THE “FIDDLER’S TRUCE” AT ARRAS
TWENTY miles away the Prussians and the Canadians were struggling in the dust and mud for the battered suburbs of Lens, but the trenches which were enjoying the “Fiddler’s Truce” were not marked to be taken by the staff officers of either army, and the only sign of war was the growling of the big guns far away. Here, too, Canadian opposed Prussian, but they did not fight until the death of Henry Schulman, killed by a most regrettable accident. He was only a private and not sufficiently famous as a violinist to have his death recorded in the musical journals of the world, but along the trenches his taking off is still being discussed as one of the real tragedies of the war.
Late in the fall, after the Somme offensive was over, three Canadian regiments arrived on the Arras front and dug themselves into the brown mud to wait until spring made another advance practicable. Two hundred feet away were three Prussian regiments. There was little real fighting. When the routine of trench life became too monotonous a company would blaze away at the other trenches for a few minutes. At night it was so quiet that conversation in one trench carried over to the other, and there was a good deal of good-natured kidding back and forth. The Canadians were especially pleased by the nightly concerts of the Germans, and applauded heartily the spirited fiddling of one hidden musician. The rest of the story can best be told by Corporal Harry Seaton, in the New York Evening Mail:
“One night we held up a piece of white cloth as a sign of truce,” he said. “With permission of our colonel I called out and asked the Boche if we couldn’t have a bit of a concert. It was agreed, and Schulman—that was the fiddler’s name—crawled out from his trench. One or two of our Johnnies crawled out, too, just as a sign of good faith.
“Believe me, every one enjoyed the rest of that evening, and when things grew quiet next day somebody yelled for the fiddler to strike up a tune. He was a cobbler in Quebec before the war, and two of our Johnnies knew him and his wife and kids. It didn’t take much coaxing after that, and he came out on the strip of ‘No Man’s Land’ and played every night.
“On the 23d of February we were ordered on to another part of the field and another regiment took our old trenches. Of course, in the hurry of departure nobody thought of Schulman.
“That night he brought his stool out as usual, but before he could draw bow across the strings the strangers filled him full of lead. Of course, they didn’t know.
“The chaplain told us the story next day and we took up a collection to send back to the family in Berlin. I wonder if they ever got it!”