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When peace broke out British and German soldiers made history in 1914 when they stopped shooting and started to sing carols and play football together. Malcolm Brown on one of the most heartening Christmas stories of modern times Malcolm Brown Guardian Monday December 24, 2001 The facts almost beggar belief. At the first Christmas of a hideous war, Germans and British sang carols to each other, lit each other's cigarettes in no man's land, exchanged souvenirs, took group photographs, even played football. Some sort of accommodation with the enemy, from cheerful waves and shouted greetings to full-scale fraternisation, took place over two-thirds of the 30 miles of the western front held by the British Expeditionary Force. Far from denouncing the event, the press celebrated it with a spate of approving headlines. Leader writers mused thoughtfully about it. Most national and many local newspapers carried letters from soldiers who had taken part in it. In an early example of instant history, none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saluted it in a book published in 1915 as "one human episode among all the atrocities which have stained the memory of the war". And then, to all intents, the story was forgotten. It disappeared under the gas clouds of Ypres and the colossal casualty lists of the Somme and Passchendaele. Thus, looking back on that stunning Christmas from the 1920s, a former infantryman who had shared the camaraderie across the lines could write: "Men who joined us later were inclined to disbelieve us when we spoke of the incident, and no wonder, for as the months rolled by, we who were actually there could hardly realise that it had happened, except for the fact that every little detail stood out well in our memory." "Every little detail" - the devil is often said to be in the detail, but not in this story. On Christmas Eve at Plugstreet Wood, Germans put Christmas trees on the parapet of their front-line trench and sang Stille Nacht (Silent Night), then largely unfamiliar to British ears but instantly acknowledged as a carol of extraordinary beauty. Moved to respond the territorials opposite struck up with The First Noel. So it continued until, when the British sang O Come, All Ye Faithful, they heard the Germans joining in with the Latin words Adeste Fideles. Recalling the event many years later, one former soldier commented: "I thought this a most extraordinary thing - two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of the war." A memorable joint burial service between the trenches on Christmas morning offers another uplifting detail. The prayers and readings were spoken first in English by a battalion chaplain and then in German by a young divinity student. "It was an extraordinary and most wonderful sight," wrote one witness. "The Germans formed up on one side, the English on the other, the officers standing in front, every head bared. I think it was a sight one will never see again." To deal decently with the dead was one powerful motive for establishing a truce. The Christmas spirit provided another. "It doesn't seem right to be killing each other at Xmas time," a Tommy noted in his diary. Officers as well as men succumbed to the festive mood. Thus the commanding officer of a guards battalion strode out to join a mixed group of British and Germans and with the cry "Well, my lads, a Merry Christmas to you! This is damned comic, isn't it?" handed round a bottle of best rum which, one participant recorded, was "polished off before you could say knife". Other lubricants assisted the event. Near Armentieres the premises and product of a brewery had fallen to the enemy. On Christmas morning, after calling out "Don't shoot", a party of Germans rolled a barrel of best Belgian beer into no-man's-land and indulged in a seasonal booze-up with the British, who in this particular case were Welsh. No nonconformist conscience inhibited these celebrations. Details which seem almost ludicrous enrich the story. A British Tommy met his German barber from High Holborn in London and had a short-back-and-sides between the lines. A German who had raided an abandoned house strutted about wearing a blouse, skirt and top hat and sporting an umbrella. After a bout of between-the-lines photography, one officer wrote in a letter home that another truce had been fixed for new year's day "as the Germans want to see how the photos come out". "Footer", a favourite recreation then as now on both sides, was an inevitable part of the occasion, but there was not one England v Germany fixture as such, rather a scatter of impromptu games or kickabouts, sometimes using a tin can or a rolled-up sandbag as a ball. Here and there a genuine leather ball was produced and a more serious contest attempted. A German lieutenant wrote of one such effort: "We marked the goals with our caps. Teams were quickly established for a match on the frozen mud, and the Fritzes beat the Tommies 3-2". Not everybody approved. One officer, ordered to prepare a more usable pitch by filling in shell holes, angrily refused to comply. This must surely be a very early case of a failure to create a level playing field. The proposed match did not take place. Some Frenchwomen, hearing of the goings-on at the front, spat at members of one battalion next time they were in town. The medical officer of a non-trucing unit, furious at the unsoldierly behaviour of a neighbouring battalion, approvingly reported "a bit of a scrap" between his men and theirs. He wrote home: "We aren't here to pal up with the enemy." Yet the general reaction was one of amazed acceptance of a happening that delighted far more than it dismayed. Letters home confirm the incredible nature of the occasion. "It would have made a good chapter in Dickens's Christmas Carol," wrote one soldier. "Just you think," mused another, "that while you were eating your turkey I was out talking with the men I had been trying to kill a few hours before! It was astounding." The truce was not organised, nor, as it might be assumed, contagious, with units catching the spark from their neighbours. Rather, it was the spontaneous product of a mass of local initiatives. Thus peaceful areas were interlaced with "business as usual" zones where hostilities continued. This could have unhappy results. One sergeant crossing no man's land to offer cigarettes to a friendly German regiment was shot by a sniper from a regiment not observing a ceasefire. He was officially described as "killed in action", his "action" being the distinctly unmilitary one of attempting to carry Woodbines to the enemy. The Germans sent across an apology. Curious as it might seem, the truce produced no courts-martial. Some generals and local commanders huffed, but most senior officers took a relaxed view. A "rest from bullets", as one of their number put it, allowed the troops to work above ground while improving their often inadequate trenches. Both sides appreciated the opportunity. At one point some Tommies, admiring the better progress made by the enemy opposite, went over and asked if they could borrow some of their tools; the Germans complied. One famous participant who responded to the mood of the occasion was the cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the archetypal British Tommy "Ole Bill", who took part as a front-line subaltern. He later wrote: "There was not an atom of hatred on either side that day, and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed. It was just like the interval between the rounds of a friendly boxing match." For clearly the war had to go on. Yet in some areas there was no instant rush to resume hostilities. A guards CO noted in his diary on December 28: "I don't think that they want to start more than we do as it only means a few of each side being hit and does not affect the end of the war." A subaltern wrote on the 30th: "At about lunchtime a message came down the line to say that the Germans had sent across to say that their general was coming along in the afternoon, so we had better keep down, as they might have to do a little shooting to make things look right! And this is war!" By early 1915, however, it became clear that the interlude was, or soon would be, over. The Manchester Guardian spoke the necessary words in an article of January 7: "'But they went back into their trenches,' a perfectly enlightened and quite inhuman observer from another planet would perhaps say, 'and are now hard at it again, slaying and being slain.' Evidently their glimpses of the wiser and better way were interesting but of no very great practical importance. To which, of course, we might reply with great reason that there was very much to be done yet - that Belgium must be freed from the hideous yoke that has been thrust upon her, that Germany must be taught that culture cannot be carried by the sword." And after that the story went underground for many years. The play and film Oh! What A Lovely War revived it - to some disbelief - in the 60s. Paul McCartney made a popular video of it to accompany his moving song The Pipes of Peace in 1984. Before that in 1981 I directed a BBC documentary on the subject, under the title Peace in No Man's Land. The book followed three years later. In 1993 an illustrated children's version of the event by Michael Foreman called War Game won a national prize. Now at every Christmas personal accounts of the truce are regularly read from pulpits, on television, on radio. This year sees the publication of a new history under the title Silent Night, the author being the distinguished American historian, Stanley Weintraub. At a time when the world is yet again at war, this strange event of 1914 - with its message of common humanity and goodwill between enemies - has a special relevance. Far from losing its attraction, it is a story that seems to gain in resonance and potency as the years go by. Malcolm Brown, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, is a former BBC TV producer. Christmas Truce, by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton is published by Pan Books. Silent Night, by Stanley Weintraub, is published by Simon and Schuster.
