Christmas - 1914 for Wilfred Owen.

Over the last couple of weeks I have gone on an amazing and enthralling journey around the world looking at individual experiences of Christmas in 1914.

I included two accounts of the Christmas Truce from, Bruce Bairnsfather and M.L.Walkinton of the Queens Westminster Rifles in Belgium. Added to that, the Truce that wasn’t, with the French Army deciding to shell any attempts the Germans might make for peace.
The Nurse Violetta Thurston had to endure Roast Horse on Christmas Day on the Russian Front and Sarah Macnaughtan had to endure German shells as they rained down in makeshift Belgian capital at Furnes.
Captain Noel Chavasse in reserve in Belgium told us of his experiences and the First Canadian Division had the communion service near Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.
The Australian accounts see them spending Christmas day in the sands of Egypt and also on a troopship heading towards Egypt.

Finally, the last word goes to the greatest poet of them all, Wilfred Owen and his Christmas 1914 spent in a small village near Bordeaux, France. In 1914 he was 21 and was employed as a tutor by a lady (Miss de le Touche) for her nephews in Merignac. John Stallworthy in his book “Wilfred Owen” describes his Christmas experience:-


“On Christmas Eve he (Wilfred Owen) went to Midnight Mass with the family and found it a piquant experience,

“All mixed up with candles, incense, acolytes, chasuble and such like. If I didn’t bow, I certainly scraped, for there was an unholy draught. How scandalized would certain of my acquaintance and kin been to see me. But it would take a power of candle grease and embroidery to Romanize me. The question is to un-Greekize me.”


It was three o’clock before they went to bed and lunchtime before they got up on Christmas morning. As he slept, only 500 miles away on the Western Front the guns were silent and carols, their words in English and in German, rose mingling out of the frozen mist. And here and there a Christmas tree spired, like the ghost of some shell-splintered stump, on the battered parapet of a trench. Round these frail symbols of a hope so soon to be extinguished men in domed helmets and spiked helmets drank together and clapped their chilblained hands against the cold.

Unaware of this strange truce, Owen on Christmas afternoon took his charges into Bordeaux to see ‘the Soldiers’ Christmas Tree’ and visit their school. Meanwhile the debate about their return to England continued.”