"In that region, there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night." (Luke 2: 8)
In December 1944, my World War II field artillery battalion was stationed in England, living in old silk mills, converted into barracks, at Congleton, Cheshire. I spent Christmas Eve of 1944 on guard duty in front of our barracks buildings, alternating between two hours on duty and four hours off.
That Christmas Eve, the ground at Congleton was frozen hard, and a bitter cold seeped in through my warmest winter woolens. Although I kept walking around, I did a lot of shivering. There were civilian homes near our barracks, and English children were in our area much of the time.
On Christmas Eve, some young boys came caroling. At first I heard them in the distance; then they came closer. Stopping in front of one of our barracks buildings, they sang for the American soldiers inside.
One boy, whose voice had not changed, sang a beautiful solo number. The soldiers collected some candy bars and gave them to that boy. I heard him responding with enthusiasm: "Oh thank you, sir. Thank you very much." After the boys had divided up the candy bars, they went further down the street. I heard them singing the same carols again, in the distance, and their star singer repeated the same solo number (to the tune of "Winchester Old"):
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.
I was deeply moved to hear those words being sung while I was on guard duty in wartime England on Christmas Eve, 1944. For I, too, was "keeping watch ... by night." I felt very close to the shepherds of the Christmas story. And what they experienced on the first Christmas Eve became very real for me.
The editor of the Congleton Chronicle published an account of my experiences, with my World War II picture, in that paper's Dec. 30, 2008, issue. To our surprise, the young soloist, whose name was John, was soon identified. In 1944, he had been 9, one of six young children whose father had recently died.
Now, in 2008, John was 73.
A second surprise to me was that John, in 2008, had detailed memories of singing that solo number 64 years earlier. It had meant more to him than I could have imagined.
John's father, serving in the Royal Artillery Regiment of the British Army, had been killed in action in France in October 1944, and on Christmas Eve of 1944, John was still actively grieving. While he and his companions were caroling, John suddenly felt that he had to sing some verses alone, and it was as if his father was telling him to do so.
A third surprise to me was that John remembered seeing me on my Christmas Eve guard duty and recognized my face from my picture in the Chronicle.
In fact, John even remembered a detail that I had forgotten: Apparently I had opened the door to our barracks so that the soldiers inside could hear the caroling better. And those soldiers whose door I had opened were the ones who gave candy to the carolers.
John has shared with me other memories of how kind the American soldiers were, including cooks in our battalion who gave food to hungry English children. According to John, "It was a Godsend when the Yanks came."
Perhaps my greatest surprise associated with all of this was my learning that I am not the only one who deeply cherishes the memory of the caroling on that street in Congleton on Christmas Eve 1944: So does John the caroler. Human lives do indeed intersect with each other in more respects than we can measure, and our actions sometimes have impacts on the lives of other persons in many wonderful ways, of which we ourselves may be unaware.
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Richard Frothingham of Little Rock is professor emeritus of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Editorial on 12/23/2016