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  Our Troops Rock!  Thank you for all you do! For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.   Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!     ~ Hall of Heroes ~ The Christmas Truce Info from here.             You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench.  It is the evening of 24 December 1914 and you are on the dreaded Western Front. Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over...

What if they called a war and peace broke out instead? That's exactly what happened during the Christmas season of 1914 when the soldiers themselves called a truce and, had it not been for intervention by the higher authorities on both sides, World War I might have ended. Stanley Weintraub does an excellent job of preserving for posterity this remarkable wartime truce in his book  Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, and much of what follows is derived from that valuable source. The truce came as no surprise, Weintraub explains, as there were early indications...

"A complete Boche figure suddenly appeared on the parapet and looked about. This complaint became infectious. It didn't take 'Our Bert' long to be up on the skyline. This was a signal for more Boche anatomy to be disclosed, and this was replied to by all our Alfs and Bills, until, in less time than it takes to tell, half a dozen or so of each of the belligerents were outside the trenches, and were advancing towards each other in no-man's land. "A strange sight, truly!" So writes Bruce Bairnsfather about the Christmas Truce of 1914. This event was an...

LONDON (Reuters) - The last known surviving allied veteran of the Christmas Truce that saw German and British soldiers shake hands between the trenches in World War One died Monday at 109, his parish priest said. Alfred Anderson was the oldest man in Scotland and the last known surviving Scottish veteran of the war. "I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence," he was quoted as saying in the Observer newspaper last year, describing the day-long Christmas Truce of 1914, which began spontaneously when German soldiers sang carols in the trenches, and British soldiers responded in English. "All I'd...

During World War I, in the winter of 1914, on the battlefields of Flanders, one of the most unusual events in all of human history took place. The Germans had been in a fierce battle with the British and French. Both sides were dug in, safe in muddy, man-made trenches six to eight feet deep that seemed to stretch forever.

The Christmas Truce By Robin Oliver December 23, 2003 Eighty-nine years ago this Christmas, just eight kilometres from the Flemish city of Ypres, an extraordinary event occurred between German and British troops in the narrow and perilous strip of no-man's land separating their trenches. Here on Christmas Eve on the British side of a muddy landscape, with the bodies of soldiers killed in the first Battle of Ypres two months earlier still lying where they fell, could be heard the sounds of Germans singing. It was thought they had been drinking. Alcohol was barred in the British front lines but...

Editor’s Note: This article was published in The Remnant in 2006 after having first appeared on the Your Guide to 20th Century History website. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author. The original song by John McCutcheon is well worth listening to as you read this incredible story from a day and age not so very far removed from our own but, alas, fading in every way from the consciousness of "grown up" and "enlightened" men who've lost sight of God, Country and even who and what they are anymore-- much less the true meaning of Christmas. MJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=s9coPzDx6tA___________________________Though World...

"We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles ... in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas." British and German soldiers gathered in a dusty field in Afghanistan on Wednesday to play a game of soccer in memory of a Christmas truce spontaneously called between their armies a century ago during World War One. That moment in 1914 - when troops along Europe's Flanders front met after four months killing each...

With British and German forces separated only by a no-man's land littered with fallen comrades, sounds of a German Christmas carol suddenly drifted across the frigid air. "It was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere: and at about 7 or 8 in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights -- I don't know what they were. And then they sang, "Silent Night" – "Stille Nacht." I shall never forget it, it was one of the highlights of my life. I thought, what a beautiful tune,"...

On Christmas morning we stuck up a board with ‘A Merry Christmas’ on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one…. Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench… So wrote a British soldier named Frank Richards, referring to the first Christmas of World War I, one hundred years ago this...

An incredible letter from trenches of the First World War by a soldier describing how he organised the famous 'Christmas Day Truce' has been unearthed and is expected to fetch £20,000 at auction. The eight-page pencilled note was sent by Lance Corporal Willie Loasby of the 2nd Northamptonshire Regiment to his mother on December 27, 1914. The 25-year-old tells how he started shouting to German soldiers who were just 40 yards away in the trenches a few days before Christmas. He explains how he persuaded the enemy not to shoot before bravely walking out into No Man's Land to meet...

German and British soldiers laid down arms in holiday celebration, took up soccer. As darkness crept over British and German trenches on Christmas Eve of 1914, one of history’s most astounding and heart-warming anomalies of warfare spontaneously unfolded. The German and British troops halted their fire and laid down their arms in order to sing to one another, exchange gifts, bury their dead together and according to many recollections, play friendly games of soccer in the no-man’s land that has been strewn with the bodies hours earlier. According to most accounts recorded in diaries and interviews years later, the 1914...

. . . James McIvor has found an instance in the Civil War when the animosity between the Union and Confederate soldiers also lifted, if only for the length of a single song . . . As the opposing forces settled into battle lines near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on December 30, 1862, the bands on each side played an evening concert for their respective comrades. The two concerts continued, unharmoniously enough, until, “as if by common consent,” recalled the Tennesseean, both took up “Home, Sweet Home.” The men on both sides soon joined together in singing the song. When it was...

The First World War's horrors still move us but one man recalls his moment of peace amid the bloodshed The words drifted across the frozen battlefield: 'Stille Nacht. Heilige Nacht. Alles Schlaft, einsam wacht'. To the ears of the British troops peering over their trench, the lyrics may have been unfamiliar but the haunting tune was unmistakable. After the last note a lone German infantryman appeared holding a small tree glowing with light. 'Merry Christmas. We not shoot, you not shoot.' It was just after dawn on a bitingly cold Christmas Day in 1914, 90 years ago on Saturday, and...

At Christmas, 1914, there occurred several informal truces at various points along the trench-lines of Northern France and Belgium. It may well be that there were other places where truces took place, but our precise knowledge of events is limited by the amount of direct, eyewitness testimony which has so far been discovered. Nevertheless, there are enough trustworthy reports (and even a few photographs) to convince us that something extraordinary happened that first Christmas of the war, and that it was not entirely an isolated happening. The image of opposing soldiers, shaking hands with each other on one day and...

<p>It was the night before Christmas, give or take a day or two, and even in the muddy pits they called home, the troops were in merry spirits. It was December 1914, the first Christmas season of World War I, and German and English soldiers were hunkered down in trenches that slashed parallel lines across thousands of miles of European countryside. The war had come to a screeching halt -- neither side could advance, neither would retreat.</p>

Christmas on the Battlefield The 1914 Christmas truce. Q&amp;A by Kathryn Jean Lopez December 22-28, 2001 &nbsp; tanley Weintraub is author of the new history, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (Dimensions, 224 pp., $17.50). Kathryn Jean Lopez: What led you to write a book about the 1914 Christmas truce? Stanley Weintraub: In 1985 I published a book about the five days leading up to the Armistice in November 1918, A Stillness Heard Round the World: The End of the Great War. While researching it I discovered the abortive informal armistice in 1914 that ...

As the guns of August spoke to start World War I, the British foreign secretary, Edward Grey, said, "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them again in our lifetime." As a prediction, his poetic quote held up. Over the next 35 years, democracy guttered out across the continent until the Allies of World War II rolled back the darkness. But there was a moment when it almost seemed as if Lord Grey had spoken rashly. It came at Christmas in 1914. Trench lines already stretched from the Swiss border to the North Sea. But ...