World War I Christmas truce

The World War I Christmas truce was an informal series of ceasefires on the Western front of World War I around Christmas of 1914. It was five months into the war, and the grind of trench warfare shattered early expectations that soldiers might return from the front in time for Christmas. In some parts of the front, soldiers from both sides set foot into no man's land to talk, trade items, and in a few cases play games of association football.

Quotes

We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in front. The funny thing is it only seems to exist in this part of the battle line—on our right and left we can all hear them firing away as cheerfully as ever. The thing started last night—a bitter cold night, with white frost—soon after dusk when the Germans started shouting 'Merry Christmas, Englishmen' to us. Of course our fellows shouted back and presently large numbers of both sides had left their trenches, unarmed, and met in the debatable, shot-riddled, no man's land between the lines. Here the agreement—all on their own—came to be made that we should not fire at each other until after midnight tonight. The men were all fraternizing in the middle (we naturally did not allow them too close to our line) and swapped cigarettes and lies in the utmost good fellowship. Not a shot was fired all night.
- Robert Miles, Wellington Journal & Shrewsbury News, January 1915, quoted in Toby Neal, "Seasons over the Decades, 1914", Shropshire Star, December 26, 2014

It remains one human episode amid all the atrocities which have stained the memory of the war.
- Arthur Conan Doyle, The British Campaign in France and Flanders, vol. 1 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), 334

[A] ball appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where, but it came from their side… They made up some goals and one fellow went in goal and then it was just a general kickabout. I should think there were a couple of hundred taking part. I had a go at the ball. I was pretty good then, at 19. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was no sort of ill-will between us…. There was no referee and no score, no tally at all. It was simply a mêlee—nothing like the soccer that you see on television. The boots we wore were a menace—those great big boots we had on—and in those days the balls were made of leather and they soon got very soggy.
- Ernie Williams, 1983, quoted in Mike Dash, "The Story of the WWI Christmas Truce", Smithsonian Magazine, December 23, 2011

I think on Christmas Eve, we'd been singing carols and this that and the other, and the Germans had been doing the same. And we’d been shouting to each other, sometimes rude remarks more often just joking remarks. Anyway, 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 on, and so it gradually grew.
- Marmaduke Walkinton, quoted in "The Christmas Truce", Voices of the First World War, Imperial War Museum

We got orders come down the trench, "Get back in your trenches every man", by word of mouth down each trench; "Everybody back in your trenches", shouting. The generals behind must've seen it and got a bit suspicious so what they did, they gave orders for a battery of guns behind us to fire, and a machine gun to open out and officers to fire their revolvers at the Jerries. 'Course that started the war again. Ooh we were cursing them to hell, cursing the generals and that, you want to get up here in this stuff never mind your giving orders, in your big chateaux and driving about in your big cars.
- George Ashurst, quoted in "The Christmas Truce", Voices of the First World War, Imperial War Museum

The armistice was an event of significance for those involved, even if its contemporaneous meaning was not the defiant moral that was imposed on it long afterward. The truce meant time off for weary soldiers, providing them with an opportunity to move about in the lines without fear of snipers, rebuild their trenches, and enjoy Christmas as best they could under the circumstances, as well as a chance to satisfy their curiosity about the enemy and write home about something besides the endless mud and shelling. The holiday cease-fire became a valued memory for the participants, as demonstrated by the way it was discussed in letters written by the soldiers, fondly recalled years later in interviews and memoirs describing their service, and featured in many regimental histories.
- Terri Blom Crocker, The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War (University Press of Kansas, 2015), 18