![]() In the darkness, some of the British soldiers began to sing back. The Germans were singing carols, as it was Christmas Eve. “Away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond, I could hear the murmur of voices.” He turned to a fellow soldier in his trench and said, “Do you hear the Boches kicking up that racket over there?” WATCH: The Christmas Truce on HISTORY Vault Singing Breaks Out in the Trenches on Christmas EveĪt about 10 p.m., Bairnsfather noticed a noise. Cold, wet through and covered with mud.” There didn’t “seem the slightest chance of leaving-except in an ambulance.” “Here I was, in this horrible clay cavity,” Bairnsfather wrote, “…miles and miles from home. And now, in a part of Belgium called Bois de Ploegsteert, he was crouched in a trench that stretched just three feet deep by three feet wide, his days and nights marked by an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuits and cigarettes too wet to light. He had spent a good part of the past few months fighting the Germans. Like most of his fellow infantrymen of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was spending the holiday eve shivering in the muck, trying to keep warm. And it remains one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War-or of any war in history.īritish machine gunner Bruce Bairnsfather, later a prominent cartoonist, wrote about it in his memoirs. ![]() It came to be called the Christmas Truce. On Christmas Eve 1914, in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the first world war, a remarkable thing happened.
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