But, however, looking back on it all, I wouldnt have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything.1
The English soldier Bruce Bairnsfather looked back on an event in which he had taken part. This small excerpt shows quite clearly that something extraordinary and unexpected must have happened. Bairnsfather talks about the Christmas Truce, which happened in 1914. After almost six month of war, soldiers fighting for the Entente powers and soldiers fighting for the Mittelmächte met in No Mans Land and celebrated Christmas together. The soldiers exchanged gifts, sometimes addresses, and drank together. Often the truce started with a request to bury the dead comrades lying between the trenches. The Christmas Truce was a small peaceful episode in a cruel environment. Certainly, Bairnsfathers statement is a bit too generalized because it did not occur along the whole frontline. Mostly English and German soldiers took part in the Christmas fraternization, but also in some cases French, Belgian, Austrian and Russian soldiers took part.2 In the following years the Christmas Truce was mystified as an act of humanity in an inhuman war. Jorgensen and Harrison-Lever published a picture book for children with the Christmas Truce as the background. A young soldier sees a nice colored small bird which was captured in barbed wire. He decides to leave his trench to free the bird, and no enemy shoots at him. The publishers text on the back introduces this book with the words:
Early on Christmas morning the guns stop firing. A deathly silence creeps over the pitted and ruined landscape.
A young soldier peers through a periscope over the top of the trench. Way out in no-mans land, he sees a small red shape moving on the barbed wire. A brightly coloured robin is trapped. One wing is flapping helplessly.3 The Christmas Truce of 1914 was mystified in another way. Not only was the
soldiers humanity emphasized in retrospect, but the war was combined with an element of sport. Stories about a football match between German and English soldiers were quite common. Many war diaries report a football match occurring during the 1914 truce, but whether or not a match was really played is unclear. Historians are still debating if a match was really played or if the soldiers just dramatized the truce.4 Contrary to in 1914, it is certain that a match between German and English soldiers occurred in 1915.5
By Thomas Löwer