CHRISTMAS FOOTBALL: ENGLAND v GERMANY

 

As we creep hour by hour nearer to Christmas, I know there are plenty of stories to be told about the "unprecedented" conditions that we have found ourselves in during 2020 and particularly over this special period.

There have been other times when Christmas has not quite been what we would have wished for. I have written about the "1914 Truce" before and others. To put our present modern crisis into perspective, it might be worth reading a bit about the conflict in Europe in 1914 and onwards.

5 months into the First World War, during the week leading up to Christmas, there was a stalemate between the warring nations, in what was known  as the "Race to the Sea (English Channel, of course) and particularly in the inconclusive state of the First  Battle of Ypres.

Soldier Bruce Bairnsfather wrote: "I wouldn't have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything.... I spotted a German officer, some sort of lieutenant I should think, and being a bit of a collector, I intimated to him that I had taken a fancy to some of his buttons.... I brought out my wire clippers and, with a few deft snips, removed a couple of his buttons and put them in my pocket. I then gave him two of mine in exchange.... The last I saw was one of my machine gunners, who was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long hair of a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck....."

During the ceasefire bodies were recovered or buried, prisoners were swopped, carols were sung together by the opposing troops and there was the famous game of football....the result only declared at the end of the war!! Candles were lit, trees decorated and carols sung, in some places the friendship lasted through to New Year's Day.

At Christmas 1915 there was no truce and in 1916 the losses on both sides were to too great to even give it a thought.

A doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade published in The Times on 1 January 1915, reporting "a football match... played between them and us in front of the trench". Some accounts of the game bring in elements of fiction by Robert Graves, an Old Carthusian and the famous British poet and writer (an officer on the front at the time). He recorded the score as 3–2 to the Germans. In his final year at Charterhouse, he won a classical exhibition to St John's College, Oxford but did not take his place there until after the war. Below is a match in 1917.

The truth of these varied accounts has been disputed by some historians. In 1984, Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton concluded that there were probably attempts to play organised matches which failed due to the state of the ground, but that the contemporary reports were either hearsay or refer to "kick-about" matches with "made-up footballs" such as a bully-beef tin. 

Chris Baker, former chairman of The Western Front Association, and author of The Truce: The Day the War Stopped," wrote that there are two references to a game being played on the British side, but nothing from the Germans. 

Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch, of the 134th Saxon Infantry Regiment, said that the English "brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvellously wonderful, yet how strange it was".

In 2011 Mike Dash concluded in his historic account, that "there is plenty of evidence that football was played that Christmas Day—mostly by men of the same nationality but in at least three or four places between troops from the opposing armies".

Many units were reported in contemporary accounts to have taken part in games: Dash listed the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment pitched against "Scottish troops"; the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders against unidentified Germans (with the Scots reported to have won 4–1); the Royal Field Artillery against "Prussians and Hanovers" near Ypres and the Lancashire Fusiliers near Le Touquet, with the detail of a bully beef ration tin as the "ball". There have been 29 reports of football being played, though substantive details are not conclusive. Colonel J. E. B. Seely recorded in his diary for Christmas Day that he had been "Invited to football match between Saxons and English on New Year's Day".

"The Goodbyeee", the final episode of the BBC television series "Blackadder Goes Forth" notes the Christmas truce, with the main character Edmund Blackadder having played in a football match. He is still annoyed at having had a goal disallowed for offside.