It is very rare - but always welcome - when a descendant of one of the Truce participants gets in touch. Rare perhaps because the death rate for soldiers in the war in 1914 was probably about one in three. We know so little about most of the soldiers we feature on this site but we can at least now tell you about one of them: Ben Calder.

You'll find him in the Bedfordshire letters' section writing to the ladies in a tea shop (the 6th Gordons would have trained in Bedfordshire before going out to France). And his grand-daughter, Rhonda Ramsay, got in touch from her home in Toronto Canada. She'd been promoted to research Private Calder a bit more because of the erecent release of the Canadian movie, Passchendaele.

She wrote to us: "My granddad, Benjamin Calder from Buckie Scotland was a soldier in WW1 and wrote this letter home to his father. I gather this letter was printed in the local Buckie newspaper. My aunt has the original. My granddad fought and was wounded at Vimy Ridge and he would often tell of that experience. He came to Canada after the end of WW1 and made his way to Trenton, Ontario. He passed away about 45 years ago but is buried in Buckie Scotland."

Having now found the letter from a Pte Calder on our site, she wondered if it was also her grandfather. I think we can be 99.9 per cent certain it is because of the similarities in the letters, his name and regiment being the same etc. Here is a transcription of the letter in the familiy's possession:

“I must say I spent a merrier Christmas in the trenches than I expected. There was a truce for a while so that we could bury our dead, after which we had a short service over the graves. The chaplain read the 23’rd Psalm and then the German chaplain read it in German. It seemed queer for us to be lined up on either side of the graves- German on one side and British on the other. After the service the Germans asked if we would not shoot that day or the day after. We were speaking to the Germans and got souvenirs from them. I got a little box of ground coffee and so I had coffee for breakfast that morning. We also got nuts, sweets and chocolate from them. The Germans seem to be well off here. They have plenty of “fags” and tobacco, and we also got some of them. You will hardly credit this, but it is the truth. Fancy shooting at them and then going over to wish them a Merry Christmas! I don’t think it has happened in the world’s history before. You would have thought that peace had been declared, as there was no shooting on Christmas Day or the day after. I am enclosing a small piece of ribbon which I got from a German. One of our chaps got a helmet. Remember me to all at home. Wishing you all a Happy New Year."

Rhonda says that her daughters have used this letter during Remembrance Day ceremonies.

Subsequently Rhonda's mother (Ben's daughter) Jean Stewart got in touch to add some biographical details.

She wrote: "Benjamin Calder was born in Buckie, Banffshire on April 10 1896. His father John Calder was a shoemaker and the family lived in a stone house called Morven View. Dad came to Canada in 1922 (he met my mother in Toronto) and lived in Toronto doing a variety of jobs until he heard that a new Canadian Forces Base was being built in Trenton, Ontario so he and my mother moved there in 1930. He opened a shoe repair shop on the main street. As I am thinking about it now I wonder at doing that during the Depression but perhaps it hadn't hit too hard at that point. I don't know much about his army career but believe he was a cook. I do know that when the big charge was on for Vimy Ridge his battalion was called into action . He was very proud of the fact that he had been at Vimy because the Canadian Legion always had a special banquet only for Vimy veterans and he was able to attend.I do know he had a small shrapnel wound on his leg but he didn't talk about the war. Only to tell my mother not to spend a great deal on a funeral as he had seen too ,many men wrapped in a blanket and rolled in a trench. The strange thing about this whole thing is my mother's father was also in WWI and was in the Canadian army. He and his family had emigrated to Canada when was broke out so he enlisted in Montreal and was sent overseas. My grandmother was not going to stay in Canada alone with three small children so she went back to England and lived in the same house in Rickmansworth all her life and until fairly recently her son lived there. I was in England a year ago and took a picture of it. Dad emigrated to Canada in 1922 . I don't know why but suspect life was too constricting after the freedom of being away from his dour Scottish father. My father died March 11,1963. He met my mother in Toronto when they had both emigrated to Canada."

Our thanks to the family for getting in touch - and if any other readers out there had an ancestor in the Truce, do write and let us know some information.