'Neath the Hills of Bastogne

When I set out to write this play it had nothing to do with the Siege of Bastogne. In December 2014, I read an article highlighting the 100-year anniversary of World War I's Christmas truce. Early in the war, before the combatants were fully entrenched in their hatred for one another, enlisted men in France and Belgium agreed to put aside their rifles, rise from the trenches, and shake hands with the enemy. They played soccer and sang Christmas carols. For one day they weren't French or Germans, they were fellow humans. The next day they were back to shooting. This story touched me deeply and I immediately dove into the research for a play. In my readings, however, it quickly became clear that the remarkable thing about the Christmas truce wasn't that it happened, but that it never happened again. For hundreds of years prior to World War I, "gentlemen's truces" were extremely common. When winter reared its head, opposing armies would often hunker down until the snows cleared. December 1944 saw the end of this tradition. By then the Americans and Germans had been in direct conflict for over two years. Uncle Sam had humiliated Hitler in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy, but had received a serious bloody nose in Holland and the Hürtgen Forest. The men on both sides were bitter and angry. They had suffered and endured the unimaginable and yet the prospect of home was impossible as long as the enemy sat across the Rhine. That tension erupted into outright hatred with the jump off of Hitler's surprise attack on December 16, 1944. The offensive, which came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge, remains the largest military action in which the United States Armed Forces have ever participated. As thousands of young men died in the snow, there was little hope for a truce. But hope is a funny thing. Sometimes it manages to survive against all odds. The day after a particularly brutal push by the German Fifth Panzer Army against the village of Champs, a squad of Americans entered a school house formerly held by the enemy. Scrawled across the chalkboard was a message that read: "Let the world never see such a Christmas night again! To die, far from one's children, one's wife and mother, under the fire of guns, there is no greater cruelty. To take away a son from his mother, a husband from his wife, a father from his children, is it worthy of a human being? Life can only be for love and respect. At the sight of ruins, of blood and death, universal fraternity will rise." This quote is a reminder to us that history is all about perspective. War is the great equalizer. It reduces humanity to its base components and dares us to build something new. Will we rise to the heights or descend to the depths? Peace cannot exist without understanding, but understanding cannot exist without an open mind. Crafting this story opened my mind. I hope it does the same for you.

- Zach Thomas Woods

• Marcella Kearns, Michael Wright, Michael Stebbins, and Milwaukee Chamber Theatre

• Renegade Writers Group

• Tom and Mary Woods for a sense of historical curiosity

• Alicia Rice for enduring thousands of hours of WW2 lectures