FREDERICK Luke, the popular janitor at Glasgow High School, made the news in July 1941 when it was announced that he had been accepted for volunteer service with the RAF. It was reported that he hoped to start training within a few days for the defence of British aerodromes. His son, Fred, was an air-gunner with the RAF. Luke was no ordinary soldier; he had, after all, been awarded a Victoria Cross (pictured) for his heroics in the Great War. “Sergeant Luke,” recollected the Glasgow Herald said in 1941, “was decorated when he galloped through an inferno of shell and fire to save two guns of his battery of the Royal Field Artillery. Another team making the attempt was wiped out. Luke got through and brought the guns to safety.”
A Christmas Truce at the World War I Front
Editor’s Note: This article was published in The Remnant in 2006 after having first appeared on the Your Guide to 20th Century History website. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author. The original song by John McCutcheon is well worth listening to as you read this incredible story from a day and age not so very far removed from our own but, alas, fading in every way from the consciousness of grown up and enlightened men who ve lost sight of God, Country and even who and what they are anymore much less the true meaning of Christmas.
This is how the Christmas truce happened on the Western Front in 1914 Peter Hart, Military History Magazine December 24, 2020 The Illustrated London News s illustration of the Christmas Truce: British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches (via Wikimedia Commons)
In the lead-up to Christmas 1914 soldiers on either side of the Western Front no man’s land set aside fear and their weapons to exchange surreal holiday greetings. By late December 1914 World War I had been raging for nearly five months. Had anyone really believed it would be “all over by Christmas,” then it was clear they had been cruelly mistaken. With the strength of imperial Germany now evident to all, there appeared to be no chance of victory in the foreseeable future. By this time men were beginning, almost despite themselves, to gain a kind of grudging respect for their opposite numbers lurking across no man’s land. They were enduring the
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What Happened When WWI Paused for Christmas Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!
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On Christmas Eve 1914, in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the first world war, a remarkable thing happened.
It came to be called the Christmas Truce. And it remains one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War or of any war in history.
British machine gunner Bruce Bairnsfather, later a prominent cartoonist, wrote about it in his memoirs. Like most of his fellow infantrymen of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was spending the holiday eve shivering in the muck, trying to keep warm. He had spent a good part of the past few months fighting the Germans. And now, in a part of Belgium called Bois de Ploegsteert, he was crouched in a trench that stretched just three feet deep by three feet wide, his days and nights marked by an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuit