In case you haven’t heard the song, Christmas in the Trenches by John McCutcheon, ©1984, tells the story of how British and German soldiers befriended each other for a brief period one Christmas day during World War I. It’s told in first-person from the viewpoint of a British soldier named Francis Tolliver. A sample verse goes like this:
The song was written in 1984 by a man who doesn’t appear to be much older than 65 right now (see links below), so it seems obvious that Francis Tolliver himself is a fictitious creation.
A Google search turns up this page, which does not mention the veracity of the story, but does show a photograph of Russian and German soldiers together on the Eastern Front in 1914. Note that they’re Russian and German and not British and German.
This page is the songwriter’s home page, which does not mention the veracity of the story, either.
To further complicate matters, ISTR a Paul McCartney video from the 80’s showing opposing WWI soldiers playing soccer against one another in No Man’s Land in what was obviously winter. So, Sir Paul himself must have had some incident to reference. That, or a good imagination.
So, after all that setup, here’s the question: Was there an incident in WWI where British and German soldiers met in friendship during a brief Christmas truce?
TIA
I don’t have a cite handy, other than just about any book ever written about The Great War, but here goes anyway: yes, it did really happen, unless thousands and thousands of reports and diaries and memoirs are all lying. All of the first hand accounts I’ve read, furthermore, were of the Western Front.
What should be noted is just how p.o.'ed the commanding officers were when this happened Christmas 1914. You know, “fraternizing with the enemy” and all that. Most accounts I’ve read explicitly state that this happened in 1914 only, because the officers made every effort to make sure it would never happen again.
It’s actually rather interesting how soldiers interacted with their enemy counterparts during WWI. The general consensus among a lot of them was “live and let live, we’re all knee deep in sh*t anyways.” But once the whistle sounded and men were ordered over the top, it was every man for himself, though.
I would recommend to anyone to read a good one-volume history of WWI. Even without nazis and atom bombs, it was really a fascinating (and bloodcurdlingly brutal) war. There is, after all, a very good reason why most belligerent nations have declared November 11th a national holiday.
Here’s a short article from the BBC on the event. It took place in 1914, when the war hadn’t killed everyone yet, and as the article mentions such truces are not anomalous in the annals of war. (The conflict with the officers in this case was a little unusual.)
There are at least two books on the subject; in addition to the one by Malcolm Brown mentioned in that article, there’s also Silent Night: The Remarkable 1914 Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub.
Garth Brooks did a song on this too. His is called “Bellau Wood” and is taken from a poem of the same name by somebody or other.