Christmas in the trenches, 1914

I first discoveraul Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose in junior high school after the novella was made into a British television film in the 1970s.? ?A Golden Globe winner, the backdrop is the battle of Dunkirk and the heroic effort by everyday fishermen and yacht owners to rescue British solders soldiers trapped at the water’s edge below the cliffs.? But, in truth, it is a love story between a battle-scarred man and a shy girl intent on healing, and that thread of the plot has appealed to my romantic heart ever since.

The film’s winter seascapes came beautifully to life for me during a recent trip along North Carolina Highway 12, which runs through Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.? The drive over the causeway and through the dunes is exhilarating off-season without the usual congestion of summer crowds.? And, can stand alone for sheer pleasure if you’re intent on getting off the grid as I was.?

After cresting the first rise that reveals the protected marsh and sea grasses, you immediately see why this region is aptly named The Golden Strand.? More breathtaking and unexpected, though, were the volume and variety of snow geese floating on the surface which migrated south to warmer waters to feed through the winter season. ?The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, their stewards and guardian angels, offer grateful sojourners like myself a tiny outpost where you can park and view this majestic site through high powered lenses inside the visitor’s center.? Truly, a precious gem in the Department of Interior’s collection of heritage sites.

I was filled with light and wonder, identifying with the story’s hero Philip Rhayader who says to Fritha, “Sometimes I think my soul is made of wings.”? ?

But I couldn’t escape the haunting history of that era, marked by successive wars ravishing young generations on the front lines. “Sometimes the world seems a rough school, Miss Marsh, and we, all of us, its unwilling pupils.”?

This holiday season marks the 100th anniversary of an unlikely Christmas Eve when British and German soldiers met across a frozen battlefield during WWI in temporary fellowship.

That story, exquisitely captured by folk artist John McCutchen’s Winter Solstice Album, is timeless in its appeal through the years. In Christmas in the Trenches, he writes,

“Then one by one on either side, walked into no-mans-land, with neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand. We shared some secret brandy and wished each other well and in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.

We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photgraphs from home| these sons and fathers far away from families of their own. Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin|this curious and unlikely band of men.

It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung. The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung. For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war had been crumbled and were gone for ever more.”

Thanking those out on point this holiday season.

Honoring the 75th anniversary of #NATO and the enduring legacy of “closing the last three feet with a handshake.”

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