This is how the Christmas truce happened on the Western Front in 1914 Peter Hart, Military History Magazine December 24, 2020 The Illustrated London News s illustration of the Christmas Truce: British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches (via Wikimedia Commons)
In the lead-up to Christmas 1914 soldiers on either side of the Western Front no man’s land set aside fear and their weapons to exchange surreal holiday greetings. By late December 1914 World War I had been raging for nearly five months. Had anyone really believed it would be “all over by Christmas,” then it was clear they had been cruelly mistaken. With the strength of imperial Germany now evident to all, there appeared to be no chance of victory in the foreseeable future. By this time men were beginning, almost despite themselves, to gain a kind of grudging respect for their opposite numbers lurking across no man’s land. They were enduring the
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What Happened When WWI Paused for Christmas Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!
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On Christmas Eve 1914, in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the first world war, a remarkable thing happened.
It came to be called the Christmas Truce. And it remains one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War or of any war in history.
British machine gunner Bruce Bairnsfather, later a prominent cartoonist, wrote about it in his memoirs. Like most of his fellow infantrymen of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was spending the holiday eve shivering in the muck, trying to keep warm. He had spent a good part of the past few months fighting the Germans. And now, in a part of Belgium called Bois de Ploegsteert, he was crouched in a trench that stretched just three feet deep by three feet wide, his days and nights marked by an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuit