Today Is...WW1 Christmas Truce

Walter Kirchhoff was a middling Opera Singer, you won't find his name amongst the greats but he instigated one of the most well known moments in the 20th Century.
He was accompanying the German Crown Prince Wilhelm on a Christmas Eve visit to the German Troops on the Western front in the time before Hitler realised that picking a fight with the entire world wasn't going to end well for him and as a morale boost for the men, he was asked to sing for them and began 'Silent Night' and his powerful voice carried over to the British, French and Belgian trenches less than 100 yards away and at the end of the song, they applauded so he sang it again, this time in English and from across the wasteland between them, the British began singing along, then a Scottish guy joined in with bagpipes.
The German troops had been sent thousands of 3-foot-tall Christmas trees, already decorated with candles and a couple of the guys lifted them up onto the top of the trenches and Kirchoff climbed out of the trench and held one aloft and sang O Come, All Ye Faithful.
The British crawled out to see this German Opera singer standing on a trench holding up a Christmas Tree and as he tentatively shuffled forward, so did they and then the German troops crawled out and both sides kept edging forward until they met in the middle, meaning they both gained more ground in one Christmas Eve piss up then they did in most of the war.
These men who had been seeking to kill each other for five bloody months began trading gifts, drinking together, singing and agreed a truce for the night to remove the dead and wounded from the no-mans land, they even had a game of football with tied-up bundles of cloth, Germany v England with the Germans winning on penalties probably.
Both the German and Allied commanders made sure it never happened again, the German troops that had met with their enemy counterparts were taken off the front lines and replaced with soldiers who hadn’t been involved. The British military authorities declared any further informal truces with the enemy would result in a Court Martial and ordered their guys to continue with their brilliant plan which involved them climbing out of their trenches and walking very slowly towards the German machine guns.