"There were signs of tacit agreements to ‘live and let live’ as soon as trench warfare began in November 1914. At various points, soldiers on both sides wrote about lulls in the fighting, especially at breakfast time, and also during the evening when the rations were brought up to the front line.
Yet even through informal truces had occurred in almost every major campaign since the Peninsular war, the extent of the fraternisation between British and German troops during Christmas 1914 was surprising. Contemporary accounts by officers and ordinary soldiers alike suggest at least two-thirds of the British-held sector was involved. The French and Belgians had similar experiences.
Christmas Eve was a beautiful frosty moonlight night, made still more beautiful when the Germans lit candles on small Christmas trees and propped them on the parapets of their trenches ‘like the footlights of a theatre’ as one British soldier described them. There was carol singing (“I don’t think we were so harmonious as the Germans”). Then came cries of “Hello, Tommy!” and “Hello, Fritz!” ‘Enemies’ took tentative steps into No Man’s Land shook hands, lit each other’s cigarettes, and exchanged gifts of German sausages and cigars, Maconnochie’s tinned stew and Wills’ tobacco, family photos and London newspapers.
The truce lasted at least until the end of Boxing Day. At several points it continued until New Year and on into January. But in other sectors the war went on as usual. The situation could differ every 200 metres, depending on the attitude of the battalion commander. Wherever the truce happened, both sides took the opportunity to bury their dead and improve their trench systems."
Quoted from plaque In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper, Belguim. Photograph taken In Flanders Fields Museum, September 2008.
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"On the Morning of December 19, so Lieutenant Geoffrey Heinekey…wrote to his mother, ‘a most extraordinary thing happened… Some Germans came out and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves immediately got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to them and they helped us to bury our dead. This lasted the whole morning and I talked to several of them and I must say they seemed extraordinary fine men… it seemed too ironical for words. There, the night before we had been having a terrific battle and the morning after, we were smoking their cigarettes and they smoking ours.”
from recommended reading 'Weintraub, S, Silent Night: the story of the World War I Christmas Truce. The Free Press. New York. 2001, p.5
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