Christmas WWI: Private James Mackenzie, Elsewhere, A Private Truce

First Battle of Ypres.

From the Scotsguard.org

The deaths recorded in the four weeks from 18 October 1914, Including those who died of wounds later or as POWs after being captured at Ypres, exceeded the total number of Scots Guardsmen who died in each of the years 1917 and 1918.. A few weeks later, just before Christmas 1914, further south from Ypres the 2nd Battalion made an attack in the dark on the German trenches at Rouges Bancs in which there were very many casualties. 

December 19, 1914, Private MacKenzie rescued a severely wounded comrade from in front of the German trenches under heavy fire. He latter made another attempt that day to rescue a wounded warrior, but he was killed in that attempt Private James Mackenzie was posthumously awarded the VC for bringing in a wounded man from near the German line. 

In the same battle Lieutenant Geoffrey Ottley led his platoon out to take on a German machine gun which was causing great losses to the attacking companies in front. He was hit in the neck, fell, got up again and led his men on, falling again near the German line. He died three days later, a month short of his nineteenth birthday, and remains to this day the youngest ever winner of the DSO

The Private Christmas Truce Several days later,

Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches, Amanda Mason of the Imperial War Museum reports

The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. After Boxing Day, meetings in no man’s land dwindled out. Although a general Truce was not approved by the officials, In what was known as the ‘Live and Let Live’ system, in quiet sectors of the front line, brief pauses in the hostilities were sometimes tacitly agreed, allowing both sides to repair their trenches or gather their dead.