A drawing of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British soldiers left their trenches to meet, talk and swap food in no-mans land.
CBW / Alamy
Almost five months after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the ambitious powers of the world began the First World War, tearing the continent into a muddy, broken remnant of its former self and turning the oceans into battlefields, the fighting along the Western Front stopped on December 24, 1914.
It was, after all, Christmas Eve, a seemingly inappropriate time for the Christians of Europe to kill each other. Earlier in December, Pope Benedict XV urged a holiday truce. But the pope’s project seemed purely aspirational. “His holiness has little hope for success,” the Associated Press reported from Rome.
On the same day, The Stirling Observer, a Scottish newspaper, reported that the idea of a Christmas truce was not a new one. It had precedent “in olden times.” But in the case of the Great War, there was, again, little hope, since Germany, “the most attached to the solemnities and festivities of Christmastide,” was also the most belligerent “in her present temper and hatred” of her enemies.
With the holiday rapidly approaching and no apparent truce in the works, public opinion began to turn against the notion. “The idea of a truce on Christmas Day is beautiful, and no doubt would commend itself to the sentimentalist,” one pundit for the Cheshire Observer wrote. “But warfare is grim, not beautiful, and warfare with savage foes like the Germans cannot be conducted upon sentimental principles.”
The first five months of the war had been so grim indeed that “not only had thousands of lives been lost but also the spirit of adventure and hope with which so many soldiers had gone to war had almost been destroyed,” historian Malcom Brown wrote in Meetings in No Man’s Land: Christmas 1914 and Fraternization in the Great War.
This destruction of hope—about the truce but also about the goodness and decency of humanity—made the events that occurred on and around Christmas 1914 all the more remarkable.
Along the Western Front, which stretched through northeastern France, Christmas trees, holly and mistletoe abounded as part of drives to show support and boost morale. On the British side, Princess Mary, the king’s daughter, organized a fund that gave each soldier and sailor a brass gift box, a pipe, tobacco, cigarettes and a Christmas card, according to The Guardian. Millions of letters and packages poured in from families. Millions of letters and packages poured in from families.
“It will be strange if one of those little truces arranged tacitly by the men and winked at by commanders does not occur tonight,” The Guardian wrote on Christmas Eve.
That very night, British troops heard Germans singing carols and saw decorations poking up from the opposite trenches. One group hoisted its own canvas banner reading “Merry Christmas” (next to an unflattering cartoon of Kaiser Wilhelm). It wasn’t shot down—a promising sign of a brief, if unofficial, cessation of total hostility between the warring sides.
“Next day would have made a good chapter in Dickens’ Christmas Carol,” one British officer wrote to the New York Times on Christmas Day. He describes “many of our chaps” walking out to meet the Germans in no-man’s land. He took photographs with the enemies and exchanged military ribbons.
Common humanity reigned for those brief moments. “The Germans opposite us were awfully decent fellows,” the officer wrote. “I had quite a decent talk with three or four and have two names and addresses in my notebook.”
Some informal soccer even took place, now an iconic image of the bonhomie (although whether any games actually got going is disputed).
These brief truces were “magical,” Mike Dash wrote for Smithsonian, although “many officers disapproved, and headquarters on both sides took strong steps to ensure that it could never happen again.”
No other year of the war had truces as wide-reaching or iconic as 1914, but they still took place sporadically. “We had a truce on Xmas Day and our German friends were quite friendly,” one Canadian soldier stationed in France wrote in a 1916 holiday letter home.
Despite the best efforts of officers and the relentless, mechanical drive of war, peace still sprung up organically whenever the season allowed.
