I was a tenor and had performed London’s Covent Garden opera house in 1913, but i had never sung for a French or Belgian audience but that all changed one Christmas Eve in 1914.
I was accompanying the German Crown Prince Wilhelm on a Yuletide 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, i was asked to sing for them and i began 'Silent Night' and the power of the carol and the contrast between the carol’s message of tranquillity and hope and the violence of war was compelling and the grimness of trench warfare was never so clear as on that night.
The British, French and Belgian trenches were 100 yards away in the clear, cold night of Christmas Eve, my voice carried very far and at the end of the song, they applauded me so i sang it again, this time in English and from across the wasteland between us, the Brtish 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 i climbed to the top and held one aloft and sang O Come, All Ye Faithful.
The British crawled out to see this chubby German standing on a trench holding up a Christmas Tree and i edged forward, so did they and then the German troops crawled out and both sides kept edging forward tentatively until we met in the middle meaning we gained more ground in one Christmas Eve piss up then we did in the whole of the war.
These men who had been seeking to kill each other for five bloody months refrained from dealing death and 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 obviously.
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 ordered their guys to continue with their brilliant plan which involved them climbing out of their trenches and walking very slowly towards our machine guns.
I gave up my singing career in the mid-1930s and worked as a singing teacher in Berlin but the memory of that night stayed with me forever, the futile waste of life, some just children, and in my mind that Don Quixote quote of the dying soldiers having no glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning Why? Not that they were asking why they were dying, but why they had ever lived'.
Sadly, young men and women sent to fight old man's wars have been asking that same question ever since.
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