In the autumn of 1914, Pope Benedict XV tried unsuccessfully to stop a war that he described as “The suicide of civilized Europe.” On December 7, 1914 he pleaded for a Christmas truce, at least “upon the night the angels sang” to allow for peace negotiations. This fell on deaf ears of all leaders of nations at war. But, on Christmas Eve thousands of British, Belgian and French soldiers put down their rifles, emerged from trenches to shake hands with the enemy, exchange gifts and spent Christmas mingling with their German enemies along the Western front. Soldiers sang all the Christmas songs they knew during days of unofficial truce. Some sources tell us that it all began with German soldiers singing Stille Nacht. This is very possible, as German soldiers would have been most familiar with the Christmas carol Silent Night since it was first composed in German by Austrian priest Josef Mohr in 1816. Mohr sang it for the first time in 1818 at midnight Mass in Oberndorf, Austria, accompanied on the guitar by assistant pastor Franz Gruber who had composed the melody.
For more than one hundred years now, this event in the trenches has been considered a kind of miracle. Weary of fighting, with desperate longing for peace, soldiers on all sides defied authority and managed an almost perfect truce for several days. There is no known exact record of the order of events that broke out across the trenches but it is likely that 100,000 soldiers participated in the legendary truce. At the end of the war in 1918, there were 56 Yorkton men and 65,000 Canadian men who died!
Contact Terri Lefebvre Prince,
Heritage Researcher,
City of Yorkton Archives,
Box 400, 37 Third Avenue North
Yorkton, Sask. S3N 2W3
306-786-1722
[email protected]
