Cooperation Under Fire: Institutional and Cultural Dynamics during War

1 " …on moving to a quiet sector, a battalion of the 51 st division heard the Germans shout, 'We Saxons, you Anglo Saxons, don't shoot', and apparently all went well, for a few days later the Saxons, 'shouted…that Prussians were relieving them, and asked us to give them hell.' " (Ashworth, p.34) " When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver. "-Hermann Goering " When I hear the word revolver I reach for my culture. "-Fritz Lang, playing himself, in Godard's film 'Contempt'. Scholars and popular writers generally represent conflicts between states as clashes between radically opposed peoples, in which propaganda and fear combine to set soldiers on each side violently against each other. World War I is no exception: it is typically portrayed as a conflict in which the lives of infantrymen were nasty, brutish, and short-when the lives of the infantrymen were considered at all. Historians traditionally place an emphasis upon the role of commanders in large battles, rather than on the life of the individual foot soldier or events of the war away from the Somme, Ypres, Verdun, or other major battles. 1 As a result, they overlook the fact that, for long periods of time, relative peace and calm prevailed along sections of the western front – despite the attempts of generals to keep the war going at all times in all places. As chronicled in Tony Ashworth's book, Trench Warfare 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System, German and English troops 2 developed elaborate systems for convincing generals that fighting was continuing apace throughout the conflict even while relative peace prevailed. 3 The live-and-let-live system progressed through three phases: at first, overt truces appeared during Christmas in 1914. These truces were usually of short duration. The high command passed down strict orders forbidding truces, putting an end to this first wave of verbally agreed 1 John Keegan's book The Face of Battle (1976) is a notable exception to the first assumption, but not the second, as he portrays the life of the individual soldier in major battles. 2 Ashworth's book draws directly only on the records and diaries of the British Expeditionary Force, and thus provides a first-hand account of only British-German cooperation; however, he does cite other sources as indicating that such cooperation occurred elsewhere as well. 3 It is important to note that Ashworth's description does not contradict other …