After the 19th December attack, we were back in the same trenches when Christmas Day came along. It was a terrible winter, everything was covered in snow, everything was white. The devastated landscape looked terrible in its true colours — clay and mud and broken brick - but when it was covered in snow, it was beautiful. Then we heard the Germans singing ‘Silent night, Holy night’, and they put up a notice saying ‘Merry Christmas’, so we put one up too. While they were singing our boys said, ‘Let’s join in,’ so we joined in and when we started singing, they stopped. And when we stopped, they started again. So we were easing the way. Then one German took a chance and jumped up on top of the trench and shouted out, ‘Happy Christmas, Tommy!’ So of course our boys said, ‘If he can do it, we can do it,’ and we all jumped up. A sergeant-major shouted, ‘Get down!’ But we said, ‘Shut up Sergeant, it’s Christmas time!’ And we all went forward to the barbed wire. We could barely reach through the wire, because the barbed wire was not just one fence, it was two or three fences together, with a wire inbetween. And so we just shook hands and I had the experience of talk-ing to one German who said to me, ‘Do you know where the Essex Road in London is?’ I replied, ‘Yes, my uncles had a shoe repairing shop there.’ He said, ‘That’s funny. There’s a barber shop on the other side where I used to work.’ << less