November 11
On December 27, 1944, the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion launched a night raid on Noirefontaine signaling the first Allied offensive of the Battle of the Bulge. The moon was full and the night so cold that enemy land mines failed to detonate in the frozen ground. Charles Fairlamb was a radio operator with the battalion and found himself in the middle of a hard-fought battle lasting through the night.
The next morning the 551st assembled for a long-overdue Christmas service. Still close to the front lines and exhausted, they gathered in a wooded area with faces still painted black and weapons ready. Fairlamb described the scene:
It was cold and snowing, and nearly half the men had lost their voices because of bad weather. The trees, mostly pine, were beautifully covered with snow and decorated with tinsel which the Germans had been dropping to make our radar ineffective. It was the most impressive Christmas service I’ve ever attended. I don’t believe that anyone could be any closer to the real Christmas than we were that day. But it made you feel kind of funny standing there worshipping God while you had a helmet on your head, a hymn book in one hand, and a rifle in the other.470
The contrast is stark. The peace of Christmas in the middle of combat. A hymn book and a rifle. This story could serve a useful purpose in reminding us to be thankful for the relative tranquility of our daily lives and worship. Or, in some cases, this story might mirror our daily lives. Sometimes our time in church is only a brief interlude to prolonged conflict, anger, or anxiety. When we find ourselves in such a state, it is time to take stock of our relationship with the Savior. It takes a certain amount of spiritual discipline, including regular prayer, study, and service, to keep Jesus at the center of our lives when we’re not in church. Only then will the rest of our lives take on that same sense of order and tranquility that we find in the sanctuary.
Be joyous always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
November 12
As his company was fighting to take the German town of Dillingen, Arnold Brown saw a building that offered good observation of the enemy occupied area of the city. He climbed two flights of stairs and found a two-man forward observation team using the same vantage point to call in artillery fire. As soon as he arrived, the strangest phenomenon of his life occurred. He called it his “vision.”
His mind suddenly became like a movie screen and he could see German soldiers with their distinctive helmets. The soldiers had a radio and were beaming in on his position. They were transmitting this information to an artillery battery where the guns were being aimed and prepared to fire. As this picture filled his mind he became confused:
I hesitated. I thought, “What should I do? Should I tell these men to move? If I tell them to move and nothing would happen, they’d think I was cracking up…”
When I hesitated, I felt something pushing me toward the stairway, just like wings, pushing me. When that occurred, I didn’t hesitate. When I got down off the last step, an artillery shell exploded in that room and killed both of those men.
This was my evidence that I was going to survive this war, and that I did have a guardian angel.471
We know that there are many biblical references to angels. This soldier’s amazing witness seems to confirm that these heavenly beings continue to do God’s work in the modern age as well. The Bible tells us that angels were created by God to act as his servants, to relay messages from God, give encouragement and guidance, and provide protection. Arnold Brown’s confidence that a guardian angel was looking over him is a powerful witness to the continued existence of this special way that God can directly touch our lives.
He thought he was seeing a vision. They passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city. It opened for them by itself, and… When they walked the length of one street, suddenly the angel left him. Then Peter came to himself and said, “Now I know without a doubt that the Lord sent his angel and rescued me from Herod’s clutches.”
November 13
After days of vicious fighting the American paratroopers brought in a wounded German soldier to their company commander. He had lain out all night in subzero weather with a severe wound in his leg from a.50 caliber bullet. Both of his arms and legs were frozen, and he was begging to be shot. The company commander later recalled:
I couldn’t do it. I asked for a volunteer. Even if he survived, he’d have to have both arms and legs amputated, and this could have been a mercy killing. But these battle hardened soldiers that had been fighting Germans a few minutes before would not volunteer. One soldier, out of sympathy for the suffering and bravery of this soldier, lit a cigarette and held it to his lips. Another soldier brought him a hot cup of coffee and held it so he could get coffee until we got the litter jeep up there and sent him to the rear.472
On another battlefield a British lieutenant described the attitude of his men toward enemy prisoners immediately after an intense battle: “We treated them very kindly, bringing in their wounded and giving them cigarettes. It is strange, but we are very poor haters.”473
These Allied soldiers exemplified the Christian moral code for the merciful treatment of a defeated enemy articulated eighty years earlier by a great American president: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…”474 Fortunately for us, mercy is an attribute of God himself, and he fully expects us to show this quality toward others, even in the heat of conflict.
