The Christmas Truce has become one of the most famous and mythologised events of the First World War. But what was the real story behind the truce? Why did it happen and did British and German soldiers really play football in no-man's land?
Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches.
The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man's land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. After Boxing Day, meetings in no man's land dwindled out.
The truce was not observed everywhere along the Western Front. Elsewhere the fighting continued and casualties did occur on Christmas Day. Some officers were unhappy at the truce and worried that it would undermine the fighting spirit.
After 1914, the High Commands on both sides tried to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again. Despite this, there were some isolated incidents of soldiers holding brief truces later in the war, and not only at Christmas.
In what was known as the 'Live and Let Live' system, in quiet sectors of the front line, brief pauses in the hostilities were sometimes tacitly agreed, allowing both sides to repair their trenches or gather their dead.
“The evidence is too hazy to say with any kind of certainty that a match took place” Mark Connelly professor of modern British military history at the University of Kent has said.
I have spent many years researching the Christmas truce, looking through war diaries, and papers at the Imperial War Museum. What I know from my investigations is that we just cannot find any conclusive evidence that a football match took place.
Taff Gillingham who has been studying British military history for more than 25 years on the other had believes that evidence discovered in 2014 proves there was football played during the truce.
A letter written by Corporal Albert Wyatt of the Norfolk regiment, published in a newspaper in 1915, said he had played a match in Wulverghem, Belgium. This was a breakthrough, as it corroborated a letter sent by Sergeant Frank Naden from the 1/6th Cheshires, telling home that he had played a Christmas Day match.
Taff said so here we suddenly have two people in the same place saying they had played a game of football which is corroborated evidence. I think the fact that we don’t see lots of soldiers talking in letters and diaries about having seen the match indicates it was on a small scale – but there was a kickabout.
A few months ago German historian Rob Schaefer uncovered a postcard sent home by another soldier of IR133 who claimed to have played. The card corroborates a well known account by Lt Johannes Niemann of the same Regiment. Again, two men, same place, same time. The kickabouts at Wulverghem and Frelinghien are the only two places where kickabouts are corroborated, although in both cases there is no corroboration from the opposing side.
Poem by Lee Jackson www.moonink.co.uk
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