Shooting at the Stars
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Illustration from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix
One of my favorite kids’ Christmas books, one I have delighted to share with my kids since I discovered it a couple of years ago, is Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix. This book does not retell the nativity narratives of the Gospels and there is not a manger scene to be found, but the truth of that story pervades this one.
Shooting at the Stars is based on the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The First World War was only in its fifth month by December of that year but had already shocked Europe with its destruction and death toll. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a war that modern technology was supposed to have ended with a quick and humiliating defeat for one’s enemies. Despite these high hopes on all sides, the overwhelming firepower of modern warfare stopped armies—with horrific losses—and forced them down, into the earth. Trench warfare had already arrived and was a settled reality, especially on the Western Front. Then, over a few days at Christmas, impromptu, unofficial ceasefires brought men from both sides into no-man’s-land to chat, exchange gifts, and celebrate the birth of Christ with real peace on earth—peace made only more real and striking by the context.
Hendrix frames his retelling as a letter home from Charlie, a teenage English soldier. Over the first several pages, Charlie describes the miseries of life in the trenches and Hendrix’s clearly well researched illustrations give the boy soldier’s descriptions weight. We see the rain, mud, the standing water that could flood soldiers out of the holes in the trench wall where they could sleep, and the Western Front’s notorious rats. Freezing temperatures come as a relief because the cold makes the ground solid again.
from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix
Then comes the miracle, “a tale so wonderful that you will hardly believe my account!” On Christmas Eve the English hear the Germans singing “Silent Night”—wonderfully rendered as blackletter calligraphy the color of candlelight, hovering over no-man’s-land—and Christmas trees appear all along the German front lines. That leads to a joke shouted over from the German side, a can of jam (mentioned prominently in They Shall Not Grow Old) heaved over from the English side, and two officers from the two warring nations stepping out of their trenches and walking toward one another to meet in the middle. Hendrix, through his careful pacing and his luminous illustrations, makes these officers’ simple handshake a powerfully emotional moment.
The first thing the soldiers do with their truce is to help bury each side’s dead, the numerous unburied corpses being a somber but important fact about the Western Front that Hendrix rightly includes but keeps kid-friendly. From there the soldiers meet, play soccer with a cracker box, take photos together, and exchange souvenirs, humble tokens like buttons and belt buckles—and one wonders at the accidental appropriateness of the German motto struck onto their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, “God with us.”
But the war intrudes again and the truce cannot last. One officer coming up from the rear berates the men in the front lines: “He said we had acted like traitors to Britain—but how could a day of peace be treason?” Hendrix thus subtly but powerfully contrasts the peace that Christ came to bring with the ideologies that possess modern people—in this case, nationalism and militarism, but it could just as easily be any other ism to which we find ourselves committed today.
A friend of mine who read my short Goodreads review a few years ago told me that, as he read Shooting at the Stars with his son, when those first two officers shook hands and Charlie writes that “For one glorious Christmas morning, war had taken a holiday,” his son stopped him and said, “That's wrong. It's more like the holiday took the war away. Right, Dad?” Amen to that.
Well researched, with a good introduction and afterword and a glossary that will be helpful to younger readers, but, more importantly, beautifully written and illustrated, Shooting at the Stars shows what the hope of the incarnation means in a world as broken and destructive as ours. If Christmas can redeem even a few days in the trenches of the Western Front, how much more can the hope born that night in Bethlehem accomplish before he is through? Shooting at the Stars is a must read, a worthwhile addition to your family’s cycle of Christmas stories, and one that makes that truth and that hope all the more real.
Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten, and pax in terra.
