Christmas carols are like time machines to Howell Peebles, a retired mechanical engineer at Arnold Engineering & Development Center. At this time of year, he only has to hear the familiar melodies of Silent Night or It Came Upon a Midnight Clear to be transported back to a December 57 years ago, to a night he can't forget. The year was 1944, late in the second war to end ail wars, but there was much fighting still to be done. Hitler's forces were being systematically pushed out of France, and that's were Pvt. Peebles of Greenwood, Miss., found himself late that year, on the front lines with the 114th infantry of the 44th Division. "We were 11 miles from Germany and were meeting with a lot of action," he recalled sitting in the living room of his home sourrounded by files of personal notes the 80-year-old occasionally referred to when his memory needed refreshing. On Dec. 7th about six weeks after arriving in Europe, he and other soldiers from his unit were advancing on an enemy position. There was nothing fancy to their plan, just broken-field running. Run a while, fall into a bomb crater and fire their M-1s toward the enemy, then take off running again. "It was a day about like today," Peebles said, noting the outside sky of mottled gray. But it wascold, with snow falling. About 10 o'clock that morning a mortar shell landed nearby, hurling man-cutting shrapnel in every direction. Peebles was struck in the chest and leg. "I got hit, and I couldn't get up. That was the beginning of my long way home," he recalled. The wounded soldier would lie in that field until late in the afternoon, when medics evacuated him to a hospital for surgery to repair a punctured lung, diaphragm and stomach. A few days later he was transferred to an Army hospital in Mirecourt, 40 miles from the front lines. As Allied forces pushed the Nazis out, enemy wounded were brought to the same hospital, as were a number of German nurses. The nurses, who were civilians, had been assigned to a German field hospital that had been overtaken by Allied forces. They were given the choice of remaining with the German wounded or leaving. "They could have returned to their homes, (but) decided to remain on duty rather than go home," he said. "So there we were. American wounded on one side of the ward and German wounded on the other. We had been shooting at each other for weeks so no one was happy about having the other around." But as Christmas approached the mood in the hospital shifted. There was a relaxing of tension, enabled by the compassionate care of the German nurses, who tended to both groups of soldiers. Knowing a little German from his prewar studies at the University of the South, Peebles became the unofficial interpreter between the Allied doctors and the nurses, who spoke no English. I got to know some of them well. One of them showed me the photograph of her husband who was on the front lines. She hadn't heard from him in six weeks. I understood that many German families were suffering too. It also made me realize that what the privates of this world has to do with policy is zero. We just fight the battles that others plan," he said. "On Christmas Eve, one of the nurses asked me if I could secure permission for her and the others to sing carols for the soldiers. Shortly after sundown, the lights in the ward were dimmed, ususual because the only lights to be seen at night in the war zone were those proclaiming the sanctuary of the hospital, Peebles recalled. At the end of the hall, the nurses entered in their gray and white uniforms, each carrying a lighted candle and a sprig of holly. As they came closer to the wounded their soprano voices filled the rooms with carols. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. O Little Town of Bethlehem. The soldiers sang, as Peebles noted, "each in his own language and each according to his state of health and musical ability. It was a beautiful moment. When the lights came back up, enemies had shared the spirit of Christmas. I can never forget that moment, nor the voices of those nurses." Back to Dispatch January 2002 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com