No man's land near Ploegsteert, Belgium

Five months into the war that wasn't supposed to last

The Christmas Truce of 1914 took place five months after the outbreak of the First World War.

The war had been expected to last weeks. The German Schlieffen Plan had counted on the defeat of France within six weeks and the subsequent transfer of German forces eastward to defeat Russia before winter. The plan failed at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. By the end of October, the Western Front had stabilised into a 700-kilometre line of opposing trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss border.

By December 1914, the war was four months old. Both sides had already suffered roughly a million casualties. Neither side had advanced more than a few kilometres.

The soldiers in the front-line trenches that Christmas — most of them volunteers, not yet conscripts — had no reasonable expectation of ever going home. They were young, cold, hungry, and beginning to understand that the romance of war sold to them by recruiting posters had been a lie.

Lights on the parapets

The truce began on the evening of Christmas Eve, 24 December 1914.

The exact sequence is recorded in dozens of letters home from British and French soldiers, published over the following months in their local newspapers and the Illustrated London News. The German side started it. Saxon infantry — most of the German troops in the Ypres Salient sector were from the Kingdom of Saxony, with a Lutheran cultural tradition of Heiliger Abend family Christmas Eve celebrations — placed small Christmas trees (Tannenbäume) on the parapets of their trenches and lit candles on them.

British troops, looking out across the 100 metres of no-man's-land, saw the candle-lit trees emerge along the German line.

Then they heard singing. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht — Silent Night, Holy Night — rising from the German trenches in the still December air.

The British troops, sometimes uncertainly, sometimes with the help of soldiers who knew German, began singing back. They sang the same carol in English. They added carols of their own. The First Noel. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. O Come All Ye Faithful.

By midnight, men on both sides were calling across no-man's-land in broken English and broken German. Frohe Weihnachten. Merry Christmas. In some sectors, individual soldiers climbed up onto their parapets in the bright moonlight without being shot at.

A football match, probably

On the morning of Christmas Day, soldiers in dozens of sectors along the British and German lines climbed out of their trenches and walked into no-man's-land.

They met in the middle.

They exchanged tobacco — German Sondereinheits-Tabak for British Capstan Navy Cut. They exchanged food rations — Tickler's plum- and-apple jam (the universal British trench food, hated for its monotony) for tinned German sausage and Schnapps. They exchanged souvenirs: regimental cap badges, buttons, postcards. They photographed each other with folding Vest Pocket Kodak cameras that some officers had brought to the front.

Crucially, they buried their dead. The trenches in the Ypres Salient and the Aisne sector had been within rifle range for weeks, and dead soldiers from earlier patrols and assaults had been lying in no-man's-land unable to be recovered. The Christmas Truce was the first opportunity in months to retrieve the bodies of comrades for proper burial. Joint burial services with both British and German chaplains officiating were held in several sectors.

The football match in no-man's-land — the part of the truce that has fixed itself most firmly in popular memory — is documented in some letters home but not as confidently as the gift exchanges. A letter from Private William Williamson of the Bedfordshire Regiment describes a Christmas Day kickabout between his unit and a group of Saxon infantry, with a ball improvised from bully-beef tin wrappers and the score (3-2 to the Germans, by Williamson's account). A similar German letter describes the same match. Other sources are less clear. The kickabouts certainly happened in some sectors and certainly did not happen in others. The football match has become a metonymy for the truce as a whole.

Never repeated

The high command on both sides was horrified.

A war fought through long-range artillery and machine-gun fire only works if the soldiers in the trenches do not see each other as human beings. The Christmas Truce demonstrated that, given the slightest opportunity, they did.

Both armies issued orders the following Christmas (1915) forbidding any contact with the enemy. Artillery bombardments were scheduled for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day specifically to prevent fraternisation. Local commanders who allowed truces were transferred or court- martialled.

There were small, scattered repetitions of the truce in 1915, mostly in quiet sectors. By 1916 — after the introduction of poison gas warfare in April 1915 and the bloodbaths of Verdun and the Somme — the mutual humanity that had made the 1914 truce possible was gone.

The truce of 1914 was a single moment. It did not stop the war and was never meant to. Both sides went back to killing each other on 26 December 1914 and continued for another 1 414 days. The war killed approximately 17 million people.

But for one cold December morning, an estimated 100 000 men along the Western Front — about ten per cent of the front-line troops then in the trenches — said no to it.