Christmas Day, 1914

I came across a reference to this event in another article, and I was surprised that I had never heard of it. There is something peculiarly touching about the idea of German and British soldiers putting down their weapons for a few hours to play soccer and trade jams, tobacco, and other niceties. The three years of brutal slaughter that followed took over 16 million lives, and there is no way that these men could have known that this would be the one last glimmer of shared humanity before a long and disheartening war that many of them would never see the end of.

"In the sunken road I met an officer I knew, and we walked along together
so that we could look across to the German front line, which was only about
seventy yards away. One of the Germans waved to us and said, "Come over here!"
We said, "You come over here if you want to talk." So he climbed out
of his trench and came over towards us. We met and very gravely saluted each
other. He was joined by more Germans, and some of the Dublin Fusiliers from our
own trenches came over to join us. No German officer came out, it was only the
ordinary soldiers. We talked, mainly in French, because my German was not very
good and none of the Germans could speak English well. But we managed to get
together all right. One of them said, "We don't want to kill you and you don't
want to kill us, so why shoot?"

They gave me some German tobacco and German
cigars - they seemed to have plenty of those, and very good ones too - and they
asked whether we had any jam. One of the Dublin Fusiliers got a tin of jam which
had been opened, but very little taken out, and he gave it to a German who gave
him two cigars for it. I lined them all up and took a photograph."
(Click here for the full article.)

"On many stretches of the Front the crack of rifles and the dull thud of shells ploughing into the ground continued, but at a far lighter level than normal. In other sectors there was an unnerving silence that was broken by the singing and shouting drifting over, in the main, from the German trenches.

Along many parts of the line the Truce was spurred on with the arrival in the German trenches of miniature Christmas trees – Tannenbaum. The sight these small pines, decorated with candles and strung along the German parapets, captured the Tommies' imagination, as well as the men of the Indian corps who were reminded of the sacred Hindu festival of light."
(Click here for the full article.)