christmas truce essay

World War I: 100 Years Later

A Smithsonian magazine special report

The Story of the WWI Christmas Truce

It has become a great legend of World War I. But what really happened when British and German troops emerged from their trenches that Christmas Day?

Even at the distance of a century, no war seems more terrible than World War I. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, it killed or wounded more than 25 million people–peculiarly horribly, and (in popular opinion, at least) for less apparent purpose than did any other war before or since. Yet there were still odd moments of joy and hope in the trenches of Flanders and France, and one of the most remarkable came during the first Christmas of the war, a few brief hours during which men from both sides on the Western Front laid down their arms, emerged from their trenches, and shared food, carols, games and comradeship.

Their truce–the famous Christmas Truce–was unofficial and illicit. Many officers disapproved, and headquarters on both sides took strong steps to ensure that it could never happen again. While it lasted, though, the truce was magical, leading even the sober Wall Street Journal to observe: “What appears from the winter fog and misery is a Christmas story, a fine Christmas story that is, in truth, the most faded and tattered of adjectives: inspiring.”

The first signs that something strange was happening occurred on Christmas Eve. At 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters: “Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” Further along the line, the two sides serenaded each other with carols—the German “ Silent Night ” being met with a British chorus of “ The First Noel “—and scouts met, cautiously, in no man’s land, the shell-blasted waste between the trenches. The war diary of the Scots Guards records that a certain Private Murker “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”

The same basic understanding seems to have sprung up spontaneously at other spots. For another British soldier, Private Frederick Heath, the truce began late that same night when “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” Then–as Heath wrote in a letter home–the voices added:

‘Come out, English soldier; come out here to us.’ For some little time we were cautious, and did not even answer. Officers, fearing treachery, ordered the men to be silent. But up and down our line one heard the men answering that Christmas greeting from the enemy. How could we resist wishing each other a Merry Christmas, even though we might be at each other’s throats immediately afterwards? So we kept up a running conversation with the Germans, all the while our hands ready on our rifles. Blood and peace, enmity and fraternity—war’s most amazing paradox. The night wore on to dawn—a night made easier by songs from the German trenches, the pipings of piccolos and from our broad lines laughter and Christmas carols. Not a shot was fired.

A German trench in December 1914. Workmanship was far less sophisticated than it became later in the war, and the muddy conditions were terrible.

Several factors combined to produce the conditions for this Christmas Truce. By December 1914, the men in the trenches were veterans, familiar enough with the realities of combat to have lost much of the idealism that they had carried into war in August, and most longed for an end to bloodshed. The war, they had believed, would be over by Christmas, yet there they were in Christmas week still muddied, cold and in battle. Then, on Christmas Eve itself, several weeks of mild but miserably soaking weather gave way to a sudden, hard frost, creating a dusting of ice and snow along the front that made the men on both sides feel that something spiritual was taking place.

Just how widespread the truce was is hard to say. It was certainly not general—there are plenty of accounts of fighting continuing through the Christmas season in some sectors, and others of men fraternizing to the sound of guns firing nearby. One common factor seems to have been that Saxon troops—universally regarded as easygoing—were the most likely to be involved, and to have made the first approaches to their British counterparts. “We are Saxons, you are Anglo-Saxons,” one shouted across no man’s land. “What is there for us to fight about?” The most detailed estimate, made by Malcolm Brown of Britain’s Imperial War Museums , is that the truce extended along at least two-thirds of British-held trench line that scarred southern Belgium.

Men from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers meet their German counterparts in no man's land somewhere in the deadly Ypres Salient, December 26, 1914.

Even so, accounts of a Christmas Truce refer to a suspension of hostilities only between the British and the Germans. The Russians, on the Eastern Front, still adhered to the old Julian calendar in 1914, and hence did not celebrate Christmas until January 7, while the French were far more sensitive than their allies to the fact that the Germans were occupying about a third of France—and ruling French civilians with some harshness.

It was only in the British sector, then, that troops noticed at dawn the Germans had placed small Christmas trees along parapets of their trenches. Slowly, parties of men from both sides began to venture toward the barbed wire that separated them, until—Rifleman Oswald Tilley told his parents in a letter home—”literally hundreds of each side were out in no man’s land shaking hands.”

Communication could be difficult. German-speaking British troops were scarce, but many Germans had been employed in Britain before the war, frequently in restaurants. Captain Clifton Stockwell, an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers who found himself occupying a trench opposite the ruins of a heavily shelled brewery, wrote  in his diary of “one Saxon, who spoke excellent English” and who “used to climb in some eyrie in the brewery and spend his time asking ‘How is London getting on?’, ‘How was Gertie Millar and the Gaiety ?’, and so on. Lots of our men had blind shots at him in the dark, at which he laughed, one night I came out and called, ‘Who the hell are you?’ At once came back the answer, ‘Ah—the officer—I expect I know you—I used to be head waiter at the Great Central Hotel .”

Of course, only a few men involved in the truce could share reminiscences of London. Far more common was an interest in “football”—soccer—which by then had been played professionally in Britain for a quarter-century and in Germany since the 1890s. Perhaps it was inevitable that some men on both sides would produce a ball and—freed briefly from the confines of the trenches—take pleasure in kicking it about. What followed, though, was something more than that, for if the story of the Christmas Truce has its jewel, it is the legend of the match played between the British and the Germans—which the Germans claimed to have won, 3-2.

The first reports of such a contest surfaced a few days afterward; on January 1, 1915, The Times published a letter written from a doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade , who reported “a football match… played between them and us in front of the trench.” The brigade’s official history insisted that no match took place because “it would have been most unwise to allow the Germans to know how weakly the British trenches were held.” But there is plenty of evidence that soccer was played that Christmas Day—mostly by men of the same nationality, but in at least three or four places between troops from the opposing armies.

A faded photo of the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment's pre-war football team was one of the souvenirs presented to Lieutenant Ian Stewart of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. Stewart remembered that the Saxons were "very proud" of their team's quality.

The most detailed of these stories comes from the German side, and reports that the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment played a game against Scottish troops. According to the 133rd’s War History, this match emerged from the “droll scene of Tommy und Fritz ” chasing hares that emerged from under cabbages between the lines, and then producing a ball to kick about. Eventually, this “developed into a regulation football match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter. Then we organized each side into teams, lining up in motley rows, the football in the center. The game ended 3-2 for Fritz.”

Exactly what happened between the Saxons and the Scots is difficult to say. Some accounts of the game bring in elements that were actually dreamed up by  Robert Graves , a renowned British poet, writer and war veteran, who reconstructed the encounter in a story published in 1962. In Graves’s version, the score remains 3-2 to the Germans, but the writer adds a sardonic fictional flourish: “The Reverend Jolly, our padre, acted as ref too much Christian charity—their outside left shot the deciding goal, but he was miles offside and admitted it as soon as the whistle went.”

The real game was far from a regulated fixture with 11 players a side and 90 minutes of play. In the one detailed eyewitness account that survives—albeit in an interview not given until the 1960s—Lieutenant Johannes Niemann, a Saxon who served with the 133rd, recalled that on Christmas morning:

the mist was slow to clear and suddenly my orderly threw himself into my dugout to say that both the German and Scottish soldiers had come out of their trenches and were fraternizing along the front. I grabbed my binoculars and looking cautiously over the parapet saw the incredible sight of our soldiers exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate with the enemy. Later a Scottish soldier appeared with a football which seemed to come from nowhere and a few minutes later a real football match got underway. The Scots marked their goal mouth with their strange caps and we did the same with ours. It was far from easy to play on the frozen ground, but we continued, keeping rigorously to the rules, despite the fact that it only lasted an hour and that we had no referee.  A great many of the passes went wide, but all the amateur footballers, although they must have been very tired, played with huge enthusiasm.

For Niemann, the novelty of getting to know their kilted opposition matched the novelty of playing soccer in no man’s land:

Us Germans really roared when a gust of wind revealed that the Scots wore no drawers under their kilts—and hooted and whistled every time they caught an impudent glimpse of one posterior belonging to one of “yesterday’s enemies.” But after an hour’s play, when our Commanding Officer heard about it, he sent an order that we must put a stop to it. A little later we drifted back to our trenches and the fraternization ended.

The game that Niemann recalled was only one of many that took place up and down the Front. Attempts were made in several spots to involve the Germans—the Queen’s Westminsters, one private soldier wrote home, “had a football out in front of the trenches and asked the Germans to send a team to play us, but either they considered the ground too hard, as it had been freezing all night and was a ploughed field, or their officers put the bar up.” But at least three, and perhaps four, other matches apparently took place between the armies. A sergeant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders recorded that a game was played in his sector “between the lines and the trenches,” and according to a letter home published by the Glasgow New s on January 2, the Scots “won easily by 4-1.” Meanwhile Lieutenant Albert Wynn of the Royal Field Artillery wrote of a match against a German team of “Prussians and Hanovers” that was played near Ypres . That game “ended in a draw,” but the Lancashire Fusiliers , occupying trenches close to the coast near Le Touquet and using a ration-tin “ball,” played their own game against the Germans, and–according to their regimental history–lost by the same score as the Scots who encountered the 133rd,  3-2.

It is left to a fourth recollection, given in 1983 by Ernie Williams of the Cheshire Regiment , to supply a real idea of what soccer played between the trenches really meant. Although Williams was recalling a game played on New Year’s Eve, after there had been a thaw and plenty of rain, his description chimes with the little that is known for sure about the games played on Christmas Day:

ball appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where, but it came from their side… They made up some goals and one fellow went in goal and then it was just a general kickabout. I should think there were a couple of hundred taking part. I had a go at the ball. I was pretty good then, at 19. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was no sort of ill-will between us…. There was no referee and no score, no tally at all. It was simply a mêlee—nothing like the soccer that you see on television. The boots we wore were a menace—those great big boots we had on—and in those days the balls were made of leather and they soon got very soggy.

Of course, not every man on either side was thrilled by the Christmas Truce, and official opposition squelched at least one proposed Anglo-German soccer match. Lieutenant C.E.M. Richards, a young officer serving with the East Lancashire Regiment , had been greatly disturbed by reports of fraternization between the men of his regiment and the enemy and had actually welcomed the “return of good old sniping” late on Christmas Day—”just to make sure that the war was still on.” That evening, however, Richards “received a signal from Battalion Headquarters telling him to make a football pitch in no man’s land, by filling up shell holes etc., and to challenge the enemy to a football match on 1st January.” Richards recalled that “I was furious and took no action at all,” but over time his view did mellow. “I wish I had kept that signal,” he wrote years later. “Stupidly I destroyed it—I was so angry. It would now have been a good souvenir.”

In most places, up and down the line, it was accepted that the truce would be purely temporary. Men returned to their trenches at dusk, in some cases summoned back by flares, but for the most part determined to preserve the peace at least until midnight. There was more singing, and in at least one spot presents were exchanged. George Eade, of the Rifles, had become friends with a German artilleryman who spoke good English, and as he left, this new acquaintance said to him: “Today we have peace. Tomorrow, you fight for your country, I fight for mine. Good luck.”

Fighting erupted again the next day, though there were reports from some sectors of hostilities remaining suspended into the New Year. And it does not seem to have been uncommon for the resumption of the war to be marked with further displays of mutual respect between enemies. In the trenches occupied by the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Captain Stockwell “climbed up on the parapet, fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with ‘Merry Christmas’ on it.” At this, his opposite number, Hauptmann von Sinner, “appeared on the German parapet and both officers bowed and saluted. Von Sinner then also fired two shots in the air and went back into his trench.”

The war was on again, and there would be no further truce until the general armistice of November 1918. Many, perhaps close to the majority, of the thousands of men who celebrated Christmas 1914 together would not live to see the return of peace. But for those who did survive, the truce was something that would never be forgotten.

Malcolm Brown & Shirley Seaton. The Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914 . London: Papermac, 1994; The Christmas Truce 1914: Operation Plum Puddings , accessed December 22, 2011; Alan Cleaver and Lesley Park (eds). Not a Shot was Fired: Letters from the Christmas Truce 1914 .  Whitehaven, Cumbria: Operation Plum Puddings, 2006; Marc Ferro et al. Meetings in No Man’s Land: Christmas 1914 and Fraternization in the Great War . London: Constable & Robinson, 2007; “The Christmas Truce – 1914. ” Hellfire Corner, accessed December 19, 2011; Thomas Löwer. “ Demystifying the Christmas truce .” The Heritage of the Great War, accessed December 19, 2011; Stanley Weintraub. Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914 . London: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

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Mike Dash is a contributing writer in history for Smithsonian.com. Before Smithsonian.com, Dash authored the award-winning blog A Blast From the Past.

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WWI’s Christmas Truce: When Fighting Paused for the Holiday

By: A.J. Baime & Volker Janssen

Updated: February 26, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2018

On Christmas Eve 1914, in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the first world war , a remarkable thing happened.

It came to be called the Christmas Truce . And it remains one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War—or of any war in history.

British machine gunner Bruce Bairnsfather, later a prominent cartoonist, wrote about it in his memoirs. Like most of his fellow infantrymen of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was spending the holiday eve shivering in the muck, trying to keep warm. He had spent a good part of the past few months fighting the Germans. And now, in a part of Belgium called Bois de Ploegsteert, he was crouched in a trench that stretched just three feet deep by three feet wide, his days and nights marked by an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuits and cigarettes too wet to light.

“Here I was, in this horrible clay cavity,” Bairnsfather wrote, “…miles and miles from home. Cold, wet through and covered with mud.” There didn’t “seem the slightest chance of leaving—except in an ambulance.”

Singing Breaks Out in the Trenches on Christmas Eve

At about 10 p.m., Bairnsfather noticed a noise. “I listened,” he recalled. “Away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond, I could hear the murmur of voices.” He turned to a fellow soldier in his trench and said, “Do you hear the Boches [Germans] kicking up that racket over there?”

“Yes,” came the reply. “They’ve been at it some time!”

The Germans were singing carols, as it was Christmas Eve. In the darkness, some of the British soldiers began to sing back. “Suddenly,” Bairnsfather recalled, “we heard a confused shouting from the other side. We all stopped to listen. The shout came again.” The voice was from an enemy soldier, speaking in English with a strong German accent. He was saying, “Come over here.”

One of the British sergeants answered: “You come half-way. I come half-way.”

British and German Soldiers Meet in the 'No Man's Land'

What happened next would, in the years to come, stun the world and make history. Enemy soldiers began to climb nervously out of their trenches, and to meet in the barbed-wire-filled “No Man’s Land” that separated the armies. Normally, the British and Germans communicated across No Man’s Land with streaking bullets, with only occasional gentlemanly allowances to collect the dead unmolested. But now, there were handshakes and words of kindness. The soldiers traded songs, tobacco and wine, joining in a spontaneous holiday party in the cold night.

Bairnsfather could not believe his eyes. “Here they were—the actual, practical soldiers of the German army. There was not an atom of hate on either side.”

And it wasn’t confined to that one battlefield. Starting on Christmas Eve, small pockets of French, German, Belgian and British troops held impromptu cease-fires across the Western Front, with reports of some on the Eastern Front as well. Some accounts suggest a few of these unofficial truces remained in effect for days.

For those who participated, it was surely a welcome break from the hell they had been enduring. When the war had begun just six months earlier, most soldiers figured it would be over quickly and they’d be home with their families in time for the holidays. Not only would the war drag on for four more years, but it would prove to be the bloodiest conflict ever up to that time. The Industrial Revolution had made it possible to mass-produce new and devastating tools for killing—among them fleets of airplanes and guns that could fire hundreds of rounds per minute. And bad news on both sides had left soldiers with plummeting morale. There was the devastating Russian defeat at Tannenberg in August 1914 and the German losses in the Battle of the Marne a week later.

By the time winter approached in 1914, and the chill set in, the Western Front stretched hundreds of miles. Countless soldiers were living in misery in the trenches on the fronts, while tens of thousands had already died.

Then Christmas came.

Firsthand Accounts of the Christmas Truce  

Descriptions of the Christmas Truce appear in numerous diaries and letters of the time. One British soldier, a rifleman named J. Reading, wrote a letter home to his wife describing his holiday experience in 1914: “My company happened to be in the firing line on Christmas eve, and it was my turn…to go into a ruined house and remain there until 6:30 on Christmas morning. During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English. They shouted out: ‘Are you the Rifle Brigade; have you a spare bottle; if so we will come half way and you come the other half.’”

“Later on in the day they came towards us,” Reading described. “And our chaps went out to meet them…I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet it seemed like a dream.”

Another British soldier, named John Ferguson, recalled it this way: “Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!”

Other diaries and letters describe German soldiers using candles to light Christmas trees around their trenches. One German infantryman described how a British soldier set up a makeshift barbershop, charging Germans a few cigarettes each for a haircut. Other accounts describe vivid scenes of men helping enemy soldiers collect their dead, of which there was plenty.

Soldiers Play a Game of Soccer 

One British fighter named Ernie Williams later described in an interview his recollection of some makeshift soccer play on what turned out to be an icy pitch: "The ball appeared from somewhere, I don't know where... They made up some goals and one fellow went in goal and then it was just a general kick-about. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part.”

German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch of the 134 Saxons Infantry, a schoolteacher who spoke both English and German, also described a pick-up soccer game in his diary, which was discovered in an attic near Leipzig in 1999, written in an archaic German form of shorthand. “Eventually the English brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued,” he wrote. “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”

Gradually, news of the Christmas Truce made it into the press. “Christmas has come and gone—certainly the most extraordinary celebration of it any of us will ever experience,” one soldier wrote in a letter that appeared in The Irish Times on January 15, 1915. He described a “large crowd of officers and men, English and German, grouped around the [dead] bodies, which had been gathered together and laid out in rows.” The Germans, this British soldier said, “were quite affable.”

Just how many soldiers participated in these informal holiday gatherings has been debated; there is no way to know for sure since the ceasefires were small-scale, haphazard and entirely unauthorized. A Time magazine story on the 100 anniversary claimed that as many as 100,000 people took part.

Not Everyone Was Pleased With the Truce

At least one account has survived of a Christmas Truce gone bad: the story of Private Percy Huggins, a Briton who was relaxing in No Man’s Land with the enemy when a sniper shot to the head killed him and set off more bloodshed. The sergeant who took Huggins’ place, hoping to avenge his death, was then himself picked off and killed.

In another account, a German scolded his fellow soldiers during the Christmas Truce: “Such a thing should not happen in wartime. Have you no German sense of honor left?” That 25-year old soldier’s name was Adolf Hitler.

Neither was high command pleased with the festivities. On Dec. 7, 1914, Pope Benedict had implored leaders of the battling nations to hold a Christmas truce, asking "that the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang." The plea was officially ignored.

So when a truce spontaneously broke out, the leaders of all the armies were reportedly horrified. British General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien wrote in a confidential memorandum that "this is only illustrative of the apathetic state we are gradually sinking into." Some accounts of the Christmas Truce hold that soldiers were punished for fraternization, and top command issued orders that it should never happen again.

For the rest of World War I—a conflict that would ultimately claim roughly 15 million lives—no Christmas Truces appear to have occurred. But in 1914, these curious holiday get-togethers reminded all those involved that wars were fought not by forces but by human beings. For years after, the Truce became fodder for everything from artwork to made-for-TV-movies to advertisements and popular songs.

Today, a memorial stands in England’s National Memorial Arboretum commemorating the Christmas Truce; it was dedicated by Prince William of England. On the 100 anniversary in 2014, the English and German national soccer teams staged a friendly match in England in remembrance of the soldiers’ impromptu soccer games in 1914. (England won 1-0.)

What stands out most today, however, are the memories of the soldiers themselves, preserved in their own penmanship. One riflemen of Britain’s 3rd Rifle Brigade recounted a German soldier saying, “Today we have peace. Tomorrow you fight for your country. I fight for mine. Good luck!”

As for Britain’s Bruce Bairnsfather, he summed up the distinct historic moment this way: “Looking back on it all, I wouldn't have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything.”

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The miraculous Christmas Truce of 1914: When WWI soldiers on both sides (briefly) stopped war

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is one of the most remarkable and unexpected events in military history. For many people who hear about it, it restores our collective faith in humanity: even in the darkest times.

In the first year of World War I, a conflict that would eventually claim millions of lives, a spontaneous ceasefire took place in the frozen trenches of the Western Front.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, soldiers from opposing armies, primarily the British and Germans, set aside their weapons and hostility to share a fleeting period of peace and goodwill.

What led to this remarkable, if temporary, call of peace?

And why did the war continue for another four horrific years?

Why the world was at war in 1914

World War I had started as a result of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo.

This single tragedy set off a rapid chain reaction among the major European powers.

In the weeks following, a series of diplomatic and military maneuvers led to the escalation of tensions.

On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. It seems that they believed that the Serbian government had been involved in the plot to assassinate the Archduke.

Then, Russia, which was bound by treaty to Serbia, began to mobilize its forces.

Like falling dominoes, this lead Germany, an ally of Austria-Hungary, to declare war on Russia on August 1st.

Then, France, allied with Russia, found itself at war with Germany and, by extension, Austria-Hungary.

This conflict ultimately became global when Germany invaded Belgium on August 4th.

Belgium was an ally of the United Kingdom. So, Britain declared war on Germany in response to the violation of Belgian neutrality.

The first five months of the war saw a series of increasingly bloody battles. However, neither side was able to gain an upper hand.

Instead, by the end of 1914, the initial war of movement seen on the Western Front had given way to gruelling trench warfare, leading to a prolonged stalemate. 

The war had become a costly struggle of attrition, with both sides constructing complex trench systems that extended from the North Sea to the Swiss border.

Why did the Christmas Truce happen?

By December 1914, soldiers on both sides were exhausted, demoralized, and bogged down in the muddy, frigid trenches.

In the face of the ongoing conflict, the festive season brought a sense of nostalgia and a longing for peace.

As Christmas Eve approached, a calm descended over parts of the Western Front. Both sides seemed to hope for a reprieve.

The strange event began with the Germans, who initiated the truce by decorating their trenches.

People from the time claimed that they adorned their positions with candles and small Christmas trees.

Across no-man's-land, the British and French troops observed these activities with curiosity and cautious optimism.

The atmosphere changed further as the German soldiers started singing Christmas carols.

It was at this moment, that disbelief was replaced by something more heart-felt.

Moved by the spirit of the moment, British and French soldiers chose to respond with their own carols.

In a strange moment, the two sides sung together: in different languages, but the same songs.

Men who were, just days prior, trying to kill each other, now shared in a rare moment of solidarity.

The remarkable events of Christmas Day 1914

The next day, Christmas Day itself, the spirit of goodwill took a more tangible form.

German soldiers, in a bold and perhaps foolhardy gesture, left their trenches and approached the Allied lines, calling out "Merry Christmas" in English.

Initially met with skepticism, the fear of a trap soon gave way to the realization that the Germans were unarmed.

Their intentions were peaceful.

The Allied soldiers reciprocated and also climbed out of their trenches.

As more soldiers joined, the no man's land, usually a place of immense danger, transformed into a common meeting ground.

The men exchanged gifts of cigarettes, food, and souvenirs. They showed each other pictures of their families and spoke about their homes.

They discovered commonalities despite their different languages and allegiances.

Accounts of the time mention that in various locations along the front, troops from both sides set up impromptu football games in no man's land.

These matches were played with makeshift balls, which were made from bundled cloth.

The games were friendly, and t he scores mattered little; what was significant was the spirit of sportsmanship and the temporary sense of normality.

However, not all of the activities that day were about fun and festivities. Some soldiers used the cessation of hostilities to recover the bodies of their friends that still lay in no man's land.

Then, joint burial ceremonies were held, with troops from both sides paying their respects.

Why did the war continue despite the truce?

In many sectors, the truce came to an end on December 26th. Commanders on both sides, concerned about the fraternization weakening their troops' resolve to fight, ordered the resumption of hostilities.

In some instances, this order was met with resistance from the troops, who had developed a sense of camaraderie with their adversaries.

However, the strict discipline and structure of the military eventually compelled the soldiers to return to their roles as combatants.

The return to fighting often began with symbolic acts, such as firing shots in the air, to signal the end of the truce.

In some cases, soldiers shouted warnings to their erstwhile comrades in the opposing trenches, signalling to them that the fighting would recommence.

In other areas, the truce lasted a bit longer, extending into the first week of January 1915.

These extended truces were particularly prevalent in quieter sectors of the front, where the intensity of combat was lower.

Why was the Christmas Truce an important event?

The Christmas Truce is a curious moment. It does raise questions about the nature of obedience and discipline in the military context.

The fact that the truce was not officially sanctioned and occurred spontaneously across various parts of the front suggests a temporary breakdown of military discipline.

From a sociological perspective, the truce underscores the influence of cultural and traditional practices, such as Christmas celebrations, in fostering a temporary peace.

The shared cultural significance of Christmas for both the German and Allied soldiers enabled them to view each other through a lens of common cultural practices rather than as enemies.

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The Christmas Truce of 1914: A Heartening Story of Humanity in the Middle of War

By maria popova.

In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches, some even walked over to their opponents bearing gifts. The incident became one of the most heart-warming displays of humanity in the history of human conflict and was dubbed the Christmas Truce.

From the trenches, a 19-year-old British private by the name of Henry William Williams — a man of confounding contradictions himself, who would go on to become one of the most lyrical nature writers in the English language, an early admirer of Hitler, and an opponent of the Second World War — wrote to his mother on Boxing Day:

Dear Mother, I am writing from the trenches. It is 11 o’clock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite me a ‘dug-out’ (wet) with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench, but frozen elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe presented by the Princess Mary. In the pipe is tobacco. Of course, you say. But wait. In the pipe is German tobacco. Haha, you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh dear, no! From a German soldier. Yes a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday the British & Germans met & shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, & exchanged souvenirs, & shook hands. Yes, all day Xmas day, & as I write. Marvellous, isn’t it?

This lovely short film captures the story and spirit of this symbolic moment of peace, grace, and humility amid one of history’s most violent and disgraceful failures of humanity.

Complement with Eleanor Roosevelt’s little-known children’s book about Christmas and hope amid war .

— Published December 25, 2010 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2010/12/25/the-christmas-truce/ —

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The Christmas Truce

For a brief and poignant moment in december 1914, war itself took a holiday..

Confronting each other across the muddy, half-frozen trenches of Flanders as Christmas 1914 ap­proached were the armies of Queen Victoria’s grandsons George and Wilhelm. No-man’s-land be­tween the troops was littered with the dead, and hopes for a short, decisive war had died with them. Yet the deadlock of the trenches and the imminence of Christmas gave rise to one of the few humane episodes of the war. It has be­come almost mythic, but it happened.

Ironically, the initiatives came from the invaders. Most Germans, even lead­ing intellectuals like Thomas Mann, viewed the war as a response to the alleged encirclement of Germany by the hostile forces of cultures less rich and technologies less advanced. To be called “Hun barbarians” when they avowedly represented the higher civili­zation, and one under threat at that, seemed absurd, a feeling shared by edu­cated young officers at the front.

While the war itself might be justifi­able, a Christmas tarnished by war seemed outrageous. Captain Rudolf Binding, a hussar officer, wrote to his father from Flanders on December 20, 1914, that if he were in authority, he would issue a proclamation banning the celebration of Christmas. “Enemy, Death, and a Christmas tree–they can­not exist so close together.”

Binding was not appeased by what he labeled as a “Christmas gift stunt orga­nized by…snobbish busybodies in a glare of publicity [that] creates such an unsavory impression here that it fairly makes one sick.” The Liebesgabe , or love gift, had been promoted by Ger­man newspapers on behalf of commercial enterprises that packaged them out of profitable patriotism. Binding dis­paraged them as “packages of bad ci­gars, indifferent chocolate, and wool­ lies of problematical usefulness.” This did not make a Christmas.

The British took their cue from the propaganda success of Victoria’s box of chocolates for the Boer War troops in 1899, a prized gift even embossed on the lid with her royal profile. Shipped across the Channel in the name of George V’s daughter, Princess Mary, were gift boxes of cigarettes, pipe tobacco–in those days everyone smoked–and a greeting card repro­duced in facsimile from the king’s handwriting, “May God protect you and bring you home safe.”

In some sectors of Flanders, firing began to slacken spontaneously on the afternoon leading up to Christmas Eve; in others it was war  as usual–at  least to begin with. “About half-past four on Christmas Eve,” a Private Mullard of the London Rifle Brigade wrote to his parents on the Isle of Wight, “we heard a band in the German trenches,  but our artillery spoilt the effect by drop­ping a couple of shells right in the centre of them. You can guess what became of the band, for we have not heard it since.” Yet when darkness fell about an hour later, they “were sur­prised to see trees stuck on the top of the [German] trenches, lit up with can­dles, and all the men sitting on top of the trenches. So, of course, we got out of ours and passed a few remarks, invit­ing each other to come over and have a drink and a smoke, but we did not like to trust each other at first.”

To Allied troops, the German im­pulse not to forgo the rituals of Christ­mas came as a surprise after the propa­ganda about German bestiality. They did not expect the supposedly barbaric and pagan Germans to risk their lives in behalf of each prized Tann e nbaum . Yet when unanticipated gunfire felled the first trees in the trenches, Fritz and his friends stubbornly climbed the par­apets to set them upright.

At Fromelles, south of the border between France and Belgium, the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards was op­posite the Saxon 15th, 37th, and 158th regiments. A German who spoke good English shouted across the lines, “Mer­ry Christmas, Scottie Guardie. We not fire tomorrow; have holiday, game of football.” An 18-year-old second lieutenant, Alan Swinton, commander of a company only a 100 yards off, soon realized that the pause in enemy fire was lengthening, with his own men happily reciprocating. The Scots lis­tened to the enemy singing into the night, and warily watched their fires and their lighted candles, which by their positions seemed to be on the branches of Christmas trees.

What broke through the suspicion at most places on the line was the singing, stolid and often religious on the German side, informal and often irreverent on the British. An infantryman in the London Rifles trenches reported that the Saxons opposite “sang and played to us several of their own tunes and some of ours, such as ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ‘Tipperary,’ etc. while we did the same for them. The regiment on our left all got out of their trenches, and every time a flare went up they simply stood there, cheered, and waved their hats, and not a shot was fired….The singing and play­ing continued all night.” (His description of the incident appeared in the Times, which relaxed its customary bellicosity to print such accounts, as did dozens of local newspapers.)

Almost everywhere opposite the Brit­ish in Flanders, Germans placed lighted candles atop their parapets, and where they could obtain small trees, put them up too. A lieutenant in the London Rifles said “the Boches’ trenches” looked “like the Thames on Henley Re­gatta night.” The numbers of exposed and unarmed men on both sides grew. Where Saxon troops went out to meet the London Rifles, Private Mullard re­ported, the enemy officers approached “on the rays of a searchlight playing from the German lines, and it made a fine picture to see the six officers meet between the lines…. All the boys on both sides gave a tremendous cheer….Then it was the troops turn, and we swarmed out of our trenches.”

To the north of Ploegsteert Wood, the Seaforth Highlanders were frater­nizing. The Germans sang Christmas songs; the Highlanders responded impudently with “Who Were You with Last Night?” as well as “Tipperary,” both “very badly,” a Seaforth officer wrote home. First “horrified at discov­ering some of our men had actually gone out,” he soon excused it as an effort to see what the enemy trenches were like. Halfway between the lines, he reported, they exchanged cigarettes for cigars “and they arranged (the pri­vate soldiers of one army and the pri­vate soldiers of the other) a 48 hours’ armistice. It was all most irregular, but the Peninsular and other wars will fur­nish many such examples.” Eventually, that first night, their officers inter­vened, and “both sides were induced to return to their respective  trenches.” Yet not only did “the enemy” sing all night, “during my watch they played ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ and ‘God Save the King,’ at 2:30 A.M.!”

Near Armentieres, the Queen’s West­ minster Rifles assumed at first that the lights were a ruse and fired at them. When there was no return volley, it puzzled them more. “The first unusual thing happened,” Rifleman Percy H. Jones wrote a few days later in his diary, “when we noticed about three large fires behind enemy lines. This is a place where it is generally madness to strike a match.” Then lights began ap­pearing on trench parapets, and Jones heard what he thought were “weird tunes on their peculiarly pitched bugles or horns,” as well as singing. Troops suspected the enemy soldiers were priming themselves up for a big attack….In fact we were about to loose off a few rounds at the biggest light when the following words were heard (probably through a megaphone): “Englishmen, Englishmen. Don’t shoot. You don’t shoot, we don’t shoot.”

How it all happened I don’t know, but shortly after this our boys had lights out, and the enemy troops were busy singing each other songs, punctuated with terrific salvos of applause.

The scene from my sentry post was hardly creditable. Straight ahead were three large lights, with figures perfectly visible round them. The German trenches, which bent sharply and turned to the rear of our ad­vanced positions[,] were illuminated with hundreds of little lights. Far away to the left, where our lines bent, a few lights showed our A Co[mpan]y trenches, where the men were thundering out “My little Grey Home in the West.”…The music then quietened down and some time was spent yelling facetious remarks across the trench­es. After this, some dare devils in E Co[mpa­ny] actually went out, met and shook hands with some of the Germans and exchanged cake and biscuits. As the night went on things gradually grew quieter.

Such early contacts were tentative and timid, and in the darkness, troops re­turned to their own lines.

Early Christmas morning at Hou­plines, near Armentieres, Private Frank Richards and some chums in the Royal Welch Fusiliers “stuck up a board” on which they had printed “A MERRY CHRISTMAS,” then waited to see what would happen. When the placard was not shot at, two men jumped onto the parapet of their trench with their hands above their heads to show that they had no weapons. Two Germans opposite did the same, and began walking toward them. As they met and shook hands, the trenches emptied and men on both sides ran toward each other. “Buffalo Bill,” Richards’s company commander, rushed into the forward trench to stop them, but his men were already gone. His nickname had come from his habit of cocking his revolver and threatening to blow a man’s “ruddy brains out” for some trifling thing–and what he saw was no trifle. Yet he had to accept what had happened, “so company officers climbed out too,” Richards wrote. “Their officers were also now out….We mucked in all day with one another.” One English-speaking Saxon confessed that he was fed up with the war, and Richards and his friends agreed.

Discovering in the morning that his men had left their trenches to meet Sax­ons in no-man’s-land, Lieutenant Swin­ton sought advice from higher authority on how to handle the situation. At battal­ion headquarters he found his superior officer, Captain George Paynter, being admonished by the brigade commander. “George,” he warned, “you are not to fraternize with the Huns!” Waiting until Paynter was alone, Swinton reported what the captain obviously knew. Paynter replied, as if he had heard no order from above, “Come on, Alan, show me the Huns.” Hurrying forward, they met their Saxon counterparts and ar­ranged for a day’s truce.

The enemy was almost too friendly, and asked to visit the British trenches; but Paynter did not want them to see how badly off the Guards were. Casual­ties and sickness had left their compa­nies woefully understrength. Forbid­ding his own troops to visit closer than the halfway point between the trench­es, he ordered some of his men to move back and forth in their own breast­ works, to give an impression of greater numbers. Meanwhile, they also used the opportunity to repair dugouts and rein­force their barbed wire. “I honestly be­lieve,” said another Guards officer of en­emy friendliness, “that if we had called on the Saxons for fatigue parties to help with our barbed wire, they would have come over and done so.” 

From the German side, Private Hein­rich Knetschke–if we are to trust the humor magazine Der Brummer (The Grumbler)–sent a letter prefaced by a poem to his “Beloved Anna” from somewhere in Flanders:

The weather is cold in France.

Maybe therefore each soldier

That is on his post is longing For the room where his girl

Is just now lighting a Christmas tree.

“All rights preserved!” Knetschke joked, hoping, he added, that his verses might stir a tear as she thought of him. Many poems were just then being writ­ten by his company, he explained. “A postal van of love has arrived and in the same were lots of different packages with rhymed verses, which all of us are answering now.” He was also sending his poem, he confessed, to two other ladies whose names and addresses he had found in his Liebesgabe, which contained a gereimte Tabakspfeife –a pipe with a patriotic motto around the bowl–and a belt decorated with “very beautiful needlepoint and the exhorta­tion, “A CALL IS SOUNDING LIKE A ROLL OF THUNDER!”

“Beloved Anna!” he went on, “I well believe that you are astonished that I am attempting poetry. However, war causes changes that in ordinary times one thinks would be impossible.” Their situation, he added, which was bad when he last wrote, was now excellent. His platoon had been ordered to an outpost that turned out to be “a very beautiful pavilion,” which must have belonged at one time to a marquis for it included a marquee. “And a hundred meters on is a little chateau; however, we did not move in because behind it is an outpost of the French.”

Once in their new quarters, his lieu­tenant had remarked, “Knetschke, we must secure a Christmas tree!” Knetschke knew exactly where to find one. Reconnoitering the chateau, he had observed a beautiful evergreen growing near the back entrance. Slipping back, in a daring foray into enemy territory, he cut down the tree and had begun “a strategic retreat ” with it when he heard loud voices. Just then, a few “Marseil­laise”–singing drunks, precariously carrying bottles of red wine, emerged from the chateau. “They swayed like rocking horses,” Knetschke wrote. He rushed back, not forgetting the tree, and report­ed the discovery of Rottwein to his lieu­tenant, “who gathered up six men and with me in the lead marched to the chateau. Well, Anna, you might be joy­ously expecting that a decisive battle fol­lowed. But it’s not the case. We reached the rear entrance and entered the ground floor, and couldn’t risk a wrong move as we heard the ‘Marseillaise’ still coming from the cellar, which showed us the way to go. As we stood quietly in the dark vault, a French officer luckily opened the cellar.”

Avoiding detection, Knetschke con­fided, was impossible, but the officer already “had such a load on” that he could not tell friend from foe, and he ordered the Germans (in French) to “move out the champagne.” They had come exactly for this purpose, the Oberleutnant answered, “and we entered the wine cellar…Their insensi­bility was obvious. Half of the French outpost was inside, and they were as drunk as loons. After this, you will surely believe me that we thanked our maker that we hadn’t come any later because the Frogs would have guzzled up everything all by themselves.”

The enemy officer “extended his French paw to our Oberleutnant … A poilu wanted to embrace me. I rejected such fraternization but only, Beloved Anna, because he was belching so pow­erfully. But then we agreed to a truce for the rest of Christmas on the condi­tion that the parleyvoozes would help us to carry fifty bottles into our pavil­ion.” Back in their own quarters, hav­ing left the French to slip fuzzily into un consciousness, the Germans put candles on their Tannenbaum and, in­spired by champagne, sang “Stille N ach t” in “voices like oxen.”

Knetschke’s tale recognized that when the irregular line separating forces had been frozen in place, the opposing trenches often had cut through farms and estates; it also acknowledged that despite the Franco-German hatred ever since 1870, some impromptu truces during that Christmas involved even the un­forgiving French.

Decades later, the novelist Henry Williamson wondered what might have been had a glum soldier in the Bavar­ian ranks across the line from him stepped forward. “Three weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I was talking to Germans with beards and khaki-cov­ered Pickelhauben, and smoking new­ china gift-pipes glazed with the Crown Prince’s portrait in colour, in a turnip field amidst dead cows, English and German corpses frozen stiff. The new world, for me, was germinated from that fraternization. Adolf Hitler was one of those ‘opposite numbers’ in long field-grey coats.” Later, in the pacifist futility of the 1930s, Williamson would fantasize hopefully about Hitler’s expe­rience of 1914-18: If the fuhrer was one of those who had been involved in that rapprochement across the lines, the memory of Bruderschaft (brother­hood) might contribute to staving off a new war. Yet Hitler had in fact rejected that opportunity in 1914. William son’s recollection–it was during the writer’s fascist phase–was only a convenient quarter-truth.

To escape Austrian conscription in 1913, Hitler had slipped into Bavaria, volunteering the next year from Mu­nich on the day the Germans invaded France and Belgium. After eight weeks of training, he was a lance corporal and field messenger in Flanders with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regi­ment. But he was out of the line on December 25, and when there was dis­cussion about crossing into no-man’s­ land to share Christmas with the Brit­ish, he contended, “Such a thing should not happen during wartime.” Besides, although he was a baptized Catholic, Hitler rejected every vestige of religious observance. He was not only opposite Williamson, but opposed Williamson’s alter ego, Phillip Mad­dison, in the novel A Fox under My Cloak (1955) is pedaling back toward a shattered chateau, from which he had liberated an ancient bicycle, when a Tommy shouts that “everyone” is out of the trenches and in no-man’s-land­ “talking to the Alleymans,” he explains. “There’s bloody hundreds of’m, Jock!” Maddison cycles toward “what at first sight looked like a crowd on a football field during the interval of a match.” What he sees seems like a dream, as is the reality of standing up safely in day­ light.” Leaning the bicycle against the British barricade, he…found himself face to face with living Germans, men in grey uniforms and leather knee­ boots….” Moving on, Maddison is sur­prised when he sees a football kicked into the air and several soldiers run­ning after it. A soccer match has been proposed, to be played in a field behind the German lines.

Whether a game of “footer” actually occurred insid e the German lines is unproven, but the references to football along the front are many. Unit histories include reports of matches, some played within earshot, often within ar­tillery range, of the enemy. One lieutenant in a Highland regiment reported talking during the truce with a foot­ baller from Leipzig who arranged with him to have a two-hour “interval” for a match the next day–Boxing Day, the traditional English day for giving Christmas gifts to servants. “This, how­ever, was prevented by our superiors at HQ.” Another soldier, Private William Tapp of the 1/Royal Warwickshires, wrote on Christmas Day from just above St. Yvas, “We are trying to ar­range a football match with them for tomorrow, Boxing Day,” but artillery fire prevented it. There were other plans to play, right up until New Year’s, especially after the clearance of corpses from no-man’s-land furnished areas for competition at least as wide as a con­ventional soccer field.

Certainly something resembling football occurred on Christmas itself. A London Rifles officer whose letter about the truce was published in the Times described how “on Christmas Day a football match was played be­tween them and us in front of the trench.” Rifles sergeant Bob Lovell re­called the preliminaries–that his com­pany commander had sent a sack of tea across the line and received a letter of thanks from his counterpart, after which, later on Christmas morning, a German juggler who had appeared in London music halls “cleared a space” between the lines and gave an exhibi­tion. One of the Saxon officers emerged with a camera–all  personal cameras on both sides violated regulations–and took a photograph of a dozen men from both sides, posed with mistletoe from gift packages thrust jauntily into caps and helmets exchanged with the enemy for the picture.

The Times also published a letter from a major in the Medical Corps who claimed that in his sector his regiment “actually had a football match with the Saxons, who beat them 3-2!!!” The ac­count is verified in the war history of the 133rd Regiment of the 9th Divi­sion, Royal Saxon Infantry, which spoke of the “droll scene” of “Tommy und Fritz ” first chasing down wild hares between the lines, then kicking about a football furnished by a Scot. “This developed into a regulation foot­ ball match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter. Then we organized each side into teams, lining up in motley rows, with the football in the center. One of us took a photograph. Das Spiel endete 3:2 fur Fritz.”

Sergeant Major F. Naden of the 6th Cheshires, then east of Wulverghem, above the River Douve in Belgium, wrote home, “The Scotsmen…started the bagpipes, and we had a rare old jollification, which included football, in which the Germans took part.” Private Higgins of the same regiment failed to mention football in his letter home, but said the Cheshires invited the ene­my, only sixty yards away, for Christ­mas dinner. “Today we were shaking hands with some of the Germans, and they have given some of our chaps four barrels of beer.” Decades later, Private Ernie Williams, a former Territorial in the 6th Cheshires, recalled,

The ball appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where, but it came from their side–it wasn’t from our side that the ball came. They made up some goals and one fellow went in for a goal and then it was just a general kickabout. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part. I had a go at the ball. I was pretty good then, at 19. Everybody seemed to be enjoy­ing themselves. There was no sort of ill-will between us…. There was no referee, and no score, no tally at all. It was simply a mell­–nothing like the soccer you see on televi­sion. The boots we wore were a menace­ those great big boots we had on–and in those days the balls were made of leather and they soon got very soggy….

Few details of reported games or the conditions of play survive. Lieutenant Charles Brewer of the 2/Bedfordshires wrote home only that “higher up in the line–you would scarcely believe it­ they are playing a football match.” And a history of the Lancashire Fusiliers records that its A Company played a Christmas game against the enemy just north of Le Touquet, using an old ration tin for a ball, and lost, 3-2. Curiously, both recorded scores are the same, but the circumstances and locations are very different. Lance Corporal George Ashurst, who was somewhere on the line with the 2/Lancashires, mentions only that “some of our boys tied up a sandbag and used it as a football”–obviously not the same incident.

No-man’s-land in the sectors where the truce was holding had taken on the atmosphere of a panoramic, anecdotal, Victorian scene as painted by W.P. Frith–a Derby Day or a Ramsgate Sands . As on every square inch of Frith’s crowded canvases, people gath­ered and stories unfolded. In the for­mer cabbage and turnip patches, cow pastures and orchards, fattened rabbits were skewered on makeshift spits and a pig caught by the 6/Cheshires was roasted and shared with the Boche. Both sides brought up loads of wood and straw to improve their dugouts, tasks laborious and even impossible un­der fire. An Englishman in the 3/Rifles had his hair cut by a Saxon who had been his barber in High Holborn, and Captain Josef Sewald of the 17th Bavar­ians watched several of his soldiers, heads cranked up, being shaved by the enemy. The cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfa­ther, a second lieutenant with the 1/ Royal Warwickshires, recalled “one of my machine gunners, who was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long hair of a docile Saxon, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck.” Few units were eager to return to a war of attrition that seemed endless. Some had agreed to stretch the cease­ fire into a further dawn; others held out for New Year’s Day. Headquarters on both sides responded with threats of punitive action; local commanders, re­alizing that their troops had to be weaned gradually from humane im­pulses, argued that the continued lull furnished time to drain flooded trench­es, repair barbed-wire defenses, and move forward ammunition and sup­plies. Reluctantly, often perfunctorily, battalions on the line recommenced hostilities. In the 1/Royal Warwick­shires, Private Tapp noted, an officer warned the Germans opposite at 8:40 a.m. on December 26 to get back into their trenches, as British artillery would begin shelling at 9:00. A German shouted back, ”We will get into your trenches as we shall be safer.”

“This will stop the football match,” Tapp mourned. “Shells are exchanged for a few hours but we all stand up at intervals, no fear of being shot with a bullet.”

In most instances, the return to hos­tilities was preceded by a signal to the other side. On the banks of the Lys, Captain Charles Stockwell of the 2/Roy­al Welch Fusiliers fired three shots in the air at 8:30 a.m., posted a sign read­ ing “Merry Christmas” above a forward trench, and climbed atop his parapet. The Germans opposite responded with a “Thank you” sheet, and their compa­ny’s captain stood up on his own para­pet. The two officers bowed, saluted, then climbed down into their trenches, from which the German officer fired two shots in the air. The war was re­sumed. A Saxon unit threw a piece of dirty cardboard across to the British side apologizing for being forced to fight, and announcing, in English, “We shot in the air.” “But of course,” Cap­tain F.D. Harris of the 1st North Staf­fordshires wrote to his family, “war is war, and I expect we shall be at it properly again in a short time.”

Little enthusiasm for hostile action was displayed in sectors where the truce had held. “During the whole of Boxing Day,” Frank Richards recalled, the 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers “never fired a shot, and they the same; each side seemed to be waiting for the other to set the ball a-rolling.” In the XIX Saxon Corps, there was almost a mutiny in one of its regiments when it received orders to begin shooting again. When on leave in Leipzig, Vize-Feldwebel Lange told Australian expatriate Ethel Cooper about it. Although she could not mail letters to her sister back home because Australia was at war with Ger­many, she carefully hid the unsent cor­respondence in date sequence until peace came. According to Miss Cooper,

The difficulty began on the 26th, when the order to fire was given, for the men struck . Herr Lange says that…he had never heard such language as the officers indulged in, while they stormed up and down, and got, as the only result, the answer, “We can’t­ they are good fellows, and we can’t.” Final­ly, the officers turned on the men with, “Fire, or we do–and not at the  enemy! ” Not a shot had come from the other side, but at last they fired, and an answering fire came back, but not a man fell. “We spent that day and the next,” said Herr Lange, “wasting ammunition in trying to shoot the stars down from the sky.”

What had made the truce work was the shared feeling that the war would be decided at another place and time, and in another way–by some massive assault or by negotiations after a wear­ing down of the desire of governments to keep on fighting. As long as the troops in the trenches saw themselves as a sideshow that only put them at risk, they preferred to make life at least marginally bearable. Yet as units re­lieved each other on both sides of the line, the links briefly forged now erod­ed. Fewer companies in the forward trenches knew their counterparts by reputation or by name, and the events of Christmas seemed strange and even surreal to newcomers full of rear-area slogans and enmities.

As Bruce Bairnsfather put it, “It was too much to expect that a table would be suddenly wheeled out into No Man’s Land, accompanied by English and German Ministers with fountain pens and documents, ready to sign PEACE.” He found that the higher the official echelon, the more annoyed the superi­or was about what had happened, right up to divisional headquarters. The holi­day having passed, “and the respective soldiers having been sorted out, and put back in their proper slots in the ground, the war went on again. Bullets whizzed around that one-time meeting place, and sundry participants in that social gathering were laid out stiff on parapets, awaiting burial….” In the sec­tor where British-officered (but Indian) Garhwals had greeted Westphalians on Christmas Eve, the 2/Worcesters now were on the front, firing away with “Archibald,” an improvised trench mortar made from a large iron drain­ pipe. It looped into the enemy lines Tickler’s jam tins, once bartered for sausages but now stuffed with explo­sives and nails. It was symbolic of the return to a shooting war that, depend­ing upon which troops were in the trenches, rekindled irregularly as the poor fighting weather in January im­proved and friendly relations deterio­rated. Easter and other holidays came and went, with nothing more than sporadic, abortive war stoppages. On both sides there would be more dead than yards gained throughout 1915.

The German army had an even more intense tradition of discipline, and its High Command was just as concerned as the other side about a spontaneous stoppage of the war. Expressions of popular will, soldier or civilian, could endanger the state. Yet some soldiers’ letters home trickled through the cen­sorship. Those that appeared in news­ paper accounts were mostly watered down to describe spotty truces to bury the dead. In Leipzig the Reclams Uni­ versum published three pictures from London papers showing artists’ render­ings of warm fraternization and fol­lowed them with German solders’ ac­counts that “proved” the enemy depic­tions were falsehoods. In Germany, authorities kept photographs of the real thing out of the illustrated weeklies.

The fading of the 1914 truce had closed off the last practical opportunity for a short war. Soldiers in the trench­es might not want to fight on, but their governments did. The Chinese novelist Lu Xun once observed wryly, “Whoever was in power wishes for a restoration. Whoever is now in power is in favor of the status quo.” A peace in place was impossible for the Western Allies. The British and Belgians and French could not concede the lost national territory; the Germans, having overrun it, could not return it without the collapse of their regime. It made no difference what the men doing the dying felt, as long as they also felt under military discipline.

Paradoxically, discipline would lead inevitably to its opposite as the war re­heated. In a play by Hubert Griffith, Tunnel Trench, a Tommy tells a captured German long after, “When you woz comin’ through Belgium you woz swine–not as bad as they said you woz, but you woz bad….But ‘ave you ‘ated us when we woz fightin’ equal, all these years in trench warfare? ‘Ave we ‘ated you? Not when you palled up with us Christmas 1914.” But, the soldier believes, once the Germans were driven from their positions, as assuredly they would be, it was ” Gawd’s ‘oly bible truth'” that “as I’m alive, we’ll lose our ‘eads as well…. We’ll chuck bombs down yer dugouts an’ laugh….We’ll baynet yer wounded….We’ll get ter kil­lin’ you fer the love of killin’….Gawd knows why it is, but so it will be. ‘Tain’t, and won’t be, our fault, but so it will be.”

However much the Christmas Truce of 1914 evidenced the desire of men to live in amity with one another, it was doomed from the start. A celebration of the human spirit rather than an abor­tive mutiny, it was at odds with a fact of war explained by Graham Greene about a very different kind of conflict in a different place and time. “An enemy,” Greene wrote in his novel The Human Factor (1978), “had to remain a carica­ture if he was to be kept at a safe distance: an enemy should never come alive. The generals were right–no Christmas cheer ought to be exchanged between the trenches.”

STANLEY WEINTRAUB is Evan Pugh Profes­sor of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. He is currently working on a book about the Christmas Truce.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 1993 issue (Vol. 5, No. 2) of  MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History  with the headline: The Christmas Truce

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Last updated 26 october 2015, christmas truce.

In December 1914, there were several truces between enemy soldiers along one part of the Western front. Widely publicized, they underscore how difficult it was for soldiers to adapt to the conditions of a long and deadly war already underway since the summer. They were also part of a broader movement to that sought to limit the violence of the war on all fronts.

Table of Contents

• 1 Christmas 1914
• 2 Broader Context

Selected Bibliography

Christmas 1914 ↑.

On Christmas 1914, several truces were declared between armies that had been fighting a deadly war for several months along different parts of the front . Soldiers - for the most part conscripts and volunteers - were far from their loved ones and subjected to the harsh conditions of trench life. They had to contend with a lasting war and the reality of daily casualties , weather conditions, arduous battles to correct positions and deadly attacks to attempt to break through enemy lines. Christmas was a celebration shared by both sides and recalled for both the comforts of home and a desire for peace. From trench to trench, men called out and threw each other newspapers , tobacco and food . They challenged each other with rounds of songs and shared traditional Christmas carols. German, French and British soldiers’ accounts mention actual encounters in no man’s land , including some impromptu football matches. These Christmas truces were particularly covered in the British and German press.

Broader Context ↑

The Christmas truces appear to fit into the broader context of movements to limit the violence of war, as historian Tony Ashworth has notably shown regarding the British front throughout the war. A system of “live and let live” existed between enemy trenches at several periods and in several sectors along the front. Such fraternization was also a form of both individual and collective disobedience towards military authority and allowed soldiers to conceive of the enemy as a comrade . Several French, German and English-speaking historians have pointed to attempts by soldier-citizens to exercise their right to contest. Despite depersonalization and feelings of animosity that likely fuelled the violence of trench warfare, cases of fraternization including the Christmas truces underscore the ability of soldiers to assess the relevance of the war and, in some cases, to deem fraternization more legitimate. And yet such behaviour was nonetheless kept in check by the social and military norms of war, the high degree of supervision (particularly in the Italian army, for example) and feelings of anger directed at the enemy, all of which were reinforced by military strategies to perpetuate the combativeness of men.

Alexandre Lafon, Université de Toulouse 2 – Jean-Jaurès

Section Editor: Emmanuelle Cronier

Translator: Jocelyne Serveau

• Ashworth, Tony: Trench warfare 1914-1918. The live and let live system , New York 1980: Holmes & Meier.
• Barthas, Louis, Cazals, Rémy (ed.): Les carnets de guerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier (1914-1918) , Paris 1978: F. Maspéro.
• Bourke, Joanna: An intimate history of killing. Face-to-face killing in twentieth-century warfare , New York 1999: Basic Books.
• Ferro, Marc (ed.): Frères de tranchées , Paris 2005: Perrin.
• Loez, André: Fraternisations : Les 100 mots de la Grande Guerre, Paris 2013: Presses universitaires de France, pp. 58-59.
• Watson, Alexander: Enduring the Great War. Combat, morale and collapse in the German and British armies, 1914-1918 , Cambridge; New York 2008: Cambridge University Press.

Lafon, Alexandre: Christmas Truce , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-10-26. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10750 . Translated by: Serveau, Jocelyne

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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Feature Articles - The Christmas Truce

Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over the watch.  Having exchanged pleasantries, your bleary-eyed and mud-spattered colleague shuffles off towards his dug out.  Despite the horrors and the hardships, your morale is high and you believe that in the New Year the nation's army march towards a glorious victory.

But for now you stamp your feet in a vain attempt to keep warm.  All is quiet when jovial voices call out from both friendly and enemy trenches.  Then the men from both sides start singing carols and songs.  Next come requests not to fire, and soon the unthinkable happens: you start to see the shadowy shapes of soldiers gathering together in no-man's land laughing, joking and sharing gifts.

Many have exchanged cigarettes, the lit ends of which burn brightly in the inky darkness.  Plucking up your courage, you haul yourself up and out of the trench and walk towards the foe...

The meeting of enemies as friends in no-man's land was experienced by hundreds, if not thousands, of men on the Western Front during Christmas 1914.  Today, 90 years after it occurred, the event is seen as a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One - a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians.

Many accounts were rushed, confused or contradictory.  Others, written long after the event, are weighed down by hindsight.  These difficulties aside, the true story is still striking precisely because of its rag-tagged nature: it is more 'human' and therefore all the more potent.

Months beforehand, millions of servicemen, reservists and volunteers from all over the continent had rushed enthusiastically to the banners of war: the atmosphere was one of holiday rather than conflict.

But it was not long before the jovial façade was torn away. Armies equipped with repeating rifles, machine guns and a vast array of artillery tore chunks out of each other, and thousands upon thousands of men perished.

To protect against the threat of this vast firepower, the soldiers were ordered to dig in and prepare for next year's offensives, which most men believed would break the deadlock and deliver victory.

The early trenches were often hasty creations and poorly constructed; if the trench was badly sighted it could become a sniping hot spot.  In bad weather (the winter of 1914 was a dire one) the positions could flood and fall in.  The soldiers - unequipped to face the rigours of the cold and rain - found themselves wallowing in a freezing mire of mud and the decaying bodies of the fallen.

Another factor that broke down the animosity between the opposing armies were the surroundings.  In 1914 the men at the front could still see the vestiges of civilisation.  Villages, although badly smashed up, were still standing.  Fields, although pitted with shell-holes, had not been turned into muddy lunarscapes.

Thus the other world - the civilian world - and the social mores and manners that went with it was still present at the front.  Also lacking was the pain, misery and hatred that years of bloody war build up.  Then there was the desire, on all sides, to see the enemy up close - was he really as bad as the politicians, papers and priests were saying?

It was a combination of these factors, and many more minor ones, that made the Christmas Truce of 1914 possible.

On the eve of the Truce, the British Army (still a relatively small presence on the Western Front) was manning a stretch of the line running south from the infamous Ypres salient for 27 miles to the La Bassee Canal.

Along the front the enemy was sometimes no more than 70, 50 or even 30 yards away.  Both Tommy and Fritz could quite easily hurl greetings and insults to one another, and, importantly, come to tacit agreements not to fire.  Incidents of temporary truces and outright fraternisation were more common at this stage in the war than many people today realise - even units that had just taken part in a series of futile and costly assaults, were still willing to talk and come to arrangements with their opponents.

Not to be outdone, Fritz received a present from the Kaiser , the Kaiserliche , a large meerschaum pipe for the troops and a box of cigars for NCOs and officers.  Towns, villages and cities, and numerous support associations on both sides also flooded the front with gifts of food, warm clothes and letters of thanks.

The Belgians and French also received goods, although not in such an organised fashion as the British or Germans.  For these nations the Christmas of 1914 was tinged with sadness - their countries were occupied.  It is no wonder that the Truce, although it sprung up in some spots on French and Belgian lines, never really caught hold as it did in the British sector.

With their morale boosted by messages of thanks and their bellies fuller than normal, and with still so much Christmas booty to hand, the season of goodwill entered the trenches.  A British Daily Telegraph correspondent wrote that on one part of the line the Germans had managed to slip a chocolate cake into British trenches.

The British accepted the invitation and offered some tobacco as a return present.  That evening, at the stated time, German heads suddenly popped up and started to sing.  Each number ended with a round of applause from both sides.

The Germans then asked the British to join in.  At this point, one very mean-spirited Tommy shouted: 'We'd rather die than sing German.'  To which a German joked aloud: 'It would kill us if you did'.

December 24 was a good day weather-wise: the rain had given way to clear skies.

On many stretches of the Front the crack of rifles and the dull thud of shells ploughing into the ground continued, but at a far lighter level than normal.  In other sectors there was an unnerving silence that was broken by the singing and shouting drifting over, in the main, from the German trenches.

Along many parts of the line the Truce was spurred on with the arrival in the German trenches of miniature Christmas trees - Tannenbaum .  The sight these small pines, decorated with candles and strung along the German parapets, captured the Tommies' imagination, as well as the men of the Indian corps who were reminded of the sacred Hindu festival of light.

By now, the British high command - comfortably 'entrenched' in a luxurious châteaux 27 miles behind the front - was beginning to hear of the fraternisation.

Stern orders were issued by the commander of the BEF, Sir John French against such behaviour.  Other 'brass-hats' (as the Tommies nick-named their high-ranking officers and generals), also made grave pronouncements on the dangers and consequences of parleying with the Germans.

However, there were many high-ranking officers who took a surprisingly relaxed view of the situation.  If anything, they believed it would at least offer their men an opportunity to strengthen their trenches.  This mixed stance meant that very few officers and men involved in the Christmas Truce were disciplined.

Interestingly, the German High Command's ambivalent attitude towards the Truce mirrored that of the British.

Christmas day began quietly but once the sun was up the fraternisation began.  Again songs were sung and rations thrown to one another.  It was not long before troops and officers started to take matters into their own hands and ventured forth.  No-man's land became something of a playground.

Men exchanged gifts and buttons.  In one or two places soldiers who had been barbers in civilian times gave free haircuts.  One German, a juggler and a showman, gave an impromptu, and given the circumstances, somewhat surreal performance of his routine in the centre of no-man's land.

Having raced off to file a report at headquarters, Hulse returned at 10.00 to find crowds of British soldiers and Germans out together chatting and larking about in no-man's land, in direct contradiction to his orders.

Not that Hulse seemed to care about the fraternisation in itself - the need to be seen to follow orders was his concern.  Thus he sought out a German officer and arranged for both sides to return to their lines.

While this was going on he still managed to keep his ears and eyes open to the fantastic events that were unfolding.

'Scots and Huns were fraternizing in the most genuine possible manner.  Every sort of souvenir was exchanged addresses given and received, photos of families shown, etc.  One of our fellows offered a German a cigarette; the German said, "Virginian?"  Our fellow said, "Aye, straight-cut", the German said "No thanks, I only smoke Turkish!"... It gave us all a good laugh.'

Hulse's account was in part a letter to his mother, who in turn sent it on to the newspapers for publication, as was the custom at the time.  Tragically, Hulse was killed in March 1915.

On many parts of the line the Christmas Day truce was initiated through sadder means.  Both sides saw the lull as a chance to get into no-man's land and seek out the bodies of their compatriots and give them a decent burial.  Once this was done the opponents would inevitably begin talking to one another.

The 6th Gordon Highlanders, for example, organised a burial truce with the enemy.  After the gruesome task of laying friends and comrades to rest was complete, the fraternisation began.

On January 1, 1915, the London Times published a letter from a major in the Medical Corps reporting that in his sector the British played a game against the Germans opposite and were beaten 3-2.

Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxons recorded in his diary: 'The English brought a soccer ball from the trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued.  How marvellously wonderful, yet how strange it was.  The English officers felt the same way about it.  Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.'

The Truce lasted all day; in places it ended that night, but on other sections of the line it held over Boxing Day and in some areas, a few days more.  In fact, there parts on the front where the absence of aggressive behaviour was conspicuous well into 1915.

Captain J C Dunn, the Medical Officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, whose unit had fraternised and received two barrels of beer from the Saxon troops opposite, recorded how hostilities re-started on his section of the front.

Dunn wrote: 'At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with "Merry Christmas" on it, and I climbed on the parapet.  He [the Germans] put up a sheet with "Thank you" on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet.  We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.'

Today, pragmatists read the Truce as nothing more than a 'blip' - a temporary lull induced by the season of goodwill, but willingly exploited by both sides to better their defences and eye out one another's positions.  Romantics assert that the Truce was an effort by normal men to bring about an end to the slaughter.

In the public's mind the facts have become irrevocably mythologized, and perhaps this is the most important legacy of the Christmas Truce today.  In our age of uncertainty, it comforting to believe, regardless of the real reasoning and motives, that soldiers and officers told to hate, loathe and kill, could still lower their guns and extend the hand of goodwill, peace, love and Christmas cheer.

Saturday, 22 August, 2009 Simon Rees

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The Last Gasp of Peace: The Message of the Christmas Truce of 1914 to the Modern Profession of Arms

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The story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 is often considered “played out,” especially in historical circles, but it is a compelling tale; its best and most impactful role is on the young minds of the military who have not yet heard it. It is hard for most to come to terms with the horrors of the Western Front, and equally challenging to understand the willingness of soldiers to set aside their differences in the midst of so much death. The actions of the Christmas Truce do not echo with the heroism of Pickett’s Charge, the audacity of Theodore Roosevelt Jr. using his cane to direct landings on Utah Beach, or the bravery of the USS Johnston charging the Japanese fleet at the Battle off Samar. Over the last twelve years, I have returned to this story every year as a teaching moment for the airmen I have led, and now for the midshipmen I teach at the U.S. Naval Academy. It has been a valuable framework for me to remind them how serious their jobs are. It is odd to consider that I teach this to Air Force and Navy members, the services with the least appreciation for the trenches of World War I, but I think that is what makes it more important. Most members of these services bear the particular burden of executing combat without staring into the eyes of the enemy. But the lesson of the truce is important for all armed services. Members of the profession of arms should remember the Christmas Truce for everything it was, and they should learn about it because of all the things it was not.

At the end of the first four months of World War I, the armies in Europe had experienced what may have been the greatest military bloodletting in history. Between August and December 1914, 116,000 German and 189,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers were killed , but that still fell short of the 16,200 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force and 30,000 Belgians killed alongside the soul-crushing 300,000 French soldiers in the same four-month span. On the Eastern Front, Russian causalities approached 2 million .

The number of military dead from the first four months of World War I does not faze most historians. It is, after all, but a fraction of the overall toll of that war. However, for those just joining today’s military, modern context provides a stinging dose of reality. The total number of military personnel (American and coalition forces, as well as local military and national police) killed in the “Global War on Terror” from October 2001 to November 2018 was just over 125,000 , with slightly fewer opposition dead. More men died on one side of the trenches in four months than were killed in combat across a war now stretching into its nineteenth year. That kind of loss, in human terms, much less the costs to military strategy and political capital, is truly unfathomable.

Among that level of death on both sides, the idea that a moment of friendly peace could spontaneously break out strikes the modern mind as almost nonsense, a mental non-starter. Yet, it happened. There was no particular location or unit where the truce began. It did not, like Athena, burst forth upon the fields of World War I fully formed. It grew slowly and sporadically in many areas at the same time. There was no unified plan or conspiracy to begin such truces, though senior leaders anticipated them. General Erich von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, expressly forbade such action and promised punishments for those who attempted to arrange a truce. However, even threats from the top of the chain proved no match for the holiday spirit of the men in the trenches.

On Christmas Eve, 1914, the overtures began. Given the love of Christmas generally associated with Germanic culture and tradition, it is not surprising that German or Austrian forces instigated most of the breakouts of peace. All day long, German units dispatched low-ranking soldiers to supply depots in the rear lines to secure special food items, mail, and small hand-held Christmas trees complete with candles and decorations. Carl Mühlegg , a private in the 17th Bavarian Regiment stationed near Langemarck, accomplished the eighteen-mile roundtrip hike to deliver a tree to his captain. The officer solemnly lit the candles and wished peace for his soldiers, Germany, and the world. Mühlegg later wrote , “Never was I more keenly aware of the insanity of war.”

In isolated pockets along the Western Front, gunfire mostly ceased on Christmas Eve, and throughout the day the cessation spread. By the time dusk encroached on France, violence was the oddity. Most propositions of peace began reasonably innocuously. In the evening quiet, without the background din of artillery and rifle fire, soldiers exchanged shouts between the trenches to wish each other “Happy Christmas” as well as pass the traditional barbed comments and trash-talk expected from members of militaries. They shared these greetings with banners and chalkboards, but mostly through song, as German regimental songs were met with British renditions of popular music, and back and forth it went between the trenches. At nightfall, the Western Front took on a different appearance. Near Chapelle d’Armentières on the French-Belgian border, Christmas trees with lit candles lined the ramparts of German trenches “like the footlights of a theatre,” according to one British soldier. Against this backdrop, German renditions of “ Stille Nacht ” (Silent Night) gently wafted over trench lines. The British listened awestruck. At the song’s conclusion, several British units, some even to their surprise, broke into applause or shot flares to signal their approval. The British demanded encores, and ad hoc caroling competitions developed up and down the Western Front.

From singing came the first overtures to cross No-Man’s Land. The signboards requesting “no fighting” and wishing each other Merry Christmas soon became requests to talk. On the French lines, German officers called “ Kamarades, Kamarades! Rendezvous! ” while waving white flags . As dawn broke on Christmas Day, the guns remained silent, other than areas of contact between Russians and Serbs, and where French Foreign Legionnaires were deployed in Alsace . The acts of friendship were varied, depending on the area, the nature of the troops on both sides, and the landscape of the battlefield. The most common was the exchanging of trinkets. Soldiers exchanged buttons, cap badges, insignias, and cigarettes, but the most prized exchanges were the small tins of sweets and tobacco given to members of the British Expeditionary Forces by the Princess Mary’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Christmas Fund and the German belt buckle emblazoned with the Gott mit uns (God is with us) slogan.

Less traditional acts occurred, as well. The soldiers held burial ceremonies in No-Man’s Land for the still unrecovered fallen soldiers of both sides. Soldiers from both armies attended, and a chaplain from each trench read the service , alternating between English and German. Food and drinks were shared, stories and letters exchanged, and soldiers swapped addresses so they could write to each other after the war. The 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers shared two barrels of beer with the Germans, though neither army had the stomach to enjoy the French beer, which both sides described , in the most positive words, as “rotten.”

Most famous of all were the football matches (soccer games, for we American heathens). In the areas where No-Man’s Land was not a ruined landscape of craters, soldiers took advantage of the truce to run freely in the open beyond the trenches. The vast majority of the matches were friendly pickup games or intra- and inter-unit competitions. However, there were several instances of cross-trench football in the Flanders sector. Often some of the best bartering was done as part of claiming victory in one of the matches, such as the kilt-clad Sutherland Highlanders challenging the 133rd Saxon Regiment to a match for a bottle of schnapps . There was no universally agreed upon victor of the matches in this 1914 World [War] Cup, with matches going in favor of both sides on multiple occasions.

The peace was not to last. As reports of the activities of the truce spread up the various chains of command, the response from senior leadership was less than enthusiastic. Field Marshal Sir John French, Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Forces, angered by the contravention of earlier orders to avoid such behavior, recalled that “I issued immediate orders to prevent the recurrence of such conduct,” and ordered punishments for those know to have fraternized with the enemy. The response was no more muted at the headquarters of the French, Belgian, German, or Austro-Hungarian armies, with threats of punishment mixing with orders to recommence bombardments. The newspapers and photographs made quite the sensation of the spontaneous peace, but despite the success of the truce in 1914 and the depth of its meaning to the soldiers, it never recurred.

The soldiers who crossed the trenches on Christmas Day were not a movement to end the war, and none expected the ceasefire to extend beyond the day. A British soldier recounted , “There was not an atom of hate on either side that day. And yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed.” After the day of peace, the soldiers parted ways with the understanding that they could be friendly, but not friends. One German solider offered a farewell to his counterpart , saying “Today we have peace. Tomorrow you fight for your country; I fight for mine. Good luck.” There were attempts at another truce in 1915, but on a dramatically more limited scale and duration. The events of the War overtook the minds of the soldiers. The spring of 1915 saw the sinking of the Lusitania and the opening of unrestricted submarine warfare, as well as the first zeppelin bombings of London and the first use of poison gas at Ypres. By Christmas of 1916, the solidarity of soldiers was replaced by animosity for the length, awfulness, and conduct of the war, and the feelings of the Christmas Truce never came again.

I find remarkably deep meaning in the events of the Christmas Truce for no other reason than that among so much destruction, no amount of hatred or bitterness could overcome their common humanity. This fact has compelled me to share this story with my airmen, and more recently, my midshipmen, every December. Among the roughly 2,000 servicemembers I have worked with in my career so far, there is a lasting impact for those who had the patience to read or listen. Each time, I recount the details of the truce and the horrors of the Western Front, I try to share the following lesson: Duty and humanity are virtues that bind all in the profession of arms, but they exist in tension with each other and must be precariously balanced.

The soldiers of World War I spent one day celebrating their common humanity and another 1,567 destroying it. The war would go on to claim the lives of an additional seven million soldiers . It was a brief and unrepeatable instance. No person in the trenches of 1914 had the authority to end the war, and their discipline as well as honor demanded that they return to fighting. Anything else would be mutiny or desertion. Wars are fought between nations, and soldiers are but tools of those political disagreements. Nor should the lessons of the Christmas Truce be taken strictly along religious lines. In 1968, U.S. forces decided to respect the North Vietnamese call for a seven-day ceasefire for the Vietnamese celebration of the Lunar New Year, and three days later the Tet Truce turned into the Tet Offensive . In 1973, Israel was attacked by an Egyptian-led coalition on Yom Kippur, which also fell within the holy month of Ramadan.

The most important lesson of the Christmas Truce has nothing to do with religion, holidays, or peace. I am not advocating that we do not seek to kill the enemy or destroy their capacity for war. Quite the opposite, actually. The image of those soldiers shaking hands in No-Man’s Land is meant only to remind us that the enemy is human. There is an inextricable bond of commonality, even between soldiers who fight against each other. Whether watching enemies in a neighboring trench or following them from thousands of miles away through the lens of an unmanned aircraft, it is incumbent on all members of the profession of arms to recognize the burden that comes with taking lives. We use terms like “military-aged male” because it makes the strike decision easier. We are not reminded that the target is a son, brother, or father with his own list of life goals and desires. The Christmas Truce should remind every service member of the incredible gravity of our role.

It is a difficult job. As service members, we stand ready to conduct violence on behalf of others. The reason we exist is to hurt people and break things. It is not a responsibility to be taken lightly, nor something to be considered in jest. We stand in defense of others, whether as soldiers or marines with the power of life or death over insurgents, or as airmen and sailors ready to release thousands of nuclear weapons at a moment’s notice. That level of responsibility, to the nation, to each other, and to mankind, is incredible and speaks to the trust placed in us by the citizens of the world.

Combat is the realm of soldiers, the dispassionate art of taking and holding the battlefield through victory over opposing forces by force of arms. There should be no anger or hatred in combat. Soldiers of each side are doing their jobs. Yet it seems that instances of respect between opposing forces have lessened significantly since WWII. Acts such as the Japanese sailors’ salutes of respect to the crew of the USS Johnston after their heroic last stand at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, or the escort of a crippled and defenseless B-17 by a German fighter beyond the range of antiaircraft fire, are much harder to find in the Cold War and post-Cold War world. To acknowledge the humanity of an enemy and yet pursue one’s duty to kill drastically increases the weight of those soldiers’ burdens as they accept the true moral cost of war. It is important that successive generations strive to fight wars with such a high moral bar.

I end every year in the same way. I remind my students of President Kennedy’s assertion at the Commencement Address to American University’s class of 1963 , when he reminded us that “in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Finally, I give a charge to everyone, whether airmen or midshipmen, and now to the world. I ask them to consider what anger they can let go, what hatred could be forgiven or feud ended, if only they are willing to step out of their trenches. What can one person accomplish, and what can all of humanity accomplish, if just for one day all the old hatreds were laid down, bread was broken with enemies, and all came to the stark realization that we are equally human?

Joe Eanett has spent the last 12 years on active duty as a U.S. Air Force officer in the security forces and intelligence career fields. He is currently assigned as an instructor of naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is a 2007 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and received a Master’s in Military History from Norwich University. He deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom with the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, and supported the recovery efforts of the 2011 Japanese tsunami as part of Operation Tomodachi.

The opinions expressed are those of the author along and do not reflect those of the U.S. Air Force. U.S. Navy, Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

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Essay: The Christmas Truce – World War I

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The Christmas truce which was a not official truce. The truce occurred along the Western Front. The truce occurred during the Christmas of 1914. World War 1 had been going on for many months but the soldiers on both sides stepped out of their trenches. They walked across no mans land which is where they shook hands and agreed to have a truce so that any of the dead from either side could be buried. As well some of the soldiers also used the truce as a way to chat with each other. Some of them even claim to playing a football game. Still today unofficial truces between opposing forces occur and some more happened at other times during World War One but never on the scale of that first Christmas truce. Similar events have occurred in other conflicts that happened in history history and continue to occur. The assassination of heir to the Austrian throne. Then Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 29 1914 sparked a rapid sequence of events which led to the outbreak of World War One. In early August. Germany swept past Luxembourg and Belgium on their way into France. That at first made rapid progress. The Allies and Germans tried a series of trying to out flank the movements which eventually led to a battle line the Western Front stretching from Lorraine in the south into the English Channel into the north. Soldiers dug trenches and erected barbed wire to hold their positions the nightmare that was to become trench warfare had begun. In places the trenches were just yards apart. Then as the soldiers realized that neither side was going to make any rapid victories or progress, the trenches became more fortified. The opposing forces now had time to regroup and strengthen their lines with more men but it soon became apparent to the Generals and to the men on the front line that this was going to be a war of attrition the only way a winner would be decided would be when one side ran out of men or out of bullets. As Private .R. Fleming of the 2nd Durham Light Infantry put it. It is not war. It is who can kill the most enemies in the shortest time possible. The proximity of the enemies also allowed men to shout out to their opponents or stick up signs on wooden boards. After a particularly heavy barrage of missiles or bullets. The soldiers might shout out Missed or Left a bit. This black humour was the start of a conversation between the troops that would hasten the on set of the Christmas truce. Another factor that assisted conditions for an unofficial truce between the men was the weather. For much of December it had been wet but on Christmas Eve the temperature dropped and a sharp frost enveloped the landscape. A White Christmas as depicted on all traditional Christmas cards would provide the backdrop to one of the most remarkable Christmas stories in 2,000 years. Shouting between troops was turned into something way more Christmas Eve. Germans celebrate Christmas on December 24 more than they do on the day itself in Britain and France, December 25 is the main day of celebration. It is on the 24th that the Germans have a large meal with family and Father Christmas delivers his gifts. So on the Western Front on Christmas Eve. German soldiers began to sing carols and place Christmas trees lit with lanterns above the trenches. As a subaltern told the Press Association and it was then published in numerous UK newspapers. In their trenches were a blaze of Christmas trees. Some of the sentries were regaled for hours with the traditional Christmas songs of their Fatherland. Their officers even showed annoyance the next day that some of these trees had been fired on. A white Christmas singing of carols shouts of good wishes. These shouts were coming from both side the trenches. The erection of illuminated decorations. The truce which days earlier had seemed impossible was now possible and happing. The night before Christmas. A British captain serving at Rue du Bois heard a foreign accent from across the divide that said. Do not shoot after 12:00 and we will not shoot at you either. Then if you English come out and you talk to us we will not shoot. Commonwealth troops fighting were in Belgium as France started hearing some odd sounds coming from across no mans land. German soldiers were singing Christmas carols like Silent Night and Holy Night. Allied troops applauded and cheered. They were shouting out for more. Soldiers on both sides began to sing in unison, trading verses in alternating languages.Then very cautiously and with great courage, unarmed German and Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches to stand atop their defenses. As well as near the Neuve Chapelle. Which is where a Irish soldier had got up and started to walk across no mans land. Thats where he was greeted with a cigar instead of a bullet. This act of bravery on his part inspired other people that were in his troop to do the same thing. More things similar to this event began to repeat in other places as well. As soldiers got up and walked towards the opposing trench and some just met halfway.

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• The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War

In this Book

• Terri Blom Crocker foreword by Peter Grant
• Published by: The University Press of Kentucky

Table of Contents

• Front cover

• Title Page, Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• Peter Grant
• 1 “A Candle Lit in the Darkness”
• 2 “Absolute Hell”
• 3 “A Great Day with Our Enemies”
• 4 “No War Today”
• 5 “One Day of Peace at the Front”
• 6 “That Unique and Weird Christmas”
• pp. 111-132
• 7 The Curious Christmas Truce”
• pp. 133-152
• 8 “The Famous Christmas Truce”
• pp. 153-174
• 9 “The Legendary Christmas Truce”
• pp. 175-196
• 10 “Memories of Christmas 1914 Persist”
• pp. 197-214
• 11 “It Was Peace That Won”
• pp. 215-226
• Acknowledgments
• pp. 227-228
• pp. 229-266
• Bibliography
• pp. 267-282
• Permissions
• pp. 283-286
• pp. 287-298

Additional Information

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Lit. Summaries

• Biographies

Exploring the Significance of The Christmas Truce through Carol Ann Duffy’s Literary Analysis

• Carol Ann Duffy

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable moment of humanity amidst the brutal warfare of World War I. Soldiers from opposing sides laid down their weapons and celebrated Christmas together in No Man’s Land. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy explores the significance of this event through her literary analysis, highlighting the themes of peace, compassion, and the power of shared experiences. In this article, we will delve deeper into Duffy’s analysis and explore the lasting impact of the Christmas Truce.

The Historical Context of The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable event that took place during World War I. It was a brief moment of peace and goodwill between the opposing sides, where soldiers from both sides laid down their arms and celebrated Christmas together. This truce was not an official ceasefire, but rather a spontaneous act of humanity that occurred in the midst of one of the bloodiest conflicts in history. The truce was a reflection of the soldiers’ desire for peace and a respite from the horrors of war. The historical context of the Christmas Truce is essential to understanding its significance. The war had been raging for several months, and the soldiers were exhausted and traumatized. The truce was a moment of relief from the constant fighting and a chance for the soldiers to connect with their enemies on a human level. The truce was also a reflection of the changing attitudes towards war and the growing disillusionment with the conflict. The Christmas Truce was a remarkable event that demonstrated the power of humanity in the face of war and conflict.

The Literary Analysis of Carol Ann Duffy’s Poem

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Christmas Truce” is a powerful piece of literature that captures the essence of the historic event. The poem is written in free verse and is divided into three stanzas, each depicting a different aspect of the truce. Duffy’s use of language and imagery is particularly striking, as she manages to convey the emotions and experiences of the soldiers in a vivid and poignant manner.

One of the most significant aspects of Duffy’s poem is the way she portrays the soldiers as individuals with their own hopes, fears, and desires. Rather than presenting them as faceless masses, she gives them distinct personalities and voices, which makes their actions and decisions all the more meaningful. For example, in the second stanza, she describes how the soldiers “swapped cigarettes and photographs from home” and “chatted in bad French” – small acts of kindness that humanize them and make the truce feel all the more poignant.

Another key element of Duffy’s poem is the way she uses imagery to convey the horror and futility of war. In the first stanza, she describes how “the frozen fields were rank with death” and how “the rats were bigger than cats”. These images are both visceral and unsettling, and they serve to remind the reader of the terrible toll that war takes on both soldiers and civilians alike.

Overall, Duffy’s poem is a powerful and moving tribute to the Christmas truce, and it serves as a reminder of the importance of compassion and humanity even in the midst of conflict. Through her literary analysis, she manages to capture the essence of the event and convey its significance in a way that is both accessible and emotionally resonant.

The Role of Poetry in Commemorating Historical Events

Poetry has always played a significant role in commemorating historical events. It has the power to capture the emotions and experiences of a particular moment in time, and to convey them to future generations. This is particularly true when it comes to events that are difficult to understand or that have been forgotten over time. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is one such event, and Carol Ann Duffy’s literary analysis of it is a powerful example of how poetry can help us to remember and understand the past. Through her use of language and imagery, Duffy brings the truce to life, allowing us to experience it as if we were there ourselves. Her work reminds us of the humanity that can be found even in the midst of war, and of the importance of remembering the sacrifices that were made by those who came before us. In this way, poetry can serve as a powerful tool for commemorating historical events, helping us to connect with the past and to understand its significance for the present.

The Importance of Remembering The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable moment in history that demonstrated the power of humanity and the spirit of Christmas. It was a brief moment of peace during one of the bloodiest wars in history, where soldiers from opposing sides laid down their arms and celebrated the holiday together. The truce was a testament to the fact that even in the midst of war, people can come together and find common ground. It is important to remember the Christmas Truce because it serves as a reminder of the humanity that exists in all of us, even in the darkest of times. Carol Ann Duffy’s literary analysis of the truce highlights the significance of this event and its impact on the soldiers who experienced it. Through her poetry, she captures the emotions and experiences of those who participated in the truce, and reminds us of the importance of peace and understanding. The Christmas Truce may have been a brief moment in history, but its impact is still felt today. It is a reminder that even in times of war, we can find moments of peace and humanity, and that we should never forget the power of coming together in the spirit of Christmas.

The Symbolism of The Christmas Truce in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poem

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Christmas Truce,” the symbolism of the truce is explored in depth. The truce, which occurred during World War I, was a brief moment of peace between the opposing sides. Duffy uses the truce as a symbol of hope and humanity in the midst of war. The soldiers, who were enemies just moments before, come together to celebrate Christmas and exchange gifts. This act of kindness and camaraderie is a powerful symbol of the human spirit and the desire for peace. The truce also serves as a reminder of the futility of war and the importance of finding common ground. Through her poem, Duffy highlights the significance of the Christmas truce and its enduring message of hope and unity.

The Humanization of Soldiers in The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable event that saw soldiers from opposing sides come together to celebrate the holiday season. It was a moment of humanity amidst the brutality of war, and it is this humanization of soldiers that Carol Ann Duffy explores in her literary analysis of the truce. Duffy’s poem, “The Christmas Truce,” highlights the shared experiences of the soldiers, their common humanity, and the bonds that were formed between them during the truce. Through her words, Duffy reminds us that even in the midst of war, soldiers are human beings with families, friends, and loved ones, and that the Christmas Truce was a moment when they were able to connect with each other on a human level. This humanization of soldiers is an important theme in the poem, and it serves as a powerful reminder of the impact that war can have on individuals and communities.

The Impact of The Christmas Truce on World War I

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable event that took place during World War I. It was a moment of peace and goodwill between the opposing sides, where soldiers laid down their arms and celebrated Christmas together. This truce had a significant impact on the war and the soldiers who participated in it. It showed that even in the midst of war, humanity and compassion could prevail. The truce also highlighted the similarities between the soldiers on both sides, who were all just young men caught up in a conflict they did not fully understand. The Christmas Truce was a moment of hope and humanity in a brutal and devastating war, and it continues to be remembered and celebrated today.

The Political and Social Context of The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable event that took place during World War I. It was a moment of peace and goodwill that occurred between the British and German soldiers on the Western Front. The truce was a spontaneous act of humanity that defied the orders of their superiors and showed that even in the midst of war, there was still room for compassion and understanding. However, the political and social context of the time played a significant role in the occurrence of the truce. The war had been raging for several months, and the soldiers were exhausted and disillusioned. The conditions in the trenches were appalling, and the soldiers were living in constant fear of death. The truce was a way for them to escape the horrors of war and to find some solace in the company of their enemies. It was also a way for them to express their frustration with the war and to show their desire for peace. The truce was a powerful symbol of the human spirit and a reminder that even in the darkest of times, there is still hope for humanity.

The Psychological Impact of The Christmas Truce on Soldiers

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable event that took place during World War I. It was a moment of peace and humanity amidst the chaos and brutality of war. Soldiers from both sides of the conflict put down their weapons and celebrated Christmas together. This event had a profound psychological impact on the soldiers who participated in it. They experienced a sense of camaraderie and brotherhood with their enemies, which was a stark contrast to the hatred and animosity that they had been taught to feel towards them. The Christmas Truce challenged their beliefs about the enemy and the war, and it left a lasting impression on their psyche. Many soldiers who participated in the truce reported feeling a sense of hope and optimism, which helped them to cope with the horrors of war. However, the truce was short-lived, and the soldiers were soon forced to return to the reality of the war. The psychological impact of the Christmas Truce on soldiers is a testament to the power of humanity and the resilience of the human spirit.

The Relevance of The Christmas Truce in Contemporary Times

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is a remarkable event that has been celebrated for over a century. It is a moment in history that has been immortalized in literature, music, and film. The truce was a brief moment of peace during World War I, where soldiers from opposing sides laid down their arms and celebrated Christmas together. The truce is a reminder of the power of humanity and the importance of peace. In contemporary times, the Christmas Truce is more relevant than ever. The world is facing numerous conflicts, and the need for peace is more pressing than ever. The truce is a reminder that even in the midst of war, humanity can come together and find common ground. It is a reminder that peace is possible, and that we should strive towards it. Carol Ann Duffy’s literary analysis of the truce is a powerful reminder of the significance of the event. Her work highlights the humanity of the soldiers and the importance of peace. The Christmas Truce is a timeless event that will continue to inspire generations to come.

The Role of Religion in The Christmas Truce

Religion played a significant role in the Christmas Truce of 1914. The soldiers on both sides were predominantly Christian, and the holiday season held great importance for them. The truce was initiated by the German soldiers, who began singing Christmas carols and placing candles on their trenches. The British soldiers responded by singing carols of their own, and soon both sides were singing together. This shared experience of religious celebration helped to break down the barriers between the soldiers and create a sense of camaraderie. It also allowed them to see each other as fellow human beings, rather than just enemies on opposite sides of a war. The role of religion in the Christmas Truce highlights the power of shared cultural experiences to bring people together, even in the midst of conflict.

The Cultural Significance of The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable moment in history that has since become a symbol of hope and humanity in the midst of war. This event, where soldiers from opposing sides laid down their weapons and celebrated Christmas together, has been immortalized in literature, film, and popular culture. The cultural significance of the Christmas Truce lies in its ability to remind us of the power of compassion and empathy, even in the most dire of circumstances. Through the lens of Carol Ann Duffy’s literary analysis, we can explore the deeper meanings behind this historic event and its enduring impact on our collective consciousness.

The Literary Techniques Used in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poem

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Christmas Truce” is a powerful piece of literature that explores the significance of the historic event that took place during World War I. The poem is written in free verse, which allows Duffy to experiment with different literary techniques to convey her message. One of the most prominent techniques used in the poem is imagery. Duffy uses vivid and descriptive language to paint a picture of the soldiers’ surroundings and emotions. For example, she describes the “frost, crisp as a razor blade” and the “silence, deep as a sleep.” This imagery helps the reader to visualize the scene and feel the emotions of the soldiers. Another technique used in the poem is repetition. Duffy repeats the phrase “we were in no-man’s land” several times throughout the poem, emphasizing the significance of this space between the opposing armies. This repetition also creates a sense of unity among the soldiers, as they are all in the same dangerous and uncertain situation. Overall, Duffy’s use of literary techniques in “The Christmas Truce” adds depth and emotion to the poem, allowing the reader to fully appreciate the significance of this historic event.

The Role of Women in The Christmas Truce

During the Christmas Truce of 1914, women played a significant role in bringing about a temporary ceasefire between the warring sides. While men were the primary combatants, women were often left behind to manage the home front and provide support to their loved ones at war. However, during the truce, women were able to use their unique position to promote peace and reconciliation. They sent letters and care packages to soldiers on both sides, encouraging them to lay down their arms and celebrate the holiday together. Some even traveled to the front lines to deliver messages of peace and goodwill. Through their efforts, women helped to create a moment of humanity amidst the brutality of war. Carol Ann Duffy’s literary analysis of the Christmas Truce highlights the important role that women played in this historic event, reminding us of the power of compassion and empathy in times of conflict.

The Historical Accuracy of Carol Ann Duffy’s Poem

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Christmas Truce” is a powerful depiction of the brief moment of peace that occurred during World War I on Christmas Day in 1914. While the poem is a work of fiction, it is based on historical events and accurately portrays the spirit of the truce.

Duffy’s poem captures the essence of the truce, which saw soldiers from both sides lay down their weapons and come together to celebrate the holiday. The poem describes the soldiers singing carols, exchanging gifts, and even playing a game of football. These events are all based on historical accounts of the truce, which was a remarkable moment of humanity in the midst of a brutal war.

While the poem is not a strictly factual account of the truce, it accurately captures the emotions and experiences of the soldiers who participated in it. Duffy’s use of vivid imagery and sensory details brings the truce to life, allowing readers to imagine what it must have been like to be there.

Overall, “The Christmas Truce” is a powerful and moving poem that accurately captures the historical significance of the truce. While it is a work of fiction, it is grounded in historical fact and serves as a testament to the enduring power of human compassion and connection, even in the darkest of times.

The Comparison of The Christmas Truce with Other Historical Truces

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is often compared to other historical truces, such as the Armistice of 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles. While these truces were significant in their own right, the Christmas Truce stands out as a unique moment of humanity in the midst of war. Unlike the Armistice and Treaty, which were negotiated by political leaders, the Christmas Truce was initiated by soldiers on the front lines. It was a spontaneous act of goodwill that transcended national boundaries and reminded both sides of their shared humanity. The Christmas Truce also had a lasting impact on popular culture, inspiring countless works of art and literature, including Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Christmas Truce.” By exploring the significance of this event through Duffy’s literary analysis, we can gain a deeper understanding of the power of human connection in times of conflict.

The Legacy of The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable moment in history that demonstrated the power of humanity and the desire for peace, even in the midst of war. The truce allowed soldiers from opposing sides to come together, share food and gifts, and even play a game of football. This moment of unity and compassion has left a lasting legacy, inspiring countless stories, songs, and works of art. In her poem “The Christmas Truce,” Carol Ann Duffy captures the spirit of this historic event, reminding us of the importance of empathy and understanding in times of conflict. Through her literary analysis, we can explore the significance of the Christmas Truce and its enduring impact on our world today.

The Commemoration of The Christmas Truce in Literature and Film

The Christmas Truce of 1914 has been a subject of fascination for many writers and filmmakers. It was a moment of humanity amidst the brutality of war, where soldiers from opposing sides laid down their arms and celebrated Christmas together. This event has been immortalized in literature and film, with many works exploring the significance of the truce. One such work is Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Christmas Truce,” which offers a poignant reflection on the power of human connection in times of war. Through her literary analysis, Duffy highlights the importance of remembering this moment of peace and unity, and the hope it offers for a better future.

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What Is Christmas Truce

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