I have witnessed something that the world will not believe. I have walked among my enemies and found them to be men. I have shaken the hand of a British soldier named William and seen him weep as he showed me a picture of his sister, the way a man shows a holy relic. And I have looked at that picture and felt, for the first time in five months of slaughter, something that feels like hope.

The truce began with singing. Our men started “Stille Nacht” — “Silent Night” — and from across the wire, we heard them answering in English. The same song. The same notes. The same God. I do not know who decided it was safe, but suddenly we were climbing out of the trenches, hundreds of us, stumbling across the craters and the barbed wire to meet the men we had been trying to kill the day before. We shook hands. We exchanged gifts — I gave a British corporal my tobacco pouch; he gave me a button from his coat. We showed each other photographs of our families, our sweethearts, our homes. And William — your brother — showed me you.

Alice. I am writing your name for the first time, and it feels like a prayer. You were standing in a garden, I think, wearing a light dress, your hair pinned back, squinting a little in the sun. You were not trying to be beautiful. You were simply there, in the moment, alive. And I thought: this is what I am fighting for. Not for the Kaiser, not for Germany, not for glory or conquest or any of the grand words the newspapers use. For this. For a woman standing in a garden on a summer day. For the ordinary, precious, irreplaceable beauty of a life lived in peace.

We played football today, the British and the Germans, in the mud between the trenches. We used a tin can for a ball. I do not remember the score. I do not think there was one. I remember laughing. I remember a young British soldier — he could not have been more than eighteen — falling in the mud and pulling two Germans down with him, and all three of them lying there, covered in filth, laughing like children. I remember thinking: this is what we are. Not enemies. Not soldiers. Just boys, far from home, who want to live.

The truce is ending. I can hear the officers on both sides shouting orders. Tomorrow the guns will start again, and we will go back to trying to kill each other, and perhaps I will die, and perhaps your brother will die, and none of it will mean anything. But tonight — tonight I have seen the face of the world as it was meant to be. I have seen men embrace their enemies. I have seen a photograph of a woman I do not know, and I have fallen in love with her.

I do not know what love is, Alice. I have studied theology for four years — I have read Augustine and Aquinas and Luther — and I am no closer to understanding the mystery of human connection than I was when I began. But I know that when I looked at your face tonight, something stirred in me that I thought the war had killed. Something tender. Something hopeful. Something that believes, against all evidence, that the world can be good.

I do not expect this letter to reach you. I do not even know if I will send it. But I needed to write it. I needed to say your name, to commit it to paper, to fix this moment in time so that it cannot be taken from me.

Whether I live or die, I am grateful that on one Christmas night, I knew peace. And I knew your face.

Thank you, Alice. Thank you for existing. Thank you for being beautiful on a summer day, for being captured on film, for being held in your brother’s pocket and shown to a stranger in the mud. You have given me a memory that I will carry into whatever comes next.

May God bless you and keep you. May you live a long and happy life. May you marry a good man and have children and grow old surrounded by love.

And if, in some other world, we might have met — in a café, on a street corner, at a dance — I would have asked your name, and I would have done everything in my power to deserve you.

Ewig dein, Klaus

P.S. — I have enclosed a small drawing I made of the Christmas Truce. It is not very good — I am no artist — but I wanted you to see it. I wanted you to know that it really happened. That we really met, your brother and I, and that for one night, we were not enemies. We were just men, singing the same song, under the same stars.