Free On a Farther Shore by William Souder Page A

bureau as a junior aquatic biologist, and she was sworn in the following month. The job mainly involved writing reports on fisheries conservation issues—but also included some lab work in making age determinations of fish. Carson’s salary was $2,000 a year.

FOUR
The English Connection and the Ocean Deep
    C hristmas Eve 1914 was clear and cold in Flanders. Frost glittered on the no-man’s-land that lay between the opposing lines forming the western front, a quagmire of mud and barbed wire and stalemate that ran from near Dunkirk on the English Channel south to a point fifty miles northeast of Paris, then east toward the German border. On one side were the British, backed by Belgian and French soldiers. On the other side, in many places close enough so that the men in the trenches could call out to their enemies, were German and Prussian forces.
    As the holiday season approached there had been talk of a cessation of hostilities, but leaders on both sides worried this would destroy fighting morale and undertook to prevent fraternization between the combatants. In mid-December, the British command had put forward a series of attacks along the line in hopes of heating up the stalled conflict, but these mainly produced shocking casualties—many by friendly fire—that only furthered the misery and doubtin the trenches. Then, on the night before Christmas, the fighting stopped. Up and down the lines, candles were lit on the German side, and makeshift Christmas trees appeared on the parapets. The Germans began singing carols, and the British joined in. Before sunrise the artillery batteries were unattended, rifles had been laid down, and soldiers from both sides armed only with food and cigarettes and liquor had emerged from the trenches to meet in no-man’s-land, where they sang together and exchanged gifts. Handwritten signs went up with the words “You no fight, we no fight.” So it went through Christmas Day and, in some places on the front, for several more days after that.
    And then the war resumed.
    Among the participants in what came to be known as the Christmas Truce was a gangly nineteen-year-old private from suburban London named Henry Williamson.The son of a stern bank clerk, Williamson was a sensitive young man. He had large eyes and sometimes wore a trim mustache that ended at the corners of his mouth.Williamson had been at the front for just over a month and had witnessed, as he put it in a letter home, “a bitter and bloody struggle” that added up to “some of the most desperate fighting of the war.” The brief pause in hostilities at Christmas caused Williamson to question the war, which suddenly seemed to him futile. Having met the enemy on friendly terms—Williamson had shaken hands with his German counterparts and merrily smoked a cigar with them—he discovered that soldiers on both sides were much the same: expendable pawns in a game played by politicians and generals. Many of the German soldiers Williamson met seemed to be waiters in civilian life. They were like himself, Williamson thought, inasmuch as they believed in their cause and yet could see its folly. Eventually, Williamson would be convinced that peace, not war, should be the natural state of the European community of nations—a conviction that would lead him down divergent paths, one into the English countryside and the other into the darkest realms of politics.
    The trenches on the front—which in some areas had been dug into reclaimed swampland that was below sea level—were watery lagoons of filth, mud, and rotting flesh. Soldiers sometimes had to sleep standing up.Only a few weeks after the Christmas Truce, Williamson came down with dysentery and had to be shipped home to England.By March he was better, though he remained weak and admitted to nerves that left him feeling “joggy.”That spring Williamson got accepted for training as an officer,and in March 1917 he returned to the front as a lieutenant in the machine gun