OUT OF THE SILENT NIGHT... My new poem about Christmas Eve 1914...

 Out Of The Silent Night…

There had been a lull in hostilities during the day,

 Which I hadn’t realised was Christmas Eve,

For trench routines had barely altered.

Lice still irritated the skin and rats still gnawed away

The flesh of recent casualties. And the cold, the smell,

The loss, the indignity, the nausea, the pain

And damp, rotting socks inside wet, torn boots remained, 

Along with the inexorable fear, nagging and worrying  

The minds of we infantrymen, awaiting death’s knell.

Seated upon a pile of broken duckboards, my thoughts astray,

I was scribbling lines of cruel verse, my way to grieve

Yet keep a level head, for too often I had faltered.  

Despair and desolation within those walls of mud and clay,

Heightened by the constant expectation of a German shell

Had rendered me mentally unstable, grappling with the strain

Of staying alert, until I became immune to the threat, ingrained.

The lingering terror of we infantrymen persisted in that hell…

And then in that midwinter bleak, cruel and grey,

With a tot of rum warming deep within my soul,

A silence dropped like night over the violent affray

And the faint sound of a single bell began to toll…

Distant voices, mellow, sad but somehow melodic

From the Hun’s lines, 'Stille Nacht…’  were heard

Approaching slowly into a no-man’s-land usually chaotic,

And a curious feeling of camaraderie within me stirred…

Like gas drifting from our front line trench, slowly

We crept over the parapet from blood stained ladders cautiously,

To spy the enemy smoking and wishing us well, if nervously

And tears filled my sore eyes, as I stepped forth, carefully… 

A Hun approached, shook my hand and offered me tobacco to share

But I hesitated, then reflected upon the words of a hymn I recalled

And wondered what little in my damp pockets for him I could spare.

Yet what I had I gave him whilst the cruel hostilities had stalled…

Those moments spent in uneasy peace were puzzling and fey:

To give to a loathed enemy and in return receive

Not only rations but friendship, if not truly vetted.

I wanted the amicability to last through Christmas Day,

Which to my surprise it did, until another bleak night fell

And the guns began to roar and destroy and maim and kill again,

With murderous lust and hate and godless ire unrestrained,

As I hid in the mire of the trench, my stinking Flanders cell…

Pete Ray

December 2023…

Thinking of what Christmas Eve might have been like for an infantryman during December 1914…

One of my grandfathers was nearby when the unofficial ‘Christmas truce’ took place and a game of football was apparently played between British and German troops…