This evening it will be exactly hundred years from one of the most remarkable events in human history, well at least in human war history. It will be one hundred years from an unexpected outburst of humanity in a cold and muddy hell which was the western front during the Great War.

On a Christmas Eve 1914 German, French and English soldiers got out from their trenches on to the no man’s land and fraternise with their respective foes. It was not an ordinary trues, bargained over the green table, it was a trues of soldiers sick of fighting. There was severe frost that day and as the night fell a sound of German Christmas carols drifted across the no man’s land and colored lights trembled over the top of their trenches. Private William Quinton was there:

“We could see what looked like very small colored lights. What was this? Was it some prearranged signal and the forerunner of an attack? We were very suspicious, when some­thing even stranger happened. The Germans were actually singing! Not very loud, but there was no mistaking it. Suddenly, across the snow-clad No Man’s Land, a strong clear voice rang out, singing the opening lines of “Annie Laurie“. It was sung in perfect English and we were spellbound. No other sound but this unknown singers voice. To us it seemed that the war had suddenly stopped! Stopped to listen to this song from one of the enemy. Not a sound from friend or foe and as last notes had died away a spontaneous outburst of clapping arose from our trenches: On chore, good ol’ Fritz”

Many of similar events were witnessed all across the line and not just on a western front, it is quite a remarkable thing especially if you put the whole story in the wider perspective of a horror that was World War I.

The Great War was the first time that humans experience modern warfare; machine guns, artillery barrages, chemical weapons, shell shocks and on top of this; generals used to 19th century military tactics. It is the first time that soldiers have to endure battles that last not days but months living in trenches together with their dead comrades risking their life every time they stick their head outside the trenches. Philp Gibbs in his book “Now it can be told” describes life in a trench:

“The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go “dead,” and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations. So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees, and the socks that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new disease — “trench-foot.” Those medical officers looked serious as the number of cases increased.”

He continues:

“Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags and burrowed in the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.”

That is what these soldiers had to put threw and on Christmas Eve a hundred years ago they have decided that they deserve three days of peace. I am not sure if I know what fascinate me the most the fact that they actually take a break from fighting and find it in them to fraternise, exchange gifts, souvenirs and presents with the same people that just a couple an hours ago were mowing down with machine gun fire or the fact that once that they did stop how did they start again. Captain Charles Stockwell wrote this in his accounts:

“At 8.30am I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with ‘Merry Christmas!’ on it, and I climbed on the parapet. He put up a sheet with, ‘Thank you’ on it, and the German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches — he fired two shots in the air and the war was on again!”

Truce like this never happened again and the next year officers on both sides were instructed not to allow any type of fraternizing with enemy troops in order to preserve a “proper fighting spirit”.

The worst battles of WWI, like Verdun and Somme, were still to come and many of these soldiers lost their lives in the meat grinder such was the Great War.

Marry Christmas everyone.