By Todd DePastino
The First World War had barely begun when, on a frozen stretch of Belgium in December 1914, something extraordinary happened. Thousands of British and German soldiers, who had spent the previous months trying to kill one another, walked out into No Man’s Land and shook hands. They exchanged food, cigarettes, and beer. Some buried their dead. Others kicked around a ball or posed for photographs. Many simply talked, face-to-face, with the enemy they had feared or hated only the day before.
What followed became known as the Christmas Truce, one of the most remarkable and improbable events in modern history. It flickered for only a day or two, and it would never happen again. But the memory endures.
In the summer of 1914, Europe went to war with astonishing speed. Whether it “sleepwalked,” into the disaster, as Christopher Clark argues, or plotted with eyes wide open, as Fritz Fischer describes, few among the belligerent powers expected the conflict to last long, much less reshape the world.
In early August 1914, Germany launched a massive invasion of Belgium and France with over 1.5 million men. Its hope was to crush France quickly before turning east to meet Russia. The attack rolled forward under a grand plan to wheel around and encircle the French Army, forcing a swift surrender.
Germany’s war plan envisioned a sweeping encirclement of the French Army through Belgium before turning east against Russia (Maggiecooper3, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
But by September, the German advance stalled just short of Paris. French and British forces counterattacked. Over the next few months, roughly one million French soldiers and nearly as many Germans were killed, wounded, or missing. Three-quarters of the British Army became casualties. The scale of violence in just the first four months of the war was unlike anything Europe had ever seen.
The problem was that 19th-century tactics met 20th-century technology. Armies went forward in tight formations, with bright uniforms, fixed bayonets, and flags unfurled—straight into the fire of modern weapons. Machine guns like the German Maxim MG 08 and the British Vickers could spit out 500 rounds a minute, accurate at hundreds of yards. A well-trained artillery battery could fire 25 high-explosive artillery shells from a single gun in one minute, pulverizing an acre of enemy ground.
“A remarkable photograph of an actual bayonet charge by French soldiers,” published in 1916 as an example of gallantry. Such charges were no match for modern machine guns.
The MG 08, Maschinengewehr 08, served as the standard heavy machine gun of the German Army during World War I.
French soldier standing next to an unexploded 420mm shell that fell on Verdun. March, 1916. It weighed 2,100 pounds empty.(Musée de L’Armée)
The result was industrial slaughter. Every attempt at a grand offensive left fields strewn with bodies. Both sides learned a brutal lesson by late 1914: defensive positions were impregnable. Offensive operations were impossible.
The best place for a soldier, therefore, was underground.
The so-called “Race to the Sea” from September–October 1914. Both sides tried to outflank one another until the line reached the North Sea.
From the North Sea down to the Swiss frontier, the armies dug in. By November 1914, a continuous line of trenches stretched roughly 400 miles across Europe. Factor in communication trenches, dugouts, and secondary lines, and thousands of miles of earthwork scarred the continent.
The trenches were cold, wet, and diseased. Men lived with rats, mud, and the ever-present threat of shellfire. Standing water rotted feet into a condition known as trench foot. Shell shock—the psychological trauma of constant bombardment—scarred minds as thoroughly as shrapnel scarred bodies. Yet, for all their misery, trenches offered the only defense in a world where standing upright in the open often meant instant death.
By late 1914, Europe had traded a century of technological and moral progress for a war of attrition in which that very progress was turned against human life.
It was against this backdrop of mud and mechanized death that the Christmas Truce took place. The war was less than five months old, but already a catastrophe. The Western Front had frozen into stalemate. The early illusion that the war might be “over by Christmas” had vanished.
What happened next has since been described as a candle lit in the darkness of Flanders, brief, but unforgettable.
In the days before Christmas 1914, heavy rains turned trenches into waterlogged ditches. Then, on December 24, temperatures dropped below freezing. The mud hardened; the water crusted with ice. For once, the men weren’t soaked through. They were just cold.
That evening, British soldiers along the Ypres salient noticed strange lights flickering in the German trenches. German troops had propped up small candle-lit Christmas trees—Tannenbaums—on their parapets and in front of their lines. It was an unofficial act, carried out in defiance of strict orders against such displays.
“It was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere; and about 7 or 8 in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights—I don’t know what they were. And then they sang ‘Silent Night’—‘Stille Nacht.’ I shall never forget it, it was one of the highlights of my life.”
—Pvt. Albert Moren, 2nd Queens Regiment
At first, British riflemen suspected a trick and fired at the lights. But the candles returned, and soon the night air carried something new across No Man’s Land: singing.
The Germans began with Christmas carols in low, steady voices. British troops responded with their own songs. Soon, carols echoed back and forth across the frozen field, mingling in the cold night air. Jokes and greetings followed, shouted in broken English and broken German.
“We’d been singing carols and the Germans had been doing the same. And we’d been shouting to each other, sometimes rude remarks. Eventually a German said, ‘Tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot.’ And the morning came and we didn’t shoot and they didn’t shoot. So then we began to pop our heads over the side and jump down quickly in case they shot but they didn’t shoot. And then we saw a German standing up, waving his arms and we didn’t shoot and so it gradually grew.”
—British private Marmaduke Walkinton
In some places, a few bold souls even crept out into the darkness to exchange small gifts or cigarettes before slipping back into the line. But most of the fraternization would come in daylight, on Christmas morning.
On Christmas morning, a fog lay over No Man’s Land. In many sectors, German soldiers took the first step, emerging unarmed from their trenches, calling and waving to the British. Some carried small trees or white flags. British soldiers, nervous but curious, began to climb out as well.
“The Saxons were shouting, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. We don’t want to fight today. We will send you some beer.’ A German officer appeared and walked out into the middle of No Man’s Land. So I went out to meet him amidst the cheers of both sides. We met and formally saluted. He introduced himself as count something-or-other, and he seemed a very decent fellow.”
—Capt. Charles Stockwell, Second Royal Welch Fusiliers
As more men ventured out, they saw the enemy up close for the first time. Bruce Bairnsfather, a British officer who later became a celebrated cartoonist, remembered the strangeness of it:
“I clambered up and over our parapet, and moved out across the field to look. It all felt most curious: here were these sausage-eating wretches, who had elected to start this infernal European fracas, and in so doing had brought us all into the same muddy pickle as themselves. This was my first real sight of them at close quarters. Here they were – the actual, practical soldiers of the German army. There was not an atom of hate on either side that day.”
—Bruce Bairnsfather
Hands were shaken. Soldiers exchanged cigarettes, chocolate, tins of British beef, German beer, buttons cut from tunics as souvenirs. In some sectors, officers organized joint burial parties for bodies that had lain between the lines for weeks. In others, men held impromptu religious services. Letters home speak of makeshift soccer games, at least in one or two places, where boots and caps served as goals.
“We met in no man’s land… We shook hands—they were Saxons—and I heard one fellow talking English… ‘Cor blimey mate,’ he said, ‘I was in a London hotel when the war broke out!’”
—Archibald Stanley
The Saxons seemed especially eager to fraternize. Saxony, unlike Prussia, didn’t have a militaristic reputation. It was a sort of war-within-a-war within the German Imperial Army. On sections of the front where Prussians dominated, there was no truce:
“We had a rather sad occurrence on Christmas Day. On our right was a regiment of Prussian Guards and on our left was a Saxon regiment. On Christmas morning the Saxons shouted they would meet our chaps half-way between the trenches and spend Christmas as friends. Our chaps went out and the Prussians fired on them killing two and wounding several more. The Saxons threatened the Prussians if they did the same trick again. During Christmas Day our fellows and the Saxons fixed up a table between the two trenches and spent a happy time together. The Saxons said they did not want war and that the Prussians are the people who are the cause of the war.”
—Anonymous British soldier, The Whitehaven News, January 15, 1915
Neither was there a truce in the French and Belgian sectors. These soldiers were fighting with their own territory under occupation and had little desire to celebrate with the enemy. Many were furious when they later heard reports of British fraternization.
Future dictator Adolf Hitler, then a corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, also condemned the Christmas Truce.
“Such things should not happen in wartime. Have you Germans no sense of honor left at all?”
—Cpl. Adolf Hitler, 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment
His view would become official policy. High commands on both sides worried that such behavior might undermine discipline.
By late afternoon on Christmas Day, the fragile truce in No Man’s Land began to break down. Men sensed that their officers were not pleased. Bruce Bairnsfather remembered how the day drew to a close:
“Slowly the meeting began to disperse . . . The feeling that the authorities on both sides were not very enthusiastic about this fraternizing seemed to creep across the gathering. We parted, but there was a distinct and friendly understanding that Christmas Day would be left to finish in tranquility. The last I saw of this little affair was a vision of one of my machine-gunners, who was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long hair of a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck.”
—Bruce Bairnsfather
On December 26, Captain Stockwell marked the formal end of the truce:
“At 8:30, I fired three shots into the air and put up a flag with ‘Merry Christmas’ on it on the parapet. He [a German] put up a sheet with ‘Thank You’ on it, and the German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots into the air, and the war was on again.”
—Capt. Charles Stockwell
Both Britain and Germany suppressed news of the truce. The public wouldn’t have learned about it if not for the New York Times, in the neutral United States, publishing the rumors on December 31, 1914. The British capitulated and broke the news embargo the first week of January. High command disapproved, and all sides made sure there would be no repeat performance in 1915.
By then, the character of the war had changed. New waves of recruits arrived, hardened by propaganda and the desire for revenge. The British government ordered artillery units to fire steadily on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so that no carols could be heard and no soldier would dare climb out of the trenches. The window of possibility that had opened in 1914 closed for good. Later soldiers wondered how such a truce could ever have happened and discounted stories of Christmas 1914 goodwill.
“I very much doubt whether anything of the nature or magnitude that have been claimed for it took place at all… I think the whole thing borders on the fairytale.
—British soldier Harold Lewis
But thousands of letters, diaries, and photographs tell a different story. The fairytale was real.
Memorial to the Christmas Truce in Messines, Belgium, near where British and German soldiers met in 1914.
Today, the Christmas Truce is commemorated in films, artwork, memorials, and even commercials. A notable example is the 2014 Sainsbury’s Christmas ad, created in partnership with the Royal British Legion, which carefully recreates the moment when British and German soldiers meet in No Man’s Land. Teachers, historians, and veterans alike still use that short film to help people imagine what the truce might have looked and felt like.
The Christmas Truce was a final flicker of humanity in a world turned inhumane. Verdun, the Somme, poison gas, convulsive revolutions, and the rise of authoritarian regimes would follow.
The Truce stands as a reminder that peace is never entirely beyond imagination.
