True Stories of the Christmas Truce

Alfred Anderson was just eighteen years old on Christmas Eve 1914. A joiner from Dundee, he had joined the 1st/5th Battalion of the Black Watch as a Territorial soldier and found himself, within months, on the Western Front in Flanders.

On the night of the Truce his unit was billeted in a farmhouse behind the front line, not in the trenches themselves — but even from there, he could hear what was happening. Or rather, what had stopped happening. The guns had fallen silent.

The peace didn't hold. Anderson later recalled that the silence ended in the early afternoon, and "the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

He went on to serve as batman to Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon — brother to the future Queen Mother — who was killed in action at the Battle of the Hohenzollern Redoubt in 1915. Anderson himself was wounded by shrapnel in 1916 and sent home. He lived to be 109, the last known surviving Scottish veteran of the First World War, and died in 2005.

Bruce Bairnsfather was a machine gunner in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, dug in near Bois de Ploegsteert in Belgium — a trench "three feet deep by three feet wide", as he later described it, where the nights passed in "an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuits and cigarettes too wet to light".

On Christmas Eve, at about ten o'clock, he noticed something odd. Singing — drifting across No Man's Land from the German lines. "Stille Nacht." Silent Night. Soon there were shouts in broken English from the other side: "Come over here."

A British sergeant called back: "You come half-way. I come half-way." And so it began.

What followed became the best-loved story of the Truce. Bairnsfather, "being a bit of a collector", took a fancy to a German officer's uniform buttons. Out came his wire clippers, and with a few snips he swapped buttons with his enemy — two for two. A few yards away, one of his machine gunners — an amateur hairdresser in civilian life — was giving a haircut to "a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck".

Bairnsfather survived the war and became one of its most famous chroniclers. His cartoon character "Old Bill" — a weary, moustachioed Tommy — made him a household name. Of Christmas Day 1914 he wrote simply: "I wouldn't have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything."

Captain Sir Edward Hulse was a 25-year-old Old Etonian, Balliol-educated, and the 7th Baronet of Breamore House in Hampshire. He had inherited his title at the age of thirteen. By Christmas 1914 he was a captain in the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards, holding the line near Ploegsteert.

Hulse wrote long, observant letters to his mother throughout the war — and it was these, published posthumously, that gave the world one of its richest descriptions of the Christmas Truce.

On Christmas morning he watched four unarmed Germans walking slowly towards the British lines. He sent two unarmed men of his own to meet them halfway. What followed was a remarkable, spontaneous gathering of men from both sides — Scots, Irish, English, Prussians, Württembergers — swapping cigarettes, photographs and addresses. And then, as the afternoon wore on, they began to sing.

Hulse also recorded the war's cheerful small absurdities. One of his men offered a German a cigarette. "Virginian?" the German asked. "Aye, straight-cut," came the reply. "No thanks," said the German, "I only smoke Turkish." Virginian tobacco for neutral America; Turkish for Germany's Ottoman ally. Even in No Man's Land, the politics of the war came along for the ride.

Less than three months later, on 12 March 1915, Sir Edward Hulse was killed at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, going to the aid of his wounded commanding officer. He was 25 years old. He is buried at Rue-David Military Cemetery in Fleurbaix, France.

It is easy, reading the British letters home, to imagine the Christmas Truce as a British story. It wasn't. It was a shared story — and one of the most vivid German accounts comes from a young Saxon officer, Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxon Infantry Regiment, who kept a meticulous diary throughout the war.

Zehmisch's diary entry for Christmas Day 1914 describes men from both sides emerging from their trenches, meeting in No Man's Land, swapping food and tobacco, and eventually — remarkably — playing football. For decades the football match was dismissed by some historians as a romantic myth. It was Zehmisch's diary, rediscovered long after his death, that confirmed it happened.

The German side of the Truce mattered in another way too. Many of the German soldiers facing the British had lived and worked in Britain before the war — as waiters, barbers, musicians, shop assistants. They spoke English. Some knew London better than the men they were now shooting at. In several sectors, it was these men — with their memories of Suffolk girlfriends and Whitechapel landladies — who called across No Man's Land first.

Zehmisch's words capture something the British accounts sometimes miss: the Truce was not one side being gracious to the other. It was two exhausted armies briefly agreeing to stop. And from both sides, the same conclusion — that on that one impossible night, peace was not merely possible. It was obvious.