Enemies Climbed Out to Bury Their Dead Together. A Football May Have Settled It 3-2.
The frost came down hard on the evening of 24 December 1914, and along the line near Ypres the British in the forward trenches started to notice something wrong with the dark. The Germans, sixty or seventy yards off across the churned ground, had set little fir trees on the lip of their parapets and lit them with candles. Then the singing started. Carols, in German, drifting over the mud, and after a while the British shouting back across the gap and the Germans calling, “Merry Christmas, Englishmen.”
The war was five months old. It had begun in the summer with everyone expecting a short, decisive campaign, and it had instead dug itself into a wet trench from the Channel to Switzerland, where men froze and rotted and shot at each other from a few dozen yards. Now, on Christmas Eve, the shooting in many places simply stopped.
Out into the open
What happened over the next day was not one thing in one place. It was hundreds of small, separate truces breaking out along the front, each one improvised by the men in that particular stretch of trench. By one historian’s count, fraternization took hold along roughly two-thirds of the twenty-odd miles the British then held, from St Eloi south of Ypres down to La Bassée. Something on the order of a hundred thousand men, British and German, took part to some degree.
They climbed out unarmed. They met in the middle of no man’s land, the strip of ground that for months had meant only death, and they shook hands. They traded what they had: tobacco, cigarettes, chocolate, schnapps, tunic buttons cut off with wire clippers, badges, caps. They swapped photographs of wives and children, and wrote down each other’s addresses with the idea of meeting after the war. Bruce Bairnsfather, a young machine-gun officer who would later become famous for his trench cartoons, took a fancy to a German officer’s buttons, brought out his wire clippers, snipped a couple off, and pocketed them — handing the man two of his own in exchange. Nearby one of Bairnsfather’s own machine-gunners, a barber in civilian life, cut the unnaturally long hair of a docile German, the enemy of some hours’ standing kneeling patiently on the ground while the clippers crept up the back of his neck.
The Saxons were the friendliest. British soldiers up and down the line found that the men opposite from Saxony tended to be the ones who shouted the first greeting, crossed first, traded most readily. The Prussians were stiffer, and British soldiers made a point of the distinction — the non-Prussian Germans were forever insisting they were Saxons, not Prussians. Captain Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards recorded the singing running through carol after carol until it ended on “Auld Lang Syne,” with English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, and Württembergers all joining in across the line they had been trying to kill each other along that morning.
And there was the grim work the truce made possible. Between the trenches lay the dead of earlier attacks, men who had fallen weeks before in ground neither side could reach under fire. In the lull, burial parties went out from both lines. In places they dug graves side by side and held joint services over them, a British chaplain and the German soldiers standing together with their heads bare.
The ball on the frozen mud
The detail everyone remembers is the football, and it is the one that needs the most care.
Lieutenant Johannes Niemann of the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment told the story best, and told it most fully. His men were facing Scots — the kilts gave it away, and Niemann noted with relish that as the Highlanders ran about, the flying kilts revealed they wore nothing underneath. A Tommy appeared with a football, Niemann said, kicking it about and clowning, and a game came together on the frozen ground. They marked the goals with their caps. The Saxons, by his account, beat the Scots three goals to two.
The Scots opposite Niemann’s regiment were the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The trouble is that Niemann gave this account to a BBC television programme in 1968, fifty-four years after the fact, and no British source from the Argylls — not the war diary, not the surviving accounts of the men who were there, including one written by a professional footballer — mentions any such match. The contemporary newspaper letters that spoke of a “3-2” game turn out, when traced back, to refer to a different Saxon regiment in a different sector miles to the south.
So the famous score is one old man’s memory, vivid and uncorroborated, and historians have spent decades pulling at it. What they will grant is the looser version: that footballs did come out that day, in several places, that men kicked them around in the open between the lines, mostly with their own side, sometimes against the enemy, on ground too frozen and pocked for any real match. A kickabout, not a fixture. The tidy 3-2 belongs to the truce’s legend more than to its record. But that something round was kicked across no man’s land that Christmas is not in serious doubt.
“Absolutely prohibited”
The high command had seen the danger coming. Weeks earlier, on 5 December, General Horace Smith-Dorrien of II Corps had issued an order warning that troops dug in close to the enemy slid all too easily into a live-and-let-live habit. Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices, the exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and amusing, were, he wrote, absolutely prohibited. On Christmas Eve the men in the trenches ignored him.
What came after was colder. On 29 December a German order went out warning that any approach to the enemy would be punished as treason. The British command was equally unamused. The truce had shown soldiers the men they were meant to be killing, had let them shake those men’s hands and learn their children’s names, and that was precisely the thing an army at war cannot allow.
The following Christmas, the generals left nothing to spontaneity. Units were ordered to mount raids and harass the line. Artillery was instructed to keep up a steady fire through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so that no carol could carry across and no man would risk climbing out. Battalions were rotated through sectors so that no set of soldiers grew too familiar with the enemy opposite. A handful of brief, furtive truces flickered up in 1915 anyway — one Scots Guards officer, Sir Iain Colquhoun, was court-martialled for allowing a short truce to bury the dead, found guilty, and quietly let off when the commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig, remitted his sentence — but the great spontaneous peace of 1914 never returned. The war ground on for nearly four more years and killed most of the men who had stood out in the open that night.
In 2008, the first official memorial to the truce was unveiled at Frélinghien, where Saxons had rolled barrels of beer across to the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The village had by then built a sports hall and a football pitch. They sit on what was once no man’s land.