December 24th, 1914, World War I Christmas Truce. One the battlefields of Flanders, one of the most unusual events in all of human history took place. German and British soldiers played soccer and exchanged gifts during a brief truce.

21 comments

  1. About “Christmas Truce”

    *December 24th, 1914: Late On Christmas Eve, British Expeditionary Force heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing Christmas carols and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches.*

    *The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took pictures and some even played football. It was a rare but magic moment of peace and harmony in the midst of one of the most atrocious events in the 20th century.*

  2. Honestly I really love the respect that had to have gone into such a decision. The enlisted people knew their orders and respected those peers across the battlefield were just following theirs. They had to have considered their ‘ennemy’ as an equal with equally important loved ones or similar human values. They found some common ground at the height of the world’s largest disagreements.

  6. “A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.”

    -*All Quiet on the Western Front*, Erich Maria Remarque.

  7. There was a report in The Times the other day that said this happened quite a few times in other years during WW1 too. Even after the commanding officers tried to stop it. They’d set snipers to fire warning shots, but the men just moved to a different location.

  18. Ah yes because there was no French in France

    Come on can y’all stop shitting on the sacrifice of those who literally died defending their own homes sometimes which were behind the trenches. They were there, we were all there.

    Everytime someone tries to do a memorium about an event on the allied side, it’s always the british, always the hero or the stroy of whom died in a foreign land, yknow who didn’t die in a foreign land? The one whose home was destroyed, whose wife and children were struggling in occupied Lorraine, the one who was exiles from wallonie.

    All of those ones who also participated in the greatest truce of the war. Forgetting them is diminishing them, and their sacrifice. Austro-Hungarians, Belgians and French all took part in that moment, as well as the madness of the war. And unlike the british, their lands was where the consequences happened. Never in a foreign land, but close to home.

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