| Description |
Cathal J. Nolan, Executive Director of the IHI and Associate Professor of History at Boston University, will give a talk on the "Xmas truce" of December 24-25, 1914. On that remarkable night British, French, and German troops stopped fighting and shared Christmas Eve together in several locales along the Western Front. The next day they buried the dead, sang, drank, and exchanged gifts between the trenches. They even played football amidst the barbed wire and craters, and the shattered hopes for a short war that were not shared by their senior officers or civilian leaders or populations. The talk will be followed by a showing of "Joyeux Noël" (2006), an outstanding and moving French feature film about that extraordinary night and day. |
