Nov 25, 2005
Last Known Veteran of the Great War’s Christmas Truce Dies Aged 109
Alfred Anderson died peacefully in his sleep on Monday. He was the last member of the British Expeditionary Force—the Old Contemptibles—and the sole remaining survivor of the Christmas truce on the Western Front in 1914. He was also Britain’s oldest man, having been born in 1896.
Go here to read more about his life and his recollections of the Christmas truce.
Only last year he spoke in detail of his memories of Christmas 1914, when British and German troops clambered out of their trenches, sang carols and played football by kicking around empty bully-beef cans, using their steel helmets as goalposts. “I remember the silence, the eerie silence,” he said of the unofficial truce, which spread along much of the 500-mile Western Front where more than a million men were bunkered down.
“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 voices,” he said. “But there was a dead silence that 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.”
You can read his obituary here before it goes behind subscription at 7 pm (EST) this Friday.
For more on the British Expeditionary Force under the command of Sir John French, go here.
For more on the Christmas truce in 1914, go here, here, here (scroll down for contemporary accounts), here for a German perspective on the truce, and here (scroll down to read about fraternization between opposing armies in the Peninsula War (in Spain), the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War).
According to the Guardian, there are now believed to be only eight survivors of the First World War left in Britain.
Go here to read more about his life and his recollections of the Christmas truce.
Only last year he spoke in detail of his memories of Christmas 1914, when British and German troops clambered out of their trenches, sang carols and played football by kicking around empty bully-beef cans, using their steel helmets as goalposts. “I remember the silence, the eerie silence,” he said of the unofficial truce, which spread along much of the 500-mile Western Front where more than a million men were bunkered down.
“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 voices,” he said. “But there was a dead silence that 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.”
You can read his obituary here before it goes behind subscription at 7 pm (EST) this Friday.
For more on the British Expeditionary Force under the command of Sir John French, go here.
For more on the Christmas truce in 1914, go here, here, here (scroll down for contemporary accounts), here for a German perspective on the truce, and here (scroll down to read about fraternization between opposing armies in the Peninsula War (in Spain), the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War).
According to the Guardian, there are now believed to be only eight survivors of the First World War left in Britain.