Ypres, Belgium, 1938.

Arthur Bell doesn’t like Christmas songs.

STACY

You know that one.

ARTHUR

Most people do.

STACY

That’s not what I meant.

Arthur looks towards the band.

ARTHUR

Stille Nacht.

That’s how I heard it first.

Not Silent Night.

Stille Nacht.

Christmas Eve, 1914.

Mud.

Wire.

Dead men between the trenches.

And Germans singing.

ARTHUR

We’d been shooting at one another all bloody week.

Then Christmas Eve comes along and somebody starts singing.

STACY

Your side?

ARTHUR

No.

Theirs.

British soldiers answer.

Different words.

Same melodies.

ARTHUR

Christ, we murdered their German.

They murdered our English.

Fair exchange.

CAELWYN

International cooperation.

STACY

In linguistic atrocities.

Then someone climbs out of the German trench.

No rifle.

Hands visible.

Nobody fires.

A British soldier follows.

Then another.

Soon men who had spent months trying to kill one another are standing together in no-man’s-land.

Cigarettes.

Tobacco.

Chocolate.

Cigars.

Buttons.

Photographs.

Names.

ARTHUR

That’s when I met Ernst.

STACY

Ernst?

ARTHUR

Ernst Keller.

He’d worked with horses before the war.

Somewhere in Bavaria.

STACY

How did you communicate?

ARTHUR

Bad German.

Bad English.

Pointing.

Pictures.

Beer helped.

CAELWYN

Human civilisation summarised.

Arthur shows Ernst a photograph of his family.

Ernst shows Arthur his.

STACY

You’d been shooting at him.

ARTHUR

Probably not him.

STACY

You know what I mean.

ARTHUR

Yes.

That’s the strange part.

The Germans were easy.

Ernst wasn’t.

Later, British and German soldiers bury their dead.

Together.

Arthur watches men from both armies remove their caps.

ARTHUR

You could tell which body was ours by the clothes.

Couldn’t tell which mother would cry harder.

Eventually someone finds a ball.

For a while, there is football in no-man’s-land.

ARTHUR

Ernst was terrible.

CAELWYN

At football?

ARTHUR

Hopeless.

STACY

Perhaps that’s why Germany invaded Belgium.

Silence.

STACY

Was that inappropriate?

Arthur bursts out laughing.

ARTHUR

Ernst would’ve laughed at that.

Not:

The German would’ve laughed.

Ernst.

Then Christmas ends.

The men return to their trenches.

The orders return.

So do the guns.

Ypres, 1938.

STACY

What happened to Ernst?

ARTHUR

Don’t know.

STACY

Could you have shot him?

Arthur thinks.

ARTHUR

If he was running at me with a rifle?

Probably.

If somebody had pointed across the field and said:

“That’s Ernst”?

I don’t know.

Later, Stacy and Caelwyn walk among the graves.

STACY

The truce didn’t stop the war.

CAELWYN

No.

STACY

It didn’t end nationalism.

CAELWYN

No.

STACY

Those men went back to fighting.

CAELWYN

Yes.

STACY

Then what changed?

Caelwyn looks across the cemetery.

CAELWYN

War needs categories.

German.

British.

French.

Enemy.

Ally.

Us.

Them.

They’re useful.

But they can hide things.

STACY

Like Ernst.

CAELWYN

Like Ernst.

Celebration did not create peace.

It did something smaller.

It interrupted the abstraction.

The enemy acquired a face.

A voice.

A mother.

A photograph.

A terrible football technique.

A name.

Arthur opens his hand.

An old German button lies in his palm.

ARTHUR

Christmas Eve, he was a German.

Christmas Day, he was Ernst.

Afterwards, they wanted him to be a German again.

CAELWYN

Did it work?

Arthur shakes his head.

ARTHUR

No.

I knew his name.

QUESTION FOR YOU

If someone you had been taught to call an enemy shared his food, showed you his family and told you his name — would you still see the same enemy the next morning?

PLAY EPIC. FEEL THE STORY.

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