In the autumn days ahead, there would be more charges and countercharges. Heightening the misery was a series of torrential rainstorms, some lasting several days. By October, the armies had come to a grinding halt on every front. "The energies of [all warring] armies flagged," wrote historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett, "worn out by defeats, fighting, and the vileness of the [now] swampy country."

Fierce fighting continued, but no army seemed capable of driving back the enemy. Instead, soldiers struggled from village to village, then farm to farm, until the lines of battle seemed to hardly move at all. The closeness of the enemy and rising casualty rates forced the commanders of both sides to make a momentous decision. Soldiers would begin digging trenches to hide from the killing fire.

Williams and the men in his company watched as more trees appeared along the enemy's battle line. Then, suddenly, "our opponents began to sing 'Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.'... They finished their carol and we thought that we ought to retaliate in the same way, so we sang 'The First Nowell,' and when we finished that they all began clapping. And so it went on. First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up 'O Come All Ye Faithful' the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words 'Adeste Fideles.' And I thought, well, this was really a most extraordinary thing -- two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war."

Wood was in the trenches in 1914 and participated in a truce that lasted over two weeks. "I . . . came to the conclusion that I have held firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would have never been another shot fired. For a fortnight that truce went on. We were on the most friendly terms, and it was only the fact that we were being controlled by others that made it necessary for us to start trying to shoot one another again."