In the first winter of the Great War, enemies met between the trenches to sing, swap gifts and, here and there, kick a football. This is what the soldiers themselves wrote down.
By December 1914 the war that was meant to be "over by Christmas" had settled into muddy, freezing trenches stretching across Belgium and France. On Christmas Eve, soldiers in parts of the British line near Ypres noticed candles and small Christmas trees appearing on the German parapets. Then came singing, often "Stille Nacht", answered by British carols.
1914
The only Christmas of the war with truces on this scale.
The truce was never one single event. It was a patchwork of local ceasefires, each with its own small story. In some sectors it began with shouted greetings across a few dozen metres of frozen ground. In others, a brave soldier walked out holding a lantern or a white cloth, and someone from the other side walked out to meet him. Officers often joined in, partly to keep an eye on things and partly, it seems, because they were just as homesick as their men.
Once both sides were out in the open, the first job in many places was sad and practical: burying the dead who had lain in No Man's Land since the autumn battles. Joint burial services were held in some sectors, with chaplains from both armies. After that came gift-swapping. Letters home talk about trading tobacco, chocolate, tins of bully beef, buttons, badges and German sausage. Men showed each other photographs of wives and children. Several soldiers recorded swapping addresses, promising to meet after the war.
This is the question every family asks, and the honest answer is: yes, in places, but probably not the neat eleven-a-side match of popular imagination. Several contemporary letters printed in British newspapers in early 1915 mention a ball being kicked about between the lines. German diaries say the same. Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxon Infantry Regiment wrote in his diary of the British bringing a football from their trenches and a lively game beginning.
Another Saxon officer, Johannes Niemann of the 133rd Regiment, recalled years later a game against Scottish troops that the Germans won 3–2. Historians treat such later memories with care, since recollections decades on can blend with retelling. What most agree is that games were improvised, sometimes with a tin or a bundle of straw instead of a proper ball, and with caps or helmets for goalposts.
Many of the best-known accounts come from Flanders, especially the area around Ploegsteert Wood (called "Plugstreet" by British soldiers) and the village of Frelinghien on the French–Belgian border. The landscape there was relatively flat and the trenches close together, which made friendly contact easier. Truces were reported along a long stretch of the line, though in some sectors fighting continued as usual, and not every unit took part.
The top brass on both sides disapproved. Orders went out forbidding fraternisation, and in following years artillery bombardments were sometimes ordered for Christmas Eve to make sure nothing similar happened again. By Christmas 1915, after gas attacks and huge losses, the mood had hardened. Small exchanges did occur, but nothing like 1914.
Bertie Felstead, who said he remembered a kickabout in 1915, was often described as the last surviving witness of a wartime Christmas game. He died in 2001, aged 106.
The truce became a symbol of shared humanity, and football became its favourite image. For the centenary in December 2014, UEFA unveiled a memorial near Ploegsteert in Belgium, and a Football Remembers memorial, designed by a schoolboy, was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Clubs and schools around Britain held commemorative matches, and the story was retold in films such as Christian Carion's Joyeux Noël (2005).
If you visit the area today, you will often find small footballs, scarves and wreaths left by visitors at memorials and cemeteries near Ploegsteert and Messines. Families leave them as quiet thank-yous. It is one of the gentlest places in football history, and well worth telling the children about when the decorations come down from the loft.
A storyteller's note: when sharing this tale, keep both halves true. Football really did cross the wire, and the war really did resume. That contrast is what makes the story so moving.