Soldiers eventually did resume shooting at each other. But only after, in a number of cases, a few days of wasting rounds of ammunition shooting at stars in the sky instead of soldiers in the opposing army across the field. For a few precious moments there was peace on earth good will toward men.
All because the focus was on Christmas. Happens every time. It happened over years ago in a little town called Bethlehem. The Germans, who had a direct land link to their home country British soldiers in Belgium were separated from London by sixty miles and the English Channel , also managed to send small Christmas trees and candles to troops at the front. Then, they began singing carols, and though their language was unfamiliar to their enemies, the tunes were not. After a few trees were shot at, the British became more curious than belligerent and crawled forward to watch and listen.
And after a while, they began to sing. Soon they were even playing soccer, mostly with improvised balls. And though corpses had been cleared from the battlefield earlier that day, shell holes and the soldiers' huge boots made close control impossible.
Players who fell in the mud were pulled out by the enemy, to cheers from spectators perched on the parapets. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part I was pretty good then, at There was no sort of ill-will between us. It was simply a melee -- nothing like the soccer you see on television.
The boots we wore were a menace -- those great big boots we had on -- and in those days the balls were made of leather and they soon got very soggy. Not everyone liked the truce. Superior officers on both sides stopped it within days.
The British brigadier CM Richards also quoted by Weintraub recalled in a postwar memoir having received a signal from Battalion Headquarters on Christmas Day "telling me to make a soccer pitch in No Man's Land, by filling up shellholes, etc, and to challenge the enemy to a match on the 1st January. I was furious and took no action at all. I wish I had kept that signal. Stupidly I destroyed it -- I was so angry. It would have been a good souvenir. A year-old German soldier named Adolf Hitler was equally shocked by the truce.
Told later that men of his regiment had played soccer with them, he exclaimed: "Something like that should not happen in wartime. Have you no German honor? Indeed, the British Council found that over two-thirds of British adults knew about them. Schools around Britain are playing commemorative matches.
Earlier this month, before every English professional game, all 22 starting players posed for a group photograph, recalling the picture of German and British soldiers posing together. You can see why people remember. The Christmas truce offers a glimpse of an alternative history: a 20th century in which, starting at Christmas , everyone stops shooting and starts playing soccer.
Then we'd have had no Russian revolution in , no future for lance-corporal Hitler, no Stalingrad, Auschwitz or the divided Europe of the Cold War. There's one other thing to say about the Christmas soccer. To the soldiers chasing balls amid shell holes that day, one fact was obvious: soccer wasn't war. In fact, it was its opposite. Yet until that Christmas, the British consensus had been that soccer was a sort of war. It took place on Christmas Day , when men from opposing armies briefly stopped trying to kill each other and met to exchange Christmas greetings, and even, the story goes, to play soccer.
For Chris Barker, whose three great-uncles were killed along a stretch of the front, the idea of the truce must be passed on. The truce happened early in the war, which may explain why it happened at all. The gas attacks and wholesale slaughter that would cause such bitterness and hatred would come later.
The phenomenon took different forms across the Western front. One account mentions a British soldier having his hair cut by his pre-war German barber; another talks of a pig-roast.
Several mention impromptu kick-abouts with makeshift soccer balls, although, contrary to popular legend, it seems unlikely that there were any organized matches. The truce was widespread but not universal.
Evidence suggests that in many places firing continued — and in at least two a truce was attempted but soldiers attempting to fraternize were shot by opposing forces. And of course, it was only ever a truce, not peace. While there were occasional moments of peace throughout the rest of World War I, they never again came on the scale of the Christmas truce in
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