Born June 25, 1896, he was an 18-year-old soldier in the Black Watch regiment when British and German troops cautiously emerged from the trenches that Christmas Day in 1914. The enemies swapped cigarettes and tunic buttons, sang carols and even played soccer amid the mud, barbed wire and shell holes of no man's land.

"I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence," Mr. Anderson told The Observer last year.

"All I'd heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices," said Mr. Anderson, who was billeted in a French farmhouse behind the front lines.

"But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see," he said. "We shouted 'Merry Christmas,' even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

This reminds me of one of the best history classes I took and a book we were required to read. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque