Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914

I loved the idea of this book, but the reality was a mess.

The problem with documenting the Christmas Truce (an actual event) is that it’s told largely in legend. It was impromptu and distributed – it happened with no advance notice, and it happened all up and down the Ypres front.

As a result, recollections of it are fragmented. The author is just left to tell random scraps of stories about it.

And I feel like he could have done better. It’s disorganized and hard to follow. I don’t know if it was his writing style, his lack of organization, or what, but I struggled to follow the narrative.

Sadly, I quit the book just past the halfway point.