(light on the speaker)

Hundreds of soldiers wrote home about it, one saying “it was the most extraordinary thing imaginable.” Pictures of it appeared in The London Evening News less than a month after it happened. Still, some refused to believe such an odd bit of rumuor. But the Christmas Truce of 1914?  It happened.

By September of that year British, French and Belgium forces had stopped Germany’s westward push into France.  But the Germans had not retreated.

It was a stalemate.

Along the 27- mile stretch of the Flanders plain, the “Tommies” and the “Fritzes” began digging. They had been ordered to entrench.

By Christmas, the North Sea’s bitter wind howled relentlessly and an icy rain, caring nothing for the misery of any man, flooded the trenches. All military operations ceased as both sides fought a common enemy - the inescapable Flanders mud.

The distrust, the anomosity…it was intense. At only five months old, the war had already claimed thousands of young men on both sides. The Germans spoke of the “pagan” French and the “soullessness” of the British while the Brits wrote of the “monstrous and unspeakable wickedness” of the Saxons.

But now these men sat only 30 yards apart, separated by No Man’s Land. It was impossible not to be curious about the man in the trench opposite you, knowing he was suffering just as much as himself.

And then, on Christmas Eve, the rain stopped. The temperature dropped, hardening the mud. The normal stench of the trenches – chorlide of lime, soaked clothing, gun smoke and decay – all disappeared.  It became quiet as stars blanketed the sky and frost covered the ground.

Even the Tommies’ sniper, who usually delivered his 9 p.m. “goodnight kiss,” took the evening off.

Both sides had been sent a literal avalanche of clothing, food, tobacco, liquor and even Christmas trees from their countrymen. Suddenly lanterns, torches and…candle lit trees…could be seen above the German trenches.

(speaker closes her eyes for a moment)

Can you imagine the sight?

And then, the Germans began to sing...

(light goes off speaker and onto a man singing Silent Night in German)

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