Christmas Remembered

-I always told my men ‘This is all temporary. We’re gonna be out of here by Christmas!’ TITLE -We had a lot of married people. It was hard on them, being away over Christmas. -Well, we used to sing ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ 1945… we sang it. -All we got was one can of Irish stew, in a can thrown to us : ‘Here you are, that’s your Christmas dinner’ because we were up on the front line, you see… -It seemed like Christmas and it didn’t seem like Christmas. It was too far from home, too much danger, a lot of discomfort. -We had our famous Christmas in the trench. Christmas in a trench is not funny because that night, a light snow was falling, just enough to cover the ground, and we said : ‘Back home it’s Midnight Mass. All of a sudden, in the loud speakers, they played ‘Holy Night’ and ‘Lili Marlene’ and all those things. It was tough. -We were promised that we would have turkey and a real Canadian Christmas dinner. We were the last to get there. One of the girls said : ‘Those pots sound empty!’ And we said no, they couldn’t be! She said ‘It seems there is nothing left! We said this is Christmas, there will be enough left for us. Got down to the bottom and there was nothing for the four of us or the six of us, they were just empty! -They started shooting phosphorus bombs of different colours, blue, red, yellow, it was very… but after that, you start thinking… -My position was up in the roof of the house, like in the attic of the house and I had knocked the brick out, I was doing observation up there. And a German soldier come out and I had to shoot him on Christmas day, that bothers me so much. -Christmas night, one of the soldiers we had with us committed suicide… and that really affected us. -Christmas morning dawn, we got up, the Japanese brought a tree in which we decorated, they brought a couple of long tables in which we put some linen sheets on, then they brought in a few loaves of bread, extra rice, oranges, even 24 quarts of beer. They lined us all up around the table, took pictures then took the whole damn thing out again. -We used to play Christmas carols over the wireless sets and over the system set we had. You could hear Christmas carols in the front lines! And that kind a made you feel nice that it was Christmas day. At least we’re not fighting, at least it’s peaceful today. -Christmas 1945, when I came back to Canada, this was a lively Christmas, full of joy, full of songs… you can’t imagine what it is, compared to the one you had spent before. It was day and night.