The truth behind the Christmas truce of WWI

ONE of the bloodiest conflicts in human history was that of the First World War. 

Millions of lives were lost, in a worldwide battle that lasted four years and left over 15 million military personnel and civilians dead. It was a time of violence and brutality, with leaders creating propaganda and lying to their citizens in order to encourage even more bloodshed. 

The war began in July 1914, and although in Britain it had been portrayed that it would “all be over by Christmas”, by December of that year it was already quite clear that this war was going to be a dragged out battle to the end, as a new kind of warfare, trench warfare, now saw opposing sides ‘dig in’ on either end of ‘no man’s land’.

However, one glimmer of goodness in the history of the First World War is that of the ‘Christmas Day truce’. This temporary truce saw English and German soldiers emerge from their trenches and begin to play a friendly game of football with those who, just hours prior, they had been attempting to kill.  

It all started on Christmas Eve on the Western Front. The torrential rain had stopped and frost had begun to settle on the ground, mimicking the appearance of white Christmas snowfall. Silence fell on the usually hectic battlefield, and then something surprising happened. 

In his life story, Private Albert Moren of the Second Queen’s Regiment recalled that “it was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white everywhere. About seven or eight in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights, I don’t know what they were. And then they sang ‘Silent Night’, Stille Nacht’. I shall never forget it; it was one of the highlights of my life. What a beautiful tune.”

The image of German soldiers lighting candles in their trenches and the sounds of their gentle singing drifting across the killing fields of no man’s land has since become iconic. Following this, the Germans are reported to have held up white flags and messages saying ‘don’t shoot’. The British began to feel something akin to ‘Christmas spirit’, and soon the sworn enemies were singing together, trading jokes, as well as the odd jovial insult or two. According to Marmaduke Walkinton of the London Regiment, “A German said, ‘tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot.’ And the morning came, and we didn’t shoot, and they didn’t shoot.”

As the sun rose on December 25, both sides warily popped their heads over the side, to realise that this was in fact not going to be another day of death, but instead, something of a Christmas miracle. 

British and German soldiers quickly began to exchange gifts in the form of cigarettes and souvenirs, showing pictures of loved ones at home and laughing in their groups. Then, as Lieutenant Johannes Niemann of the 133rd Saxon Infantry Regiment wrote in his memoirs, “a soldier came with a football, kicking already and making fun, and then began a football match. We marked the goals with our caps. Teams were quickly established for a match on the frozen mud, and the Fritzes (Germans) beat the Tommies (British) 3-2.”

For a single day, peace seemed to reign over parts of the Western Front, and although fighting quickly resumed, the truce of Christmas day stands as a testament to the love and empathy that humanity forever holds deep in it’s heart, even in times of bleakness and bloodshed.