Bible
Key Verse: Verse 8 – “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.”
Key Words: I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me to dwell in safety.
This story has been
told in a variety of ways, but this is the researched version that appeared in
newspapers nationwide on December 25, 1994, from the Associated Press.
Eighty years ago, on the first Christmas Day of
World War I, British and German troops put down their guns and celebrated
peacefully together in the no-man’s land between the trenches.
The war, briefly, came to a halt.
In some places, festivities began when German
troops lit candles on Christmas trees on their parapets so the British sentries
a few hundred yards away could see them.
Elsewhere, the British acted first, starting
bonfires and letting off rockets. Pvt.
Oswald Tilley of the London Rifle Brigade wrote to his parents: “Just you think that while you were eating
your turkey etc. I was out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had
been trying to kill a few hours before!!
It was astounding.”
Both armies had received lots of comforts from
home and felt generous and well disposed toward their enemies in the first
winter of the war, before the vast battles of attrition began in 1915,
eventually claiming 10 million lives.
All along the line that Christmas Day, soldiers
found their enemies were much like them and began asking why they should be
trying to kill each other.
The generals were shocked. High Command diaries and statements express
anxiety that if that sort of thing spread it could sap the troops’ will to fight.
The soldiers in khaki and gray sang carols to each
other, exchanged gifts of tobacco, jam, sausage, chocolate and liquor, traded
names and addresses and played soccer between the shell holes and barbed
wire. They even paid mutual trench
visits.
This day is called “the most famous truce in
military history” by the British television producer, Malcolm Brown, and
researcher, Shirley Seaton, in their book Christmas Truce, published in
1984.
What to do:
✞ Remember only through Jesus Christ can men dwell together in peace.
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