![]() ![]() ![]() (He also reportedly asked, in explicit terms, for a Christmas truce, though the primary source for this request proved difficult to find.) Though ignored by the leaders of the armies - and perhaps unknown to many of the soldiers - by divine providence, the truce for which Benedict pleaded ultimately came to pass. The pope at the time, Benedict XV, had often decried the aggression and bloodshed of the war and had most recently called for peace in a letter a few weeks before Christmas 1914. The Christmas truce didn’t come out of nowhere. A soccer ball was produced, which led to a hearty, informal “kickabout.” After hours of socializing and enjoying each other’s company - and also burying and paying respects to their dead - the men from both sides returned to their trenches, unharmed. The next morning, after crossing into no man’s land, the young soldiers began exchanging chocolate, alcohol, and cigarettes. Then, according to the witness, a German soldier shouted across the 30-yard expanse: “Tomorrow, you no shoot, we no shoot.” According to one account, the men on both sides of the trenches began singing carols on Christmas Eve - their hoarse voices, singing in their respective native tongues, carrying over the pockmarked ground. In a few places, soldiers were ordered to fire on their unarmed counterparts.īut in other sectors, the young men who had days before been firing upon each other found that their enemy was surprisingly relatable. Some soldiers - understandably - felt no desire to socialize with the enemy. So although a truce was indeed observed in many sectors along the front in Belgium and France on Christmas Day 1914, this wasn’t true across the entire front line. According to the Imperial War Museum, the nature of trench warfare in 1914 was that each sector was quite distinct if one sector of trenches was observing a truce, or vice versa, neighboring sectors may not have had a clue. But perhaps not on the scale you might imagine.įor one thing, the Christmas truce was not observed universally across the Western Front. Gifts were exchanged, and soccer balls flew instead of bullets.īut did such a storybook Christmas Day ever actually happen, or is the Christmas truce merely the stuff of legend? The answer, you may be surprised to learn, is that yes, it really did happen. On a chilly Christmas morning, soldiers from both sides of the trenches clambered over the barbed wire, arms raised, and shook hands. You may have read the story, or seen it dramatized on the big screen or even in a TV commercial. The grisly realities of trench warfare had already, in just five months, claimed a million lives by the time Christmas came along in 1914, and on the orders of their superiors, young men from both sides routinely gunned or gassed one another into oblivion.īut in the midst of such a hellish time in human history, there was a glimmer of light: the “Christmas truce” of 1914. The experience of fighting in “The Great War,” World War I, was marked by brutality and misery on a scale never before seen. ![]()
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