Christmas Truce of 1914

What happened during the 1914 Christmas Armistice?

Since Christmas Eve, many German and British soldiers who fought in World War I sang
carols to each other across the line, and sometimes Allied soldiers even heard brass bands
join the Germans in their merry song.

In the first light of Christmas dawn, several German soldiers emerged from their trenches
and approached Allied lines through no man's land, chanting "Merry Christmas" in their
enemy's mother tongue. At first, the Allied soldiers feared this was a ruse, but when they
saw the unarmed German soldiers, they fled from the trenches and shook hands with the
enemy soldiers. People exchanged cigarettes and Christmas pudding as gifts, and sang
carols and carols. Some Germans light Christmas trees around their trenches, and there are
even documented cases of soldiers from other countries playing a good game of football.

Lieutenant Kurt Zemisch recalled: "How beautiful, but how strange. British officers thought
the same way. This is how Christmas, the festival of love, managed to gather sworn enemies
as friends for a while."

Some soldiers use this short-lived truce for a more dire task: recovering the bodies of other
fighters trapped in no man's land between the lines.

First World War and Christmas Peace

The so-called Christmas Armistice of 1914 came just five months after the outbreak of war in
Europe and is one of the latest examples of the ancient idea of chivalry among wartime foes.
It never happened again - future truce attempts on the holiday were thwarted by threats of
disciplinary action from officials - but it served as encouraging, albeit brief, evidence that the
basic humanity of the soldiers lived under brutal clashes of arms.

During World War I, soldiers on the Western Front didn't expect to celebrate it on the
battlefield, but even World War II couldn't break the Christmas spirit.