According to the Christmas 1915 edition of War Illustrated there would be nothing like that this year. ‘The Germans at many points,’ it claimed, ‘are anxious to have an informal truce. They have already been calling out beyond their lines 'Christmas coming. No more shoot.' But they are not meeting with a response. Our armies have too many bitter recollections from the twelve months that have passed. Recollections that cannot be effaced. They have read of the treatment of our own soldiers in German prison camps. They have experienced the German poison gas……There will be no stretching out of friendly hands this year. But Christmas will be observed in very marked fashion, and, unless some stern commander orders an advance on this day, things will be reported as quiet along the front.’
The amount of newspaper coverage afforded the 1914 Christmas Truce came about because it happened over such a wide area and extended period of time. It immediately captured the popular imagination and carried as far as Australia and to the United States. What principally kept it alive was the amount of letters sent to the newspapers rather than editorial comment. The principal reaction was one of amazement. On January 1st 1915 The South Wales Echo reported: ‘When the history of the war is written one of the episodes which chroniclers will seize upon as one of its most surprising features will undoubtedly be the manner in which the foes celebrated Christmas. How they fraternized in each other’s trenches, played football, rode races, held sing songs, and surprisingly adhered to their unofficial truce will certainly go down as one the greatest surprises of a surprising war.’
Many accounts of the 1914 Christmas Truce, some written long after the event, are confused or contradictory. Described as an agreeable interference and a sentimental aside in the dialogue of war, there was a more serious undercurrent, a belief, albeit a naïve one, that what the men themselves were doing would somehow bring the fighting to an end. Naturalist, journalist, broadcaster and author, Henry Williamson, was an eye-witness to the fraternisation on Christmas Eve. In A Fox Under My Cloak, his alter-ego (Philip Maddison) is tasked with repairing a flooded communications trench when a lighted Christmas tree appears on top of a pole put up in the German lines. Crouching and ready to fling themselves flat, the expected barrage never occurs, instead cheers waft across No Man’s Land from a dim outline of figures on the German parapet. The British platoon commander looked at his watch and confirmed that it was eleven o’clock. By Berlin time, it was midnight. ‘A merry Christmas to everyone!’ he declared, as from the German parapet wafted a rich baritone voice singing Stille Nache! Heilige Nacht – Tranquil Night! Holy Night!
In a history of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel George Laurie, claims that it was he who crossed to the German trenches on Christmas Day armed only with a three-day-old copy of the Daily Telegraph. Eventually others joined him and the two sides exchanged gifts, admired family photographs and talked.
The Times for January 1, 1915, states that the 6th Gordon Highlanders organised a burial truce with the enemy before the fraternisation began, which included impromptu games of football. A major in the Medical Corps reported that the Germans beat the British 3-2 and Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxons recorded in his diary that the British 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’.
Lieutenant Ian Stewart wrote that he could speak some German, ‘and one of the German officers; some English …Our conversation was no different from that of meeting a friendly opponent at a football match’. One former soldier reminiscing in the 1920s confirmed that ‘footer’ was an inevitable part of the occasion, sometimes using a tin can or a rolled-up sandbag as well as a genuine leather ball. One German Lieutenant wrote: ‘We marked the goals with our caps. Teams were quickly established for a match on the frozen mud, and the Fritz’s beat the Tommies 3-2’.
But not all of those in charge of discipline approved. One officer ordered to prepare a more usable pitch by filling in shell holes refused to comply. Some local Frenchwomen were also unimpressed and spat at members of one British battalion the next time they were in town. Another former infantrymen writing of the Christmas Truce in the 1920s recalled that the men who joined them later ‘were inclined to disbelieve us when we spoke of the incident, and no wonder, for as the months rolled by, we who were actually there could hardly realise that it had happened, except for the fact that every little detail stood out well in our memory.’
Ed Harris is the author of The Footballer of Loos: A Story of the 1st Battalion London Irish Rifles in the First World War and Walking London Wall. He has spent 35 years in the broadcasting and entertainment industry. In 2000 he took a Masters Degree in Local History at Kingston University. He is Trustee of The Twickenham Museum and chairman of the Borough of Twickenham Local History Society.