Silent Night

I just finished watching this movie called Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) - an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. It was based on true events that happened during Christmas in 1914 where, as the Observer article below put it, "Weary men climbed hesitantly at first out of trenches and stumbled into no man's land. They shook hands, sang carols, lit each other's cigarettes, swapped tunic buttons and addresses and, most famously, played football, kicking around empty bully-beef cans and using their caps or steel helmets as goalposts. The unauthorised Christmas truce spread across much of the 500-mile Western Front where more than a million men were encamped."

Here are some links on the Christmas Truce:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/christmastruce.htm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1376965,00.html
These two articles give an overall picture of the events that happened.

http://www.christmastruce.co.uk/letters.html

This website is devoted to Operation Plum Puddings, which aims to collate the many letters printed in UK regional papers from soldiers who took part in the Christmas Truce of 1914. About 80 letters from 100 newspapers have been transcribed so far. This website's home page also has a link to a list of the songs that were sung by the soldiers during the truce. It's A Long Way To Tipperary made it to the list as did Silent Night, Onward Christian Soldiers and the Austrian anthem :-)

I read some of the letters, and went through the first two articles. What amazed me was how these men decided that even though there was a war, peace could still be had for a while on Christmas. There was even a short English-German service held by an English clergyman! The reason the higher authorities knew about the truces was that the soldiers had written about them in their letters home! But most heartbreaking was the fact that for some of these letter writers, they never made it home.

There are two books written about the 1914 Christmas truce:
1. Christmas Truce - M Brown and S Seaton. (out of print, but second-hand editions available at amazon - I checked)

2. Silent Night, The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914 - Stanley Weintraub. (I hope I can find it at Kino!)

I think it's very encouraging to know that God's Spirit does touch people even in the most terrible of times, the most difficult of circumstances and that for a moment, as a character in the movie said: "We can forget about the war."