The Christmas truce of 1914 was a series of unofficial ceasefires on the Western Front around 24 to 26 December, mostly between British and German troops in Flanders and northern France. Men sang carols, met in no man's land, swapped food and souvenirs and buried their dead together. Football was played in a few places, but as improvised kickabouts rather than an organised match with a reliable score.
By December 1914 the war that was supposed to be over by Christmas had settled into lines of muddy trenches running from the North Sea to Switzerland. The battles of the autumn, from the Marne to First Ypres, had cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and the men facing each other across no man's land were already veterans.
Then, on Christmas Eve, along parts of the line, the shooting stopped. What followed is one of the most retold episodes of the First World War, and one of the most simplified. Here is what the letters, diaries and war diaries actually record.
Christmas Eve: candles, trees and carols
Pope Benedict XV had asked the warring powers on 7 December 19141 to stop fighting at least for Christmas. The governments ignored him. The truce, when it came, was made not by statesmen but by the men in the trenches.
On Christmas Eve weeks of rain gave way to a hard frost. In many places the Germans placed candles and small Christmas trees along their parapets. At 8.30 that evening an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles sent a message to headquarters: "Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas2." He added that he was still taking every military precaution.
Along other stretches the two sides sang to each other across no man's land, carols answered by carols. Scouts met cautiously between the wire. According to the Scots Guards war diary, one private ran into a German patrol, was given whisky and cigars, and came back with an offer: if the British did not fire, the Germans would not either.
Christmas Day in no man's land
At dawn, small groups climbed out and walked towards each other. They shook hands, swapped tobacco, food, drink, buttons and caps, and showed each other photographs of their families. Many used the quiet to do something they had not been able to do for weeks: collect the bodies of their comrades from no man's land3, bury them and hold services, sometimes side by side.
Saxon regiments were the most willing to make the first move. Language could be a barrier, but many Germans had worked in Britain before the war. Captain Clifton Stockwell of the Royal Welch Fusiliers recorded a Saxon opposite his trench who spoke excellent English and said he had once been head waiter at the Great Central Hotel2 in London.
Rifleman William Eve wrote in his diary that on Christmas Day everybody strolled about, talked with the Germans, "exchanged souvenirs, played football, and not a shot fired3 all day or night." His diary is now in the National Army Museum.
Where it happened, and how big it was
The truce was never general. In some sectors the fighting went on through Christmas, and men in others fraternised to the sound of guns firing nearby. The most detailed estimate, by the historian Malcolm Brown, is that it extended along at least two-thirds of the British-held line4. Figures of around 100,000 men are often quoted, but no one counted, and estimates vary.
Most accounts describe British and German troops. The French were far less willing to make friends with an enemy occupying about a third of their country. Even so, smaller truces were recorded on some French sectors, and on the Yser front Belgian soldiers arranged one so that they could send letters5 to their families in occupied Belgium.
Was there really a football match?
Football was in the story from the start. On 1 January 1915 The Times printed a letter from a doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade who reported a match played between the British and the Germans in front of the trench. The brigade's own history denied it.
The most detailed account comes from Lieutenant Johannes Niemann of the Saxon 133rd Regiment, interviewed decades later. He remembered a Scottish soldier producing a ball, caps laid out as goalposts, play on frozen ground for about an hour with no referee, until his commanding officer ordered it stopped. The regiment's history put the score at 3 to 22 to the Germans. Later retellings borrowed details from a short story Robert Graves published in 1962, which was fiction.
Other games between the two sides were reported near Ypres, in a sector of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and on the Lancashire Fusiliers' front, and attempts elsewhere failed because of hard ground or officers. Ernie Williams of the Cheshires, recalling a kickabout with the Germans at New Year, reckoned that a couple of hundred men took part, and said: "There was no referee and no score, no tally at all.2" The fair conclusion is that football was played, mostly among men of the same army, and in at least three or four places between the two sides, as chaotic kickabouts rather than a proper match.
How the commanders reacted
Senior officers did not approve. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commanding the British II Corps, issued orders forbidding friendly communication with the enemy. On the German side a general order of 29 December 1914 warned5 that any approach to the enemy would be punished as treason.
Not every officer was a hard-liner, and not every hard-liner was senior. Lieutenant C. E. M. Richards of the East Lancashire Regiment, who had welcomed the return of sniping, was furious to receive a signal from his battalion headquarters telling him to prepare a pitch and challenge the Germans to a match on 1 January. He did nothing and destroyed the signal, which he later regretted as a lost souvenir.
In most places the truce ended on Boxing Day, sometimes with formal courtesy: shots fired into the air, a bow across the parapet. In a few quiet sectors it lasted into the New Year.
Why it never happened again on the same scale
In December 1915 the high commands made sure there would be no repeat. Units were told to mount raids and keep the enemy line under fire, and artillery shelled the front throughout Christmas Day1. A small number of brief truces happened anyway. The Welsh writer Llewelyn Wyn Griffith described a dawn rush of men from both sides to swap souvenirs before officers called them back.
The men had changed too. A year that brought gas at Second Ypres and the slaughter at Gallipoli had made the war far more bitter, and after the battles of 1916 even the soldiers were rarely in the mood for truces. When a Scots Guards officer, Sir Iain Colquhoun, allowed a short burial truce at Christmas 1915, he was court-martialled, although Douglas Haig set aside his punishment.
Memorials to the truce
A wooden cross left in 1999 at Saint-Yvon, near Ploegsteert in Belgium, marked one of the truce sites. On 11 November 2008 a memorial was unveiled at Frelinghien5 in France, and soldiers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers played a German battalion where their predecessors had met in 1914.
For the centenary in December 2014, UEFA unveiled a memorial at Ploegsteert, and Prince William unveiled the Football Remembers memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
Why the truce still matters
It is tempting to read the truce as a rebellion against the war. The historian Terri Blom Crocker has argued that most men who took part saw it differently: they shook hands on Christmas Day and went back to fighting the next day, still believing6 in their cause. That is what makes it remarkable. These were not pacifists. They were soldiers who, for a day, recognised the men opposite as men.