by Gregory Tomlin, posted Thursday, December 22, 2005 (18 years ago)
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Soldier’s promise
Tom Townsend, standing in front of his World War II memorabilia, recounts: “When I left for the army at the train station, my mother gave me a Bible -- a New Testament. She made me promise that I would read it every day. … Sixty years later, I’m still reading a chapter a day just like I promised.” Photo by Lisa Watson
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Even in the final years of his life, Alfred Anderson could remember the Christmas of 1914.
Born in 1896, Anderson was a member of the United Kingdom’s famed Black Watch regiment during World War I. On Dec. 25, 1914, firing along the 500-mile long Western Front ceased momentarily. Allied and German soldiers crawled from their trenches and exchanged greetings and lapel pins. Moments later, the troops returned to their lines and the killing began again.
“All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine gun fire and distant German voices,” Anderson told a British newspaper last year. “But there was dead silence in the morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.” Read More
