Snoopy's Christmas

In this re-mixed cover version of Snoopy's Christmas by Greg Bravo parts of the song were edited to sound like it's playing on an early Edison Lo-Fi Box (like a scratchy record) giving more of a feeling for the period in which the story takes place.

Always liked this song very much and loved Snoopy and the Peanuts characters, but it takes on a whole new meaning when you think of the parallels it has to the informal British-German truce along the WWI Western Front in Belgium on Christmas Eve of 1914. There the troops decorated bunkers with small Christmas trees and met in "No Man's Land," the battlefield between the trenches of the opposing forces. They exchanged wine, cognac and cigarettes for Westphalian black bread, biscuits and ham, and some even remained friends after the war.

It happened again in December of 1915 when the Christmas bells sounded in the villages of the Vosges behind the lines. German and French troops spontaneously made peace and ceased hostilities; visited each other through disused trench tunnels, and again exchanged wine, cognac and cigarettes, food, etc.

One eyewitness account by Richard Schirrmann, who was in a German regiment holding a position on the Bernhardstein, one of the mountains of the Vosges, and separated from the French troops by a narrow no-mans-land, described by him as strewn with shattered trees, the ground ploughed up by shellfire, a wilderness of earth, tree-roots and tattered uniforms.

Military discipline was soon restored, but Schirrmann pondered over the incident, and whether thoughtful young people of all countries could be provided with suitable meeting places where they could get to know each other. He went on to found the German Youth Hostel Association in 1919.

The informal armastace was depicted in a movie called Joyeux Noel, and it's a great story. Go watch it!

Also very interesting is that the Red Baron was indeed a real person named Baron Manfred von Richthofen. He downed 80 British, Canadian and Australian planes before being shot down and killed himself by Australian artillery. His life was over at the age of only 25, and he was given a full military burial by the British pilots with the honor and dignity they felt he deserved.

They respected him as German aviators also respected their British foes. There was no bitter hatred between the two, this was their job. They had no reason to kill each other than the fact that their superiors told them to.

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[sashavaz]

it was 53 bty RAA

[ADKLadyHawk]

:-)