The 1914 Christmas truce: fraternisation of an extraordinary kind

The Christmas truce of 1914 really happened. It was not a myth elevated to the status of a fact by a public who wished it so. It didn’t just happened in one place but all along the Western Front where the British and Germans faced each other. To a lesser extent it also happened between French and German, and German and Russian soldiers.

There may or may not have been a football match between the Germans and the British. Accounts differ, but there was certainly fraternisation of an extraordinary kind and souvenir swapping.

Even those who have no interest in the first World War and the catastrophic clash of arms which set back Europe for decades know about the Christmas truce.

The first World War happened because the elites of Europe abrogated their first responsibility to ensure that their citizens could live in peace. The impetus for the Christmas truce came from the bottom up, from the officers and men who paid the price for the blundering of their masters.

The Germans bear the heaviest responsibility for starting both world wars, but they also started the Christmas truce.

The truce happened once only and it was during the first Christmas of the war. The war became too advanced and the advent of gas, first used by the Germans in 1915, made it impossible to repeat.

The “home by Christmas” mantra was not as widespread as many would subsequently believe, but the early euphoria of the first World War was a distant memory by December 1914.

Conditions during that first Christmas were intolerable. Trench warfare was in its infancy. Suffocating mud was everywhere. Men everywhere were cold, tired and fed up and those were the ones who survived. A million had already died from August to December.

Tory MP Valentine Fleming, father of Bond creator Ian Fleming, wrote to his friend Winston Churchill in early December. "Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men, by the piteous calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. It's going to be a long, long war in spite of the fact that every single man in it wants it stopped at once."

The British occupied an area of 50 kilometres of the front from Ypres in Belgium southwards to La Bassée in northern France. This was flat, poorly drained, soil crossed by rivers and canals which were prone to flooding in winter. Shelling had destroyed the precarious drainage.

When men were not dodging shells or snipers, they were trying to keep the damp at bay. They spent hours, as best they could, bailing out their water-logged trenches.

The 2nd Leinster Regiment had landed in France in September 1914. This was a regiment mostly filled with men from the midland counties of Offaly, Laois, Westmeath and Meath. Their barracks was in Birr.

In October 1914 they tried to take the village of Premesques outside Armentiéres with massive losses. Some 155 men were killed and 434 injured in five days of fighting. The shallow trenches dug by the Leinsters and their unfortunate occupants were blown to pieces.

Having lost half their strength, the Leinsters were billeted in an old-fashioned “lunatic asylum” for most of November. They were then transferred to the front lines near the border with Belgium which was crossed by a dry river bed and which swelled to a torrent and flooded their trenches on a daily basis.

They were situated here on Christmas Eve when the Germans erected Chinese lanterns opposite the trenches occupied by C company. The sentries shot them out and then a voice in accented, but perfect English shouted across: “Play the game, if you don’t shoot, we won’t shoot”.

On Christmas morning B company took advantage of a lull in the fighting to build new trenches. Meanwhile, the Germans moved across no man’s land with shovels and began to bury their dead. The Leinsters helped them at this grim task and so the fraternisation began.

The Germans were Saxons from Saxony, thought of by British soldiers as less belligerent and unreasonable than the hated Prussians.

Some had perfect English. They expressed amazement that Irishmen were fighting for the British Army. The German papers had played up the divisions in Ireland between Home Rulers on the one hand and the UVF on the other. The Irish were chaffing at the stricture of British rule, the Germans believed, so what were they doing in the trenches?

The Germans were skeptical until officers produced two-day old copies of Irish papers confirming the Irish were fighting with the British and not against them in this war.

The truce lasted all morning after which the respective troops returned to their trenches for dinner. The Germans sounded the officers’ mess call when they got back.

The ceasefire was not universal. None happened where the D company held the line. Sniping continued all through Christmas Day.

The fighting died down in all sectors between Christmas Day and the New Year. The informal truce between the men of C company and their Saxon enemy continued. Both built new trenches in full sight of each other.

The Leinsters were envious of the calibre of timber available to the Germans. "We had to be content with small dug-out frames, something like garden hot beds and a few brushwood hurdles," recalled Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Whitton in his book The History of the Prince of Wales's Leinster Regiment. The Germans sportingly lent them mallets.

Both sides wanted the truce to continue but their betters had other ideas. Both were ordered to resume shelling which they did, but they agreed to aim high, decapitating what was left of the trees in their sector.

The 2nd Leinsters moved out of the line on January 10th. When they returned to the frontlines, it was opposite a different enemy. Their war had resumed.