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The Christmas Truce (1914): it was always called football-not soccer! |

Published in United Kingdom - Social interactions and entertainment - 0 - 04 Apr 20 08:24


As the first article of Kalis History Works Newspaper we are bringing forth the event that let the world speechless at the time! The Christmas
Ceasefires of 1914. Support us if you want to see more interesting
content and hopefully in the future we will upgrade to wikipedia quality
content. Enjoy todays story!

Christmas Truce

The Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front of the First World War around Christmas 1914.
The truce occurred during the relatively early period of the war (month 5 of 51). Hostilities had lulled as leadership on both sides reconsidered their strategies following the stalemate of the Race to the Sea and the indecisive result of the First Battle of Ypres. In the week leading up to the 25th, French, German, and British soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. In some areas, men from both sides ventured into no mans land on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, while several meetings ended in carol-singing. Men played games of football with one another, creating one of the most memorable images of the truce. Fighting continued in some sectors, while in others the sides settled on little more than arrangements to recover bodies.
The following year, a few units arranged ceasefires but the truces were not nearly as widespread as in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from the high commands of both sides prohibiting truces. Soldiers were no longer amenable to truce by 1916. The war had become increasingly bitter after devastating human losses suffered during the battles of the Somme and Verdun, and the use of poison gas. The truces were not unique to the Christmas period, and reflected a mood of live and let live, where infantry close together would stop overtly aggressive behaviour and often engage in small-scale fraternisation, engaging in conversation or bartering for cigarettes. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy. The Christmas truces were particularly significant due to the number of men involved and the level of their participation—even in very peaceful sectors, dozens of men openly congregating in daylight was remarkable - and are often seen as a symbolic moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent events of human history.

Background

During the first eight months of World War I, the German attack through Belgium into France had been repelled outside Paris by French and British troops at the Battle of the Marne in early September 1914. The Germans fell back to the Aisne valley, where they prepared defensive positions. In the subsequent Battle of the Aisne, the Allied forces were unable to push through the German line, and the fighting quickly degenerated into a stalemate; neither side was willing to give ground, and both started to develop fortified systems of trenches. To the north, on the right of the German army, there had been no defined front line, and both sides quickly began to try to use this gap to outflank one another. In the ensuing Race to the Sea, the two sides repeatedly clashed, each trying to push forward and threaten the end of the others line. After several months of fighting, during which the British forces were withdrawn from the Aisne and sent north into Flanders, the northern flank had developed into a similar stalemate. By November, there was a continuous front line running from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, occupied on both sides by armies in prepared defensive positions.
In the lead up to Christmas 1914, there were several peace initiatives. The Open Christmas Letter was a public message for peace addressed To the Women of Germany and Austria, signed by a group of 101 British women suffragettes at the end of 1914 as the first Christmas of World War I approached. Pope Benedict XV, on 7 December 1914, had begged for an official truce between the warring governments.  He asked that the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang.  This attempt was officially rebuffed.

Christmas 1914

Roughly 100,000 British and German troops were involved in the unofficial cessations of hostility along the Western Front.
The Germans placed candles on their trenches and on Christmas trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols. The British responded by singing carols of their own. The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were excursions across No Mans Land, where small gifts were exchanged, such as food, tobacco and alcohol, and souvenirs such as buttons and hats. The artillery in the region fell silent. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently killed soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Joint services were held. In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, continuing until New Years Day in others. On Christmas Day, Brigadier-General Walter Congreve, then commanding 18 Infantry Brigade, stationed near Neuve Chapelle, wrote a letter recalling the Germans initiated by calling a truce for the day. One of his brigades men bravely lifted his head above the parapet and others from both sides walked onto no mans land. Officers and men shook hands and exchanged cigarettes and cigars, one of his captains smoked a cigar with the best shot in the German army, the latter no more than 18 years old. Congreve admitted he was reluctant to personally witness the scene of the truce for fear he would be a prime target for German snipers. Bruce Bairnsfather, who served throughout the war, wrote:
I wouldnt have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything.... I spotted a German officer, some sort of lieutenant I should think, and being a bit of a collector, I intimated to him that I had taken a fancy to some of his buttons.... I brought out my wire clippers and, with a few deft snips, removed a couple of his buttons and put them in my pocket. I then gave him two of mine in exchange.... The last I saw was 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.

Future nature writer Henry Williamson, then a nineteen-year-old private in the London Rifle Brigade, wrote to his mother on Boxing Day
Dear Mother, I am writing from the trenches. It is 11 oclock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite me a dug-out (wet) with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench, but frozen elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe presented by the Princess Mary. In the pipe is tobacco. Of course, you say. But wait. In the 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 Germans met shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, exchanged souvenirs, shook hands. Yes, all day Xmas day, as I write. Marvellous, isnt it?
Captain Robert Patrick Miles, Kings Shropshire Light Infantry, who was attached to the Royal Irish Rifles recalled in an edited letter that was published in both the Daily Mail and the Wellington Journal Shrewsbury News in January 1915, following his death in action on 30 December 1914:
Friday (Christmas Day). 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 mans 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.
Of the Germans he wrote: They are distinctly bored with the war.... In fact, one of them wanted to know what on earth we were doing here fighting them. The truce in that sector continued into Boxing Day; he commented about the Germans, The beggars simply disregard all our warnings to get down from off their parapet, so things are at a deadlock. We cant shoot them in cold blood.... I cannot see how we can get them to return to business.
On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (24 and 25 December) 1914, Alfred Andersons unit of the 1st/5th Battalion of the Black Watch was billeted in a farmhouse away from the front line. In a later interview (2003), Anderson, the last known surviving Scottish veteran of the war, vividly recalled Christmas Day and said:
I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence. Only the guards were on duty. We all went outside the farm buildings and just stood listening. And, of course, thinking of people back home. All Id heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted Merry Christmas, even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.
Nor were the observations confined to the British. German Lieutenant Johannes Niemann wrote: grabbed my binoculars and looking cautiously over the parapet saw the incredible sight of our soldiers exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate with the enemy.
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the British II Corps, issued orders forbidding friendly communication with the opposing German troops. Adolf Hitler, then a young corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, was also an opponent of the truce.
In the Comines sector of the front there was an early fraternization between German and French soldiers in December 1914, during a short truce, and there are at least two other testimonials, from French soldiers, of similar behaviours in sectors where German and French companies opposed each other. Gervais Morillon wrote to his parents: The Boches waved a white flag and shouted Kamarades, Kamarades, rendez-vous. When we didnt move they came towards us unarmed, led by an officer. Although we are not clean they are disgustingly filthy. I am telling you this but dont speak of it to anyone. We must not mention it even to other soldiers. Gustave Berthier wrote: On Christmas Day the Boches made a sign showing they wished to speak to us. They said they didnt want to shoot. ... They were tired of making war, they were married like me, they didnt have any differences with the French but with the English.
In sections of the front where German and Belgian troops faced each other in December 1914, there was at least one such instance when a truce was achieved at the request of Belgian soldiers who wished to send letters back to their families, over the German-occupied parts of their own country.
Richard Schirrmann, who was in a German regiment holding a position on the Bernhardstein, one of the mountains of the Vosges, wrote an account of events in December 1915: When the Christmas bells sounded in the villages of the Vosges behind the lines... something fantastically unmilitary occurred. German and French troops spontaneously made peace and ceased hostilities; they visited each other through disused trench tunnels, and exchanged wine, cognac and cigarettes for Westphalian black bread, biscuits and ham. This suited them so well that they remained good friends even after Christmas was over. He was separated from the French troops by a narrow No Mans Land and described the landscape as: Strewn with shattered trees, the ground ploughed up by shellfire, a wilderness of earth, tree-roots and tattered uniforms. Military discipline was soon restored, but Schirrmann pondered over the incident, and whether thoughtful young people of all countries could be provided with suitable meeting places where they could get to know each other. He went on to found the German Youth Hostel Association in 1919.
Football matches
Many accounts of the battle involve one or more football matches played in no-mans land. This was mentioned in some of the earliest reports, with a letter written by a doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade, published in The Times on 1 January 1915, reported a football match... played between them and us in front of the trench. A wide range of similar stories have been told over the years, often naming specific units or a precise score. Some accounts of the game bring in elements of fiction by Robert Graves, a British poet and writer (and an officer on the front at the time) who reconstructed the encounter in a story published in 1962; in Gravess version, the score was 3–2 to the Germans.
However, the truth of the accounts has been disputed by some historians; in 1984, Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton concluded that there were probably attempts to play organised matches which failed due to the state of the ground, but that the contemporary reports were either hearsay or refer to kick-about matches with made-up footballs such as a bully-beef tin. Chris Baker, former chairman of The Western Front Association and author of The Truce: The Day the War Stopped is also sceptical, but says that although there is little hard evidence, the most likely place that an organised match could have taken place was near the village of Messines: There are two references to a game being played on the British side, but nothing from the Germans. If somebody one day found a letter from a German soldier who was in that area, then we would have something credible. In fact, there is a German reference. Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch of Germanys 134th Saxons Infantry Regiment said that the English brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. In 2011 Mike Dash concluded that there is plenty of evidence that football was played that Christmas Day—mostly by men of the same nationality, but in at least three or four places between troops from the opposing armies.
A wide variety of units were reported in contemporary accounts to have taken part in games; Dash listed the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment pitched against Scottish troops; the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders against unidentified Germans (with the Scots reported to have won 4–1); the Royal Field Artillery against Prussians and Hanovers near Ypres; and the Lancashire Fusiliers, based near Le Touquet, with the specific detail of a bully beef ration tin as the ball. One recent writer has identified 29 separate reports of football, though does not give substantive details. Colonel J. E. B. Seely recorded in his diary for Christmas Day that he had been Invited to football match between Saxons and English on New Years Day, but this does not appear to have taken place.


Bibliography: the entirety of this article has been inspired from wikipedia. Check out this link for the full article!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

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