Ninety Four years on the 1914 Christmas Truce Football match was replayed this week in France.

On Armistice Day 2008, some 30 Officers and soldiers from the Chester-based 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh remembered those who gave their lives in battle by playing a football match where, nearly 100 years ago, British and German soldiers played football together in no man’s land on Christmas Day in a rare day of humanity amidst the horror of war.

Frélinghien, witnessed the unveiling of a Christmas Truce Memorial in the town and as improvised football matches were a feature of the original Christmas Truce in 1914, a football match was played on the day of the unveiling as part of the commemoration. 

The match took place on the original site in what was once no man’s land, where both British and German troops, bitterly fought and suffered large losses during the battle.

• The “Christmas truce” is used to describe a series of unofficial cessations of hostilities that occurred along the Western Front during Christmas 1914.  World War One had been raging for several months but German and Allied soldiers stepped out of their trenches, shook hands and agreed a truce so the dead could be buried.
• Unofficial truces between opposing forces occurred at other times during World War One but never on the scale of that first Christmas truce. 

Geoff Olson writes:

We have Remembrance Day, but where on the calendar do we mark such epochal moments in wartime, when the sacrificial lambs laid down their arms and greeted one another as kindred spirits?

This mass outbreak of peace on the front alarmed the high command on both sides. They issued orders against fraternization, but it was days before all the men were back in the trenches, returning to the all-important business of killing each other.

(In 1915, a similar Christmas truce occurred between German and French troops, and during Easter of 1916, a truce also opened up on the Eastern Front.)

The Royal Welsh Fusilliers who played in the 1914 Christmas Truce match were represented on Armistice Day 2008 by a team from the 1st Battalion with a team from the German Army’s Panzergrenadier Battalion 371 providing the opposition.

1st Battalion Commanding Officer Lt Col Nick Lock commented: 

We are delighted to be taking part in the unveiling of the memorial and commemorative football match to mark the actions of our forbears.

The Christmas Truce illustrated the basic humanity of the men from both sides engaged in this terrible conflict.

Following the match the officers and soldiers visited the battlefields around the town of Ypres, known during World War 1 by the British as ‘Wipers’

Some Interesting Links:
Christmas Truce
First World War

Special thanks to HQLF/MoD for allowing Island Pulse to use the photos, of which all rights are reserved and subject to Crown Copyright.