'A very funny thing happened on ‘Xmas Eve. The Germans, who are only 100 yards in front of our trenches, started singing'

The soldiers who wrote home to the Lothians with firsthand accounts of the miraculous 'Christmas truce'

Christmas in No Man’s Land - the truce in the trenches

It was the night before Christmas in 1914. All along the ghastly stalemate that was the Western Front that Christmas Eve, soldiers offered prayers in their native English, French and German that they would live through the festive season.

The newly ascended Pope Benedict XV had called “that the guns m…