For nearly five months the war had been fought with mounting severity. Suddenly, as darkness fell on Christmas Eve, there was, in sections of the front line, a moment of peaceable behaviour. ‘We got into conversation with the Germans who were anxious to arrange an Armistice during Xmas,' a 25-year-old lieutenant with the Scots Guards, Sir Edward Hulse, wrote in his battalion's war diary. ‘A scout named F. Murker went out and met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn't fire at them they would not fire at us.' That night, on a front where five days earlier there had been savage fighting, the guns were silent.
On the following morning, German soldiers walked across towards the British wire and British soldiers went out to meet them. ‘They appeared to be most amicable and exchanged Souvenirs, cap stars, Badges etc.,' noted Hulse. The British gave the German soldiers plum puddings ‘which they much appreciated'. Then arrangements were made between the two sides to bury the British dead who had been killed during the disastrous raid on the night of December 18, and whose bodies were still lying between the lines, mostly at the edge of the German front-line wire where they had been shot down. ‘The Germans brought the bodies to a half way line and we buried them,' Hulse wrote in the battalion diary. ‘Detachments of British and Germans formed a line and a German and English Chaplain read some prayers alternately. The whole of this was done in great solemnity and reverence.'
That Christmas Day, fraternisation between the Germans and their enemies took place almost everywhere in the British No-Man's Land, and at places in the French and Belgian lines. It was almost always initiated by German troops, through either messages or song. Near Ploegsteert a German-speaking British officer, Captain R.J. Armes, having listened with his men to a German soldier's serenade, called for another and was treated to Schumann's ‘The Two Grenadiers'. Men from both sides then left their trenches and met in No-Man's Land, when there was ‘some conviviality', as Captain Armes called it, followed by two final songs, ‘Die Wacht Am Rhein' from the Germans and ‘Christians Wake!' from the British.
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