the world, was loved less than this bloodied patch of land. The mud flats remained frozen; the thin layer of white crystals that had fallen the afternoon before still formed a translucent sheet, glistening like the stubble on an old man’s beard. Dead trees, their leaves blasted away, were outlined in white against the mud. Stenciled against the landscape, they had no right to be so beautiful.
But the mood of the men that day was like that of the night before—somehow different from usual, and right from the beginning, from first light. You have to remember that in 1914, in the British army, we had no helmets—they were not introduced until 1916. So although the trenches were, in theory, supposed to be deeper than the height of a man, meaning one was always protected, in practice this was nowhere near true everywhere. Infills, underground streams, rocky outcrops all meant that, in many places, one had to stoop, or even crawl, to prevent one’s head from showing and presenting itself as an easy target to the enemy snipers.
But not that day. From daybreak, both sets of soldiers moved around freely, allowing themselves the luxury, for once, of standing up straight to shave, placing a mirror on the lip of a trench, in full daylight and in full view of the Germans, who did the same. We cooked breakfast, whistled our heads off, shouted “Happy Christmas” across the barbed wire, and those who could wrote letters home.
Around half past ten, one of their men stood up on open ground. He raised his arms, to show he was carrying no weapons, and held aloft a metal rod of some sort with a white handkerchief tied to it. I ordered that no one on our side should fire. Instead, we watched as he made his way forward, through the shell craters and frozen mud, to the German line of barbed wire. He stopped and beckoned.
I sent out the company sergeant, a carpenter from Bath called Frank Stephenson. He too was unarmed. He returned a short time later with a message.
“Their CO. would like to meet you at noon, sir, noon our time. For an exchange of gifts and a discussion about burying the dead.”
Gifts? What on earth did the Germans have to give us and, more important, what did we have to give them? Was the exchange of gifts even appropriate? But I liked the idea of a discussion about burying the dead. Corpses, or parts of corpses, lay all over no-man’s-land. The stench of decaying bodies, and the shrill squeaking of the rats as they gorged on the remains, never let us forget that, at the Front, death was not the end. Each and every one of us had lost good friends, even relatives, and a decent burial—any kind of burial—was the one thing we could do for men who were beyond all other forms of aid.
But what gifts could we exchange? Our men had nicknamed the trench the Great West Road, and Bond Street it wasn’t.
“We’ve got plenty of plum puddings, sir,” said Stephenson. “How about them?”
By God, he was right. “What’s your idea,” I said, chuckling. “To poison the Germans?”
Stephenson grinned.
Back in London the Daily Register had organized a campaign to see that all units at the Front were supplied with plum puddings for Christmas and, because the Register and the rest of the press were watching, the puddings had got through, in huge numbers. Boxes of the stuff occupied as much space as our ammunition dump.
“Brilliant idea, Sergeant,” I added. “Let’s kill them with kindness. Make the puddings ready, will you.” I hated the Daily Register and its hysterical jingoistic war coverage, and the idea of off-loading its Christmas gift onto the Germans appealed to me.
If the Germans opposite wanted to discuss burying the dead, we would have to make the most of the time available, so I instructed the men to bring together all our shovels and told Stephenson to start looking for wood, for crosses. It was such a change from my normal type of order that the men set to it with something approaching gusto.
At noon, I was the first out of the trench. It was unnerving to show myself but, after those first heart-stopping seconds, when any one of three hundred Germans could have riddled me with bullets, the fear vanished, to be followed by exhilaration as I stared across the landscape, viewing it like an ordinary person would in peacetime, the sort of ordinary person