Carols in No Man's Land

When the First World War began in the summer of 1914, many people believed it would be over by Christmas.

It wasn't. By December, the armies on the Western Front had dug in. Long lines of trenches stretched across Belgium and France. In many places the British and German lines were only a few hundred metres apart, and sometimes much less. The muddy, shell-torn ground between them was called No Man's Land.

Life in the trenches was cold, wet and dangerous. Soldiers lived with mud, rats and the constant threat of gunfire. And yet, in the days around Christmas 1914, something happened that nobody had planned.

Lights along the trench

On Christmas Eve, in several places along the front, especially in parts of Belgium near Ypres, British soldiers noticed lights appearing on the German side. German troops had placed candles along their trenches, and some had set up small Christmas trees.

Then came the singing.

Soldiers on both sides later wrote home about hearing carols drifting across the frozen ground. In some places the Germans sang and the British answered with carols of their own. Some soldiers recognised the tunes, even if the words were in a different language.

Into No Man's Land

Over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, in some sections of the line, soldiers began to call out to each other. Then, carefully and nervously, a few climbed out of their trenches without their weapons.

Others followed. In No Man's Land, men who had been trying to kill each other only days before shook hands. According to letters and diaries, they swapped small gifts: cigarettes, tobacco, chocolate, buttons and badges from their uniforms. Some showed each other photographs of their families. A few exchanged addresses and promised to write after the war.

In some places the truce had a sad and serious purpose too. Soldiers on both sides used the pause to recover and bury the bodies of comrades who had been lying between the lines, and some held short services together.

And football?

The story most people remember is that the two sides played football. Some soldiers' letters do describe impromptu kickabouts in No Man's Land. Historians, however, think these were probably informal games of the kind that break out wherever a ball turns up, not organised matches, and they did not happen everywhere.

It's an important reminder that even well-loved stories deserve careful checking. The truth is a little less tidy than the legend, but it is no less remarkable.

Not everywhere, and not for long

The Christmas truce was not universal. In many parts of the front the fighting continued, and soldiers were killed over Christmas. Where truces did happen, they were local and unofficial, and they varied a great deal from place to place.

Senior commanders were not pleased. They worried that soldiers who had shared Christmas with the enemy might find it harder to fight them. In later years, orders were issued to prevent anything similar from happening, and the war became even more brutal. A truce on the scale of 1914 never happened again in that war.

Within days, or in some places within hours, the guns started again. The war went on for nearly four more years and cost millions of lives.

Why we still remember it

If the truce changed nothing about the war, why does it matter?

Perhaps because it showed something the war tried hard to hide: that the soldiers on the other side were not monsters. They were young men who were cold and homesick, who missed their families, liked the same songs and had photographs in their pockets of people they loved.

For a few hours in the middle of a terrible war, ordinary people chose to see each other as human. That choice is always available to us, and it is worth remembering.