Stille Nacht...

 

Once a month Carolyn and I go to Fort Wayne to play with the ukulele folks there. Their group is called Tru Ukes and meets at the Jefferson Point Pizza Hut. A bit unusual? Yes, it is. The group has been meeting there for years. They play for an hour and a half and then order pizza, of course. We really like playing with them, although their chords seem a little bit harder than the ones we rehearse here in town. I mean, how often do I need a F#7? So, going to their group makes us play a little better, and we sure work a little harder.

The group is led by a lovely couple, Mike and Susan. This past weekend was our meet up! Mike handed out bells for our wrists so that when we played Jingle Bells or any other lively song, we would have fun bells accompanying our uke. We play, on average, 17 songs per session. That is a lot of uke playing. On Saturday, before our last song, Mike told the story of Christmas in the trenches. I was so happy about that. I know that story. I love that story. It was made quite famous by my friend and musician, John McCutcheon, who wrote a ballad about the event. Mike told the story and then we played Silent Night and sang the last verse in German, as it was written.

Since Saturday I just can’t get the song or the story out of my head. I know I have written about it before, maybe even more than once, but if you are a new reader or have forgotten, here is the story.

The year was 1914. It was Christmas Eve on the Western Front. The war was raging. The men were tired, hungry, lonely, homesick, but there they were. On one small part of the front, German soldiers began to sing. They sang songs from their homeland and then they sang Christmas carols. Many Christmas carols are German in origin, so they had plenty to sing. One the other side of the trench was The British Expeditionary Force known as the BEF. The German troops also put up small fir trees along the trenches and small lanterns. I assume they got the trees from the forest. The British men were quite amazed and really didn’t know what to do with this. They had been trained in warfare, but not in this.

The next day, which was Christmas, they joined up together in no man’s land. They exchanged chocolates, cigarettes, and other gifts from back home. In 1914 Britain’s Princess Mary wanted each man to have a gift for Christmas so she sent small packages to each soldier. In the packet were cigarettes and tobacco. These packets were shared. It was said they shared photos of loved ones…many of their sweethearts. They play football. The soldiers did not speak each other’s language, but that did not matter. For two days they celebrated. They helped each other work on the trenches and they gathered their dead from either side and buried them together.

Not everyone was happy about this event. Some officers were worried they would not be able to go back into battle after Christmas. I ask the same question. How can you go back into battle once you know a person…once you see their sweetheart’s picture they keep close in their pocket…once you shared your chocolates and cigarettes?

After this wonderful event, it never happened again. John McCutcheon wrote a song about it and memorialized the event. Perhaps we would never have known the story without McCutcheon.

Sitting with all my friendly uke players, each one in red or green for the holidays, I looked around at them as Mike told the story. Most did not know it, so I was very grateful Mike talked about it. As we turned over our song sheets, there was the last song for us to play. Silent Night with the last verse in German. We played and sang with all our voices and our ukes blending together in harmony. When we got to the last verse, I took a deep breath. I love this song, and I love singing it in German. I sang with all my heart letting tears drip down thinking about Christmas in the trenches in 1914.

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!