The news out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• Germans are reported to be using some kind of "silent cannon" that makes no noise when fired, that in areas where trenches are very close troops are talking back and forth and agreeing to ad hoc cease-fire agreements [this is another lead up to the famous informal Christmas cease-fire, and will later be "solved" by old men in charge by introducing troop rotation so the cannon-fodder won't have time to get friendly enough to agree not shoot each other], but life in the trenches is generally cold and miserable.
• It seems a story from yesterday about disappointing recruitment drives at football [soccer] matches that I took as unimportant is a more serious problem to some. The British Prime Minister is expected to be asked to introduce legislation banning football matches for the duration of the war.
• A large shipment of tobacco products is being sent to Canadian troops.
• Strange political machinations in the hard-to-comprehend politics of Egypt.
• Commendations for British and French pilots for Zeppelin-shed raids.
• Canada's first expeditionary force expected to be on the front lines before Christmas. The article goes on to detail the physical training the men are getting.
• In an extension of the programme of internment of "enemy aliens" all Canadian soldiers with German-sounding names in the Salisbury Plain camp, many of which are decorated Boer War veterans, are arrested, removed, questions and likely to be interned.
An editorial describing Basra and its strategic significance.
• A senator from Saskatchewan defends the loyalty of Galacians and Hungarians on the prairies
• Questions in London Parliament about annuities being paid to members of the British royal family living in Germany

The news out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• Nothing really new in the European theatre...
• In more exotic locales, there is news, however: British forces taken the port city of Basra and a British advance has been repulsed by Germans in German East Africa.
• A report of a secret movement for an armistice at Christmas...
• Ten million cigarettes donated...
• Story of a British raid on a German Zeppelin factory is, rather interestingly, reported from both the British and German perspectives.
• One of the cable station operators on Fanning Island recounts the German attack on the trans-Pacific cable station early in the war.