"On Christmas Day the Germans never fired a shot, and we were walking about the trenches. In the afternoon about three o'clock the ----, who were on our right, started whistling and shouting to the Germans whose trenches were only four hundred yards away. They asked them to come down.... After about ten minutes two Germans ventured out, and the ---- went to meet them. When they met they shook hands with each other, and then other Germans came, and so we went up to them.... I was a bit timid at first, but me and a lad called Starling went up and I shook hands with about sixteen Germans. They gave us cigars and cigarettes and toffee, and they told us they didn't want to fight but they had to.... We were with them about an hour, and everybody was bursting laughing at this incident, and the officers couldn't make head or tail of it. The Germans then went back to their trenches, and we went back to ours, and there was not a single shot fired that day." "Elsewhere," says a subaltern writing to the Press Association, "I hear our fellows played the Germans at football on Christmas Day. Our own pet enemies remarked that they would like a game, but as the ground in our part is all root crops, and much cut up by ditches, and as, moreover, we had not got a football, we had to call it off." One incident recorded by the _Manchester Guardian_ from the letter of an officer is surely the strangest of all--the story of a friendly haircut. "At eleven P.M.," says the officer, "on December 24, there was absolute peace, bar a little sniping and a few rounds from a machine gun, and then no more. 'The King,' was sung, then you heard 'To-morrow is Christmas; if you don't fight, we won't,' and the answer came back 'All right!' One officer met a Bavarian, smoked a cigarette, and had a talk with him about half-way between the lines. Then a few men fraternised in the same way, and really to-day peace has existed. Men have been talking together, and they had a football match with a bully beef tin, and one man went over and cut a German's hair." I might multiply these extracts indefinitely, but sufficient has been said to show the spirit in which our lads and the Germans spent Christmas Day. I do not wonder that one soldier, after saying that some German officers took the photographs of our men between the trenches, adds, "I would not have missed the experience of yesterday for the most gorgeous Christmas dinner in England." If the strangest incident of that strange Christmas Day was the cutting of a German soldier's hair by one of our lads, surely the strangest service was that conducted by the Rev. J. Esslemont Adams, Chaplain of the United Free Church of Scotland, of whom I have already had occasion to write.