Silent Night, Holy Night

Christmas: 1915        
by Percy MacKaye

Now is the midnight of the nations: dark 
    Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas, 
    Earth, like a mother in birth agonies, 
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark 
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark,
    Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees 
    Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades 
Wrenching the night’s imponderable arc. 
 
Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn 
    Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another
    Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother 
Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn 
    From her racked flesh?—What splendour from the smother? 
What new-wing’d world, or mangled god still-born?



It was Christmas Eve of 1915, during World War I. In the trenches (and no man's land in between) near the village of Laventie in France, British and German soldiers were fighting when the British Army regiment of the Royal Welch Fusiliers heard the Germans singing Silent Night. In response, they sang another carol, Good King Wenceslas. The next day, Christmas, both British and German soldiers got out of their trenches and greeted each other. For the next half an hour or so, the war was forgotten and both sides played a friendly game of football.

music by Celtic Thunder