The Christmas Day Truce 1914

Truces and armistices, brief halts in the fighting, temporary fraternisations, all are as old as warfare. They might be called in order to exchange prisoners, retrieve wounded or bury the dead, or, as in 1914, in celebration of a festival common to both sides. The difference in 1914 is that what occurred was widely publicised, and in many cases exaggerated.

The Christmas Day Truce of 1914 has become one of the most famous incidents of the First World War....On Christmas Day 1914 all along the Western Front (and on the Eastern Front too) there were sporadic instances of carol singing by both sides, leading to meetings in no-man’s-land, fraternisation, exchange of gifts and even at least one football match. After a press embargo was broken in the neutral USA the British press reported it pretty much as it was, with pictures, the German press criticised what had happened, without pictures, and the French press said it was treason and only happened on the British sector.

This talk by Gordon Corrigan - which was given to a live, online audience, explains what really happened and not only what its effects were, but what they were thought to be.