The informal ceasefire that occurred on the Western Front at Christmas 1914 has gained legendary status and is an event that haunts the imagination. Perhaps like many, my understanding of what occurred on that day is intimately intertwined with a piece of television: the documentary, Peace in No Man’s Land, made by Malcolm Brown and first broadcast on BBC1 on Christmas Eve 1981. I saw it for the first time three years later when it was repeated on 23 December, and it enchanted me. Although it was shown just after twelve noon, my memory is of sitting and watching our family television on a December Sunday so dreary that it might as well have been four o’clock on that short mid-winter day, or perhaps that is a trick cast over my recollection by the deep black background of the final credit sequence.
To a fourteen-year-old, the four veterans that Brown and his collaborator, Shirley Seaton, interviewed seemed both remarkably ancient and remarkably sprite, as if the clock of ageing had finally decided to come to a halt. And they had proper relics, too. I can still recall my wonder at hearing the story of Princess Mary’s Christmas Box and seeing Albert Moren show off his tin complete with cigarettes, and my amazement that Leslie Walkinton could fish out letters he had sent home to his father and read out extracts.
And as in any great piece of television, the visuals weave their own magic. The veterans sit against black backgrounds – is this another contributing factor to my memory of darkness everywhere that day of seeming no-daylight? – and they are juxtaposed with the amazing photographs of young men of both sides standing together in no man’s land. The final visual element, the bit that holds it together, is Martin Patmore’s landscape photography of the fen-like border country between Belgium and France. Although used sparingly, this location photography has a beguiling power. Shots of frozen drainage ditches and fields rimed with thick frost, shots of a glassy winter sun low on the horizon, and the amazing shot of an old barbed wire stake sticking out of an embankment (as if Ernest Brooks had popped back to take an official photograph for the newspapers) conjure up a magical winter world in which anything might be possible.
And one location in particular dominates, a place that acts as the lens, the focus and the kaleidoscope of that iconic event: Ploegsteert (‘Plugstreet’) Wood. Ploegsteert Wood is the Journey’s End of the piece, it is the liminal world linking past and present, it is the world of ghosts as encapsulated and created by Patmore’s shots of a place shrouded in, and enclosed by, mist. Deep in the wood, deep in the mist come the last few images: an old concrete bunker with, we are told, “its oddly evocative name, still visible on the lintel, Blighty Hall”, and then the cut to the old stake before the final, most touching and elegiac of lines from narrator Martin Jarvis, “it’s as fitting a landscape as any for this twentieth century story of temporary peace and goodwill”, as the screen fades to black and we hear the sound of a choir singing Stille Nacht.
Three years on from that Sunday morning, I made my first visit to Ploegsteert Wood, and it was exactly as it existed in my imagination. I’ve visited countless times since, and to me it remains precisely as I saw it at Christmas 1984. Come on a trip with me and we will walk that landscape of temporary peace and goodwill, where you will find the ghosts of Christmas 1914.
