What Happened in the Christmas Truce of 1914?
Because the truce was in fact a series of incidents which took place organically and spontaneously along a considerable length of the Western Front, the exact nature of what took place varied according to the responses of the men and the commanding officers involved. What we know is drawn from many eyewitness accounts, several of them quoted on the Christmas Truce website. Generally speaking, the accounts indicate a number of events. Perhaps most importantly, these truces gave soldiers the opportunity to recover their dead from No Man’s Land and give them a decent burial: but they also involved more obvious fraternisation and the exchange of gifts – the Royal Welsh Regiment were given a barrel of German beer, while elsewhere cigarettes were exchanged for cheese. Most famously, the Christmas Truce is associated in the popular imagination with a game of football between the sides. Because of the fragmentary nature of the truce, it seems unlikely that a single football match would have ta
