I started crawling back towards our lines, and I had never seen so many dead men clumped together. That was all I could see and I thought to myself, ‘All the world’s dead – they’re all dead – they’re all dead’. That’s all I could think as I crawled along. Everywhere I passed, to my left and my right were dead men laying on the ground.
Pte Charles Taylor, 13 Battalion, Yorks and Lancs
One summer evening after the Battle of the Somme had started the guns were rumbling and there was a terrible nose of battle in our ears. Yet where we lay, just thirty metres from the trenches, there were mountains and peace, and hardly any shooting. We could see the French soldiers, and one night a Frenchman started to sing – he was a wonderful tenor. None of us dared to shoot and suddenly we were all looking out from the tranches and applauding, and the Frenchman said ‘Merci‘!
It was peace in the middle of war, and the strange thing was that – just a few kilometres northwards – the terrible battle of the Somme was going on.
Captain Herbert Sulzbach, German Artillery
We were still fighting hard and losing men – we knew nothing of the proposed Armistice, we didn’t know until a quarter to ten on that day. As we advanced on the village of Guiry a runner came up and told us that the Armistice would be signed at 11 o’ clock that day, the 11th of November. That was the first we knew of it.
We were lined up on a railway bank nearby, the same railway bank that the Manchesters had lined up on in 1914. They had fought at the Battle of Mons in August that year. Some of us went down to a wood in a little valley and found the skeletons of some of the Manchesters still lying there. Lying there with their boots on, very still, no helmets, no rusty rifles or equipment, just their boots.
Marine Hubert Trotman, Royal Marine Light Infantry
It wasn’t like London, where they all got drunk of course. No, it wasn’t like that, it was all very quiet. You were so dazed that you just didn’t realise that you could stand up straight and not be shot.
Corporal Reginald Leonard Haine, 1 Honourable Artillery Company
The Armistice came, the day we had dreamed of. The guns stopped, the fighting stopped. Four years of noise and bangs ended in silence. The killings had stopped.
We were stunned. I had been out since 1914, I should have been happy. I was sad. I thought of the slaughter, the hardships, the waste and the friends I had lost.
Sgt Major Richard Tobin, Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division
Blackhall St Columba’s Parish Church is the place to be for murder mystery fans this month when the St Columba’s Dramatic Society performs ‘Curtain Up On Murder’ from 21 – 23 November.
