1914: The Christmas Truce Of World War I
World War I officially began in July 1914 when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia following the execution of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, and by December, a dozen countries were involved. Hundreds of thousands of men had already been killed or wounded — and the worst was yet to come.
Public DomainAn artist’s rendition of the Christmas Truce that appeared in the Illustrated London News in January 1915.
But that Christmas, British and German troops on the Western Front declared a brief truce to celebrate the holiday. On the night of Christmas Eve, British soldiers heard the Germans singing carols from their trenches around 300 yards away. According to the Imperial War Museums, one brave German supposedly shouted, “Tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot.”
So, on Christmas morning, the men tentatively left their trenches and came together on No Man’s Land. They exchanged tobacco, buttons, and food. They retrieved their dead. Some of them even played soccer.
One British soldier wrote to his mother:
“In [my] pipe is German tobacco. Haha, you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh, dear no! From a German soldier. Yes, a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday, the British and Germans met and shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, exchanged souvenirs, and shook hands. Yes, all day Xmas day… This is only for about a mile or two on either side of us (so far as we know).”
Hostilities resumed on Dec. 26, but Christmas of 1914 symbolized a brief moment of peace in the midst of one of history’s deadliest conflicts.
