End of a Century
History, living and dying with Bertie Felstead.

Mr. Stuttaford is a writer living in New York.
August 6, 2001 12:15 p.m.

few days ago, in a quiet English country town, the long, long life of Bertie Felstead finally came to an end. And when the old man died, a small, surviving fragment of the 19th century died with him. He had been a local celebrity, an approachable Methuselah, a dapper figure in blazer, regimental tie, and, sometimes, on very special occasions, a row of medals. He had bright eyes, a cheery, amazed-to-be-here smile, and a lifespan that stretched across civilizations. Born on October 28th, 1894, Mr. Felstead was ancient enough to have seen the imperial spectacle of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, sufficiently young to have outlived the Clinton presidency. It was an astonishing achievement, made all the more remarkable by the fact that, in his youth, Mr. Felstead was to participate in an event that characterized, more than most, the last moments of the world into which he was born.

Historians like to tell us that the European 19th century did not end at the moment dictated by the calendar. Its optimistic bourgeois spirit, its almost naïve belief in progress, continued to flourish for more than another decade. It took the First World War to bring that "long 19th century," and so much else, to a close. Spiritually and physically, the Europe that emerged from that conflict bore very little resemblance to the seemingly stable culture that had existed only four years before. In August 1914, totalitarian hecatombs were the stuff of nightmare, believable, perhaps, by madmen or in the dark of night, unimaginable in the reassuring light of an Edwardian morning. Forty months later Lenin was already ordering his first mass executions.

The men that went off to fight that summer were still the soldiers of the older era, still the sort of men who believed that war could be a bit of a lark. With luck, they thought, it would be over by Christmas. In Britain, poignantly, the troops were all volunteers, professional soldiers, "Territorials" (National Guardsmen) perhaps, or the first wave of that trustingly patriotic civilian army that was doomed to die in the killing fields of Flanders and of France.

Christmas 1914, of course, eventually arrived, but peace did not. Despite this, up and down the line the holiday was marked by informal cease-fires, the sound of carols, and, surprisingly often, even more. The opposing armies shared meals, drinks, and cigarettes. There were contests, peaceful for once, a shooting match, card games, some soccer. The generals did not approve, but to see these encounters as an early pacifist spasm is to believe hindsight's myth. Those sentiments would come, but only later, after the disillusion brought by countless battles over scraps of Belgian mud. In that first, almost innocent Christmas of the war the troops were celebrating a truce, not a mutiny, a day off, not a desertion, and, yes, they were pleased to do so with their counterparts in the opposite trench. The enemy was still the enemy, certainly, but that word had not yet come to bear its full, modern significance. There could be room for a break in a war that was still, just, being fought according to the rules of a dissolving, shared civility.

A year later, the orders went out. There was to be no repetition of such disgraceful scenes. Christmas fraternization was a crime, a desertion, a betrayal of the glorious dead. In the event, these instructions were largely superfluous. The sporting contest of 1914 was no more. The war had become an abattoir struggle that stretched the length of a continent. There had been too many casualties, too many tens of thousands of corpses, too many bitter memories. The hundred-yard gulf between the two trenches was no longer so easily crossed by mistletoe, schnapps, and a burst of song. In a couple of magical spots along the Front, however, wonderfully, hauntingly, the older decencies still managed to linger on. One of those places was Laventie, in France. Bertie Felstead, in those days a private in the 15th Welch Fusiliers, was there. The man who was to survive into the 21st century participated in one of the final grace notes of the long 19th.

It was a story that this last witness would often tell. "We were only one hundred yards or so apart when Christmas morning came. A German began singing All Through The Night, then more voices joined in and the British troops responded with Good King Wenceslas…you couldn't hear each other sing like that without it affecting your feelings for the other side."

"The next morning all the soldiers were shouting to another, "Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz." The Germans started it, coming out of their trenches and walking over to us. Nobody decided for us — we just climbed over our parapet and went over to them. We thought nobody would shoot at us if we all mingled together." And nor they did. No shots were exchanged, only cigars and cigarettes. "We met, we swapped cigarettes and had a good smoke…Of course, we realized we were in the most extraordinary position, wishing each other Happy Christmas one day — and shooting each other the next, but we were so pleased to be able to forget the war and shake hands."

Someone started kicking around a soccer ball. "It wasn't a game as such — more of a kick-around and a free-for-all. I remember scrambling around in the snow. There could have been 50 on each side. No-one was keeping score." No one was keeping score. Ah, the relief of it. Just for a moment, just for a snatched miraculous instant, there was a pause in that daily murderous struggle, a pause in that struggle where the savage accounting never seemed to stop, a pause in that struggle where high commands always knew the score.

Just for a few minutes, it was all so different. In the age before the mass ideologies and the slaughters that they made so easy, it was still possible for these opponents to remember what they had in common. "The Germans were men of their Fatherland, and we [were men] of our Motherland, and human nature being what it is, the feelings built up overnight and so both sides [had] got up…to meet halfway in No Man's Land." To Bertie Felstead, a civilized, understated man, a man of an older era, it was the natural thing to do and, as for those Germans that day, well, they were, he said, quite simply, "all right".

It couldn't last. The 20th century was not to be kept waiting. After about half an hour an officer appeared to warn his troops that they were in France to fight "the Huns, not to make friends with them." It was not long before artillery had replaced the carols.

In 1916, there were no Christmas Truces.